Papel De Los Grupos Ambientalistas En Latinoamerica

EAFIT University

School of Business Administration
International Business Department
Organizations and Cultures

Environmental Groups in Latin America

Semester 2011/1
Presented to:
Gina María D’Amato Herrera
Prepared by:
Oscar Mauricio Loaiza
oloaizat@eafit.edu.co
May, 2011
Abstract
Environmental organizations have grown to be an important component in the decision makingprocess of environmental issues in many developed economies. But in the Latin American region, these groups have not reached an important status among the society and State Governments. The fact that there are many environmental organizations looking for their own purposes, does not allow a concrete view of environmental demands in Latin American countries. This paper pretends to explain the differenttypes of environmental groups existing in Latin America, their goals and the role they have played within the countries in the region.
Key words: Environmental groups, Latin America, Governments, Environmental laws.
Introduction
In recent years, climate change and global warming have been more plausible than ever before, entire communities have been affected by the consequences that anirresponsible and an unguarded growth have brought (Burton, 2010). Many activist groups were created in order to create conscience on the population and make an effort to change the way corporations and national economies are growing. These groups have selected regional/national governments and enterprises as their main target, because they know these organizations, public and private, are the mainresponsible of the environmental damage and could be the main leaders to promote greener policies (Newell, 2007).
Environmental groups, evidently, do not share a common goal when they decide to take part on the issue, their backgrounds and their standards of living are different and these characteristics make them have diverse needs and objectives when protesting against governments andcorporations. Depending on the nature and exposure of the environmental group, international organizations have broader objectives, compare to other less recognized groups, but in general, they all are looking for a common goal, the protection of the environment (Newell, 2007).
This paper pretends to explain the nature of environmental groups in Latin America, how they try to achieve their goals andpromote new and greener policies within the countries in the region. There will be a differentiation about the nature of international environmental groups and those who are local organizations. These differences play an important role when all these groups are looking to define their goals and prospects.
After this introductory section, it is presented a brief literature review were the findingsother authors have reached are presented, then the methodology of the investigation is explained; later, there will be a review of environmental groups, their definition and their points of view. After that, it will be presented the nature of environmental groups in Latin America and the role they have played in the definition of policies and strategies for governments and corporations within thecountries in the region, and finally, there will be a conclusion where the results of the investigation are shown and further ideas are proposed.
Literature Review
Newell (2007) defines environmental justice as “the distribution of environmental goods and environmental bads among the human population” (Newell, 2007:237); however, Burton (2010) illustrates clearly that economic growth has affectedunfairly all the countries around the world, although developing and non-developed economies are the most affected from this situation, their citizens commonly are the least interested in creating environmental laws. Christen et al., (1998) made interesting findings about this topic, they found that environmental concerns would only be addressed on people after they gain economic security, and...