The environmentalism of the poor and conflicts of environmental content: a theoretical debate

Abstract

From the late 1980s to the present, the implementation of social policies focused on controlling and mitigating the poverty of the most vulnerable peasant sectors in Latin America, especially through the development of extractive enterprises in their territories, has not achieved the results expected by central governments; rather, this has led to discontent among these actors.
Consequently, this has contributed to the formation and emergence of new social movements in the public arena that have mobilized against this type of enterprise. Parallel to these conflicts, the academic world, and especially political ecology, has put forward theories that have generated proposals for dealing with this type of conflict