The study of environmental politics in Latin America and the Caribbean expands as conflicts stemming from the deterioration of the natural world increase. Yet this scholarship has not generated a broad research agenda similar to the ones that emerged around other key political phenomena. This Element seeks to address the lack of a comprehensive research agenda in Latin American and Caribbean environmental politics and helps integrate the existing, disparate literatures. Drawing from distributive politics, this Element asks who benefits from the appropriation and pollution of the environment, who pays the costs of climate change and environmental degradation, and who gains from the allocation of state protections.

Scholars and activists investigate the emergence of a distinctively Latin American environmental justice movement, offering analysis and case studies that illustrate the connections between popular environmental mobilization and social justice in the region.

In 2020, as Latin American countries shuttered their economies, it became clear that effective lockdowns would require states to provide income support. In a region that has historically struggled to build systems of social protection, the effort to expand benefits was notable. Policies varied in scope and generosity, but in what seemed to signify a new era of state-building, Latin American democracies demonstrated a nearly uniform commitment to providing assistance to the poor. Why did some countries implement broader and more adequate programs than others and why did countries vary in their ability to sustain support over time? This Element argues that three factors explain cross-national and cross-temporal differences in policy effort: policy legacies, unified/divided government, and fiscal space. The study shows that in settings of crisis, the democratic politics of social policy expansion shift, with traditional factors like ideology and electoral competition playing a less central role.

Slow Harms and Citizen Action chronicles the struggle against toxic exposure in urban Latin America. By examining cities in Argentina, Colombia, and Peru, Veronica Herrera shows how local movements fighting for pollution remediation can ally with resourced outsiders for impactful change. Moreover, Herrera illustrates how the most successful environmental movements occurred in settings where established human rights movements had previously helped dismantle state-sponsored militarized violence. By unpacking human rights movements as thoroughfares for environmental activism, Slow Harms and Citizen Action sheds new light on the struggles for environmental justice in Latin America.

Since democratization, Latin America has experienced a surge in new forms of citizen participation. Yet there is still little comparative knowledge on these so-called democratic innovations. This Element seeks to fill this gap. Drawing on a new dataset with 3,744 cases from 18 countries between 1990 and 2020, it presents the first large-N cross-country study of democratic innovations to date. It also introduces a typology of twenty kinds of democratic innovations, which are based on four means of participation, namely deliberation, citizen representation, digital engagement, and direct voting. Adopting a pragmatist, problem-driven approach, this Element claims that democratic innovations seek to enhance democracy by addressing public problems through combinations of those four means of participation in pursuit of one or more of five ends of innovations, namely accountability, responsiveness, rule of law, social equality, and political inclusion.

Where party identification is in decay or in flux, alternative political identifications have gained centrality. In this Element, the author develops a typology of post-partisan political identities: alternative ways in which rejection of or the absence of partisan politics are defining political identifiers or non-identifiers. Based on original evidence collected through opinion polls in different Latin American countries, as well as applying an innovative measurement, the author shows the respective magnitudes and ideological composition of anti-partisans (individuals who hold negative partisanships: strong identities based on predispositions against a specific political party or movement), anti-establishment identifiers (individuals who hold many negative partisanships simultaneously), and apartisans (individuals who lack any positive or negative partisanships). This Element demonstrates the usefulness of employing these categories in order to better understand different levels of party system institutionalization, party-building, and partisan polarization in the region.