Ecuador’s Environmental Revolutions
Organizational Bust, 2000 to 2006: Opportunities for Ecoresisters and Ecoalternatives
The Organizational Bust that took place directly after the Neoliberal Boom is marked by the complete decrease in transnational funding. This is due to a few notable reasons including the 2000 financial crisis and dollarization in Ecuador. Ecuador’s political-economic system was in shambles and they continued to stay indebted and weak, despite the Boom era. Transnational funders were more reluctant than ever to give funds to Ecuador. But this was only a small portion of the problem. Second, after the terrorist attacks on the United States in 2001, US funding was completely cut back, as the focus of the US was on the Middle East, and all their funding went to military, war, and other countries. Ecuador’s dependent environmentalism was no longer an important aspect. However, these were not the only two reasons for the downturn. By the end of the 1990s, two large scale bilateral projects, USAID’s SUBIR (Sustainable Uses for Biological Resources) and a Dutch project in Loja called Programa Podocarpus, both ended, and with that, many of the organizations that got off the ground in part with these projects, also ended (Lewis, 2016. Pg.118).
Aside from the financial burdens that ecodependent groups in Ecuador were facing, they were also hit with a major failure to the environmental movement and received large amounts of criticism for this. This was due to the OCP pipeline, a crude oil pipeline which would be built to pass through the rainforest and the Andes, all the way to a port city on the coast. The pipeline was backed by multinational crude oil companies, the International Monetary Fund, and the Ecuadorian government. When you are as weak a state as Ecuador, it is easy to choose economic synthesis rather than ecological synthesis for your country, even when it plans to harm your biodiverse lands and your indigenous peoples. Of course, the president during this period, President Lucio Gutierrez, was no environmental activist, and was considered to be both ineffective and authoritarian, and eventually would come to create a national crisis, step down as leader, and become arrested (Pg.152). Only once progressive and socialist President Rafael Correa steps up in Ecuador will we begin to see a shift away from the Bust era and into what is now known as the “citizen’s revolution” era.
During the Organizational Bust, ecodependent groups stopped receiving funding from ecoimperialsts, and must either shut down their organizations, shift their agendas to make international organizations meet their own personal goals, to ensure NGO funding, or participate in what became known as “proyectismo”—going “from project, to project, to project” as they worked with companies who imposed deadlines and guidelines, forcing ecodependent NGOs to do the work that they wanted done in the timeline that they wanted it done in (Pg. 128). The ecoimperialst-ecodependent relationship was changing drastically and many popular NGOs in Ecuador were being criticized for the work, or lack thereof, that they were able to, or willing to do, for Ecuador’s environmental movement. Many people wondered if there was an “environmental movement” at all. This is because the shift from the Neoliberal Boom to the Organizational Bust was very fast and drastic on the country’s sustainable development paradigm, and seemed like Ecuador had gone one step forward and then two steps back.
Due to the weakening of national NGOs in Ecuador, ecoresisters and ecoentrepreneurs were beginning to step up in their place. These two different types of organizations were able to take larger stances politically because they were never dependent on transnational funding, and therefore were able to thrive while ecodependents dwindled due to resource scarcity. When the OCP pipeline was being built, and ecodependents could not gather the resources to try to stop it, or even worry about rallying against it, ecoresisters like DECOIN would step up and work the government to make changes. It wasn’t easy during this era, but they did try, while ecodependent groups waited for funding and worked harder on trying to obtain contracts rather than getting outside and speaking up. This was the stem for the criticism. Additionally, while indigenous people were trying to fight off multinational corporations in the Amazon, the state and the dependent organizations were working with these same companies, that would add funds to an “EcoTrust” in exchange for the exploitation and extraction that they would inevitably partake in. The money in this trust would be put towards “environmental sustainability” although the place it was coming from was far from sustainable.
The first National Environmental Assembly (Asamblea Nacional Ambiental, ANA) took place to eventually address the rapid changes that were occurring in Ecuador; and the diverse organizations that met here were not ones that were internationally funded environmental groups, but instead they were activists and ecoresisters, along with ecoentrepreneurs. Ecuentrepreneurs are very important during this era in addition to ecoresisters because they would attempt to create local and national-level funding so that they would never have to be reliant on transnational organizations (Pg.155). In this way, environmental organizations in Ecuador could start funding their own agendas. Agendas that were important to them socially and economically as well as environmentally, ones that would protect their indigenous peoples as well. They would focus on how to solve local and national problems, not just work to make more money for large multinational corporations.
It is worth noting again that this era would eventually end in conjunction with a president who would attempt to shift the state’s backwards focuses, and try to turn the country of Ecuador into one that could actually begin working towards true “sustainable development” and “the good life” (buen vivir/ sumak kawsay). I believe that the election of President Rafael Correa in Ecuador was a groundbreaking point in their history, and therefore they call this next era the “Citizen’s Revolution”. I will go into more detail about this later. To show just how prominent the beginning of Correa’s presence would be on ending this Bust era, is to understand that, “..In office for ten years, Correa became the country’s longest-serving president, providing a modicum of stability in an often-turbulent political arena” and “his tenure was marked by progressive fiscal policy, significant reductions in poverty and inequality, and the recognition of collective rights and the rights of nature,” (Brown, 2017). Although the Bust era was one of some significant environmental devastations, this is not all of Ecuador’s history; just one important aspect to help us understand why and how Ecuador stands where it does today on the environmental, political, economic, and social spectrums.
References
Brown, D. (2017, August 7). Ecuador's "citizen revolution". Retrieved from https://thenextsystem.org/learn/stories/ecuadors-citizen-revolution.
Lewis, T. L. (2016). Ecuador's Environmental Revolutions: Ecoimperialists, Ecodependents, and Ecoresisters. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.