Negotiating the Politics of the Local in Transnational Religious Environmentalism

• In Event: Religion and the Indigenous Challenge to Global Environmental Debate

Abstract

Much of the funding and institutional momentum for religious engagements with environmental issues in Latin America flows from transnational religious organizations headquartered in Europe, the United States, and Canada. This paper describes the role of large international religious NGOs (hereafter RNGOS, a category that includes groups like ACT Alliance, World Vision, Caritas International, and Christian Aid) as they confront climate change and other sustainability issues across the region. In particular, it explores processes of coalition building and collaboration that couple transnational religious groups with partner organizations at local and national scales. Large RNGOs often operate as donors, brokers, or advocates: their engagements typically aid, assist, or amplify the activities of local organizations where mutual interests are evident. Such collaborations often, by necessity, negotiate theological and denominational boundaries; grapple with questions of race, indigeneity, and international justice; and reflect the power disparities latent in many North-South alliances. The transnational political space in which many RNGOs function sets them at a remove from that which they seek to safeguard (i.e. healthy ecosystems, socially intimate communities, and sustainable modes of production). While some scholars of religion celebrate the potential of religion as means to respond to environmental pressures and foster more sustainable societies, there has been little attention to the messy political particularities within which religiously inflected environmentalism operates. This paper focuses on these complex intersections as they inform the increasingly transnational phenomenon of religious environmentalism in a changing climate.

Author

• Evan Berry, American University