The Institutional Activation of Popular Consultations in Latin America: Environmental Protection through Political Participation

• In Event: 4271 - Legal Resistance

Abstract

The advancement of the extractive footprint through Latin America has reconfigured politics and prompted diverse legal and political responses from a wide array of actors beyond indigenous movements. This paper analyzes a new form of legal and political response taken up mostly by nonindigenous movements: popular consultations (also known as local referendums.) Popular consultations are institutions of direct democracy that provide electorates with the opportunity to vote on “yes or no” questions relevant to their jurisdictions. Since the early 2000s, popular consultations have become increasingly common in Latin America as a way for citizens to legally resist extractive projects, notably mining, from taking place in and around their towns, as tensions over control of water, land, and the models of development have radicalized citizenship. The rise of popular consultations across the continent presents us with three questions: (i) how do citizens go from traditional protesting to actuating institutional tools of resistance? (ii) what conditions enable what I call citizen institutional activation, defined as the political, contested process through which institutions go from dormant to active as a result of citizen action? And, (iii) what is the relationship between institutions of political participation and environmental protection? This paper addresses these questions by presenting a theory of citizen institutional activation and assessing it through an in-depth ethnography of Piedras —the first popular consultation against mining held in Colombia in 2013 in which citizens put to a vote one of the ten largest open-pit mining projects in the world and successfully stopped it.

Author

• Diana Rodriguez-Franco, University of Los Andes