Infrastructure remains one of geography’s most exciting debates, providing an entry point to understanding the making of social worlds (for example with a focus on citizenship, politics, cities and development). A recent LAG blog by Jonathan Alderman and Geoff Goodwin discussed the centrality of infrastructure to Latin American politics and their new edited volume, The Social and Political Life of Latin American Infrastructures. Here, we continue this conversation by outlining our concern for how infrastructure is remaking Latin American political ecologies and environmental geographies, introducing our recent Special Issue (SI) of the Journal of Latin American Geography.
Plans for new infrastructure include new highways, waterways, railways, ports, dams, and power stations, including in the Amazon basin. These plans support the region’s extractive imperative but also extend a wider turn to infrastructure-led development and, as Hope argues in her paper, are entangled with global agendas for sustainable development. In the grey literatures of global development, new infrastructure is understood as much needed to fill an existing ‘gap’. In this somewhat apolitical logic, infrastructure links states to society, connects remote communities, and facilitates the soft infrastructure of social development (for example education and healthcare), thus ensuring development for all.
Though Latin America’s new infrastructure is being researched by critical geographers, despite many hard infrastructures reaching into rural and conservation areas (such as roads or energy infrastructure) there is less attention to how new infrastructures co-constitute socio-environmental worlds. From Latin America and more widely, emerging work in geography and political ecology is arguing for an expanded conceptualisation of infrastructure to better include environmental analysis. For example, expanding infrastructural violence to include violence against the non-human, being better attuned to how infrastructure changes non-human relations and mobilities, as well as how negotiations of nature discipline human/non-human relations within state-sanctioned citizenship regimes. Our SI extends this work with a collection of papers dedicated to how infrastructure is changing the region’s environmental geographies.
Ultimately, we argue that that although infrastructure can be important for inclusion, citizenship, and participatory development (Bayer, this issue; Bauman & Zimmerer, this issue), much new hard infrastructure is proving top-down and hard to negotiate. It is tied to wider economic and political agendas and constitutes yet another environmental injustice for many communities. These papers show the importance of who drives decision-making about infrastructure and what this might mean for more emancipatory environmental geographies (Werner & Pimentel de Oliveira, this issue; Guarneros-Meza & Torres Wong, this issue; Post, this issue). We further argue that hard, built infrastructure is not simply a connecting device. It constitutes a new object and political agent in particular environmental geographies, one that has consequences for how environments are experienced and known (Hope, this issue). This is crucial for assessing what ambitious plans for new infrastructure mean for the regions’ environmental geographies and for wider trajectories of sustainability.
Bayer’s and Bauman and Zimmerer’s papers show that new infrastructure can reach marginalised populations and ensure that they can better access the basic and social infrastructures needed for development and wellbeing. However, taken together, the rest of the papers show the importance of who drives decision-making about infrastructure, the ways infrastructure projects are top-down and hard to negotiate, and how they are tied to wider economic and political agendas, some of which echo colonial states and colonial violence. There is thus a need for scholars to be more sensitive to different forms of infrastructure as well as the extent to which alternatives are being articulated, offered, and negotiated as road building, energy, or irrigation projects are planned. Otherwise, and as many of the papers in this special issues show, new infrastructure is yet another form of environmental injustice.
Much of this injustice can be traced back to the workings of contemporary neoliberalism. This concerns the antagonism between the will of the state – to dominate, to transform, to develop and, ultimately, to facilitate accumulation–and the capability of local communities to articulate livelihood strategies that are meaningfully and distinctly their own. This antagonism can often manifest itself in overt conflict, as shown in the contributions of Post and Baumann and Zimmerer. In other contexts, to the extent that there exists a conflict, this is more covert, taking the shape of insurgent strategies of local communities, as is the case with the interlocutors of Bayer’s in Antofagasta. It also concerns the huge power of global capital and the new ways that it is landing in nation-states (for example, as Hope identifies in global sustainable development agendas) and the extent to which it can be negotiated or held accountable. It is worth noting, however, that conflict concerning infrastructures is not necessarily and always synonymous with conflict against infrastructure. The struggles of local communities to make meaning of their local realities under the shadow of state power can sometimes result in their militating in favour of infrastructural development and associated dynamics of extractivism. Baumann and Zimmerer, for instance, show how marginalised communities affected by the suspended Tolima Irrigation Project are demanding the completion of the project. It is just as important to note, however, that this is not necessarily a demonstration of unalloyed support for the state or its large-scale infrastructural projects. Rather, as Werner and de Oliveira as well as Guarneros-Meza and Torres Wong argue in different ways, support for infrastructural and extractivist development can be inspired by a search for emancipatory political strategies, ones that promise meaningful material development and genuine democratic control over resources and the state.
In the absence of such strategies, local communities who (are forced to) acquiesce to the dictates of the neoliberal order, such as the residents of self-built neighbourhoods in Antafogasa studied by Bayer, do so with the hope of gaining a stronger foothold for themselves and their communities. In other words, conflict against as well as accommodation of state power is always a transitory outcome. Both strategies are deployed as part of a broader search for territorial autonomy and struggles for alternative subjectivities and livelihoods.
The papers also demonstrate that the antagonism between local communities and the state unsurprisingly predates the onset of neoliberal developmentalism but is being reworked by infrastructure projects. This is not to suggest that these struggles are repeating past patterns. Rather, the special issue demonstrates the layered nature of the contemporary politics of infrastructural development. As the papers of Post, Guarneros-Meza and Torres Wong, and Baumann and Zimmerer show clearly, understanding these layers is key to making sense of the communities’ political subjectivities today, though this in no way suggests that previous layers of struggles determine contemporary outcomes. Just as the communities themselves change in myriad ways, the context in which they enact their politics– the character of the relationship between the state and capital–is continuously transformed as well. Going beyond the remaking state-society relations, these papers foreground how environmental geographies are remade within these processes despite nature so often being rendered a “static backdrop” for infrastructure projects.
In instances where infrastructure is being challenged and environmental consequences are being emphasised, these papers reveal that hard, built infrastructure is not simply a connecting device. Rather, it constitutes a new structure and object in particular environmental assemblages, ones that have consequences for how environments are experienced and known. In this special issue, the papers outline the relevance of hard infrastructure to Indigenous communities that experience it as a death of their own ways of living (Post, this issue), to spreading and enabling global and state-led political ideologies (Werner & de Oliveira, this issue), and for their materiality, which reassembles existing relationships between human and non-human (Hope, this issue). As Hope argues, this has particular relevance for a region looked to for its radical frontiers and glimpses of possibility, as this infrastructure is being built into the very communities, territories, and regions from which radical alternatives emerge. In short, new hard infrastructure constitutes a new non-human and political actor in Latin American environmental geographies and we need to know more about the work that it does.
Whilst important work has outlined how environmental crisis is rooted in long, violent, colonial histories and amounts to a slow violence, the current turn to infrastructure demonstrates that environments are also being remade quickly and significantly, under the guise of the straightforward, common-sense foundations that all humans need to develop. However, as well as constituting new problems for already threatened places, this also offers us a way to think about how other kinds of infrastructures would underpin better ways of living. This conclusion has informed our upcoming conference panel at the 2023 RGS-IBG Annual Conference, which will debate the Emancipatory Possibilities of Infrastructure. As well as revealing the ways that infrastructure co-constitutes power, norms and knowledges, researchers have drawn our attention to moments where infrastructure sparks experimentation and offers possibilities for emancipation and transformation. In this time of climate change, this dynamic of infrastructure offers us a moment of possibility, as one route to redesigning, re-making, and re-organising our worlds. In this double session, we have selected papers that focus critical thinking on advancing our understanding of emancipatory infrastructures, setting out the theoretical frameworks, methods and partnerships needed to identify, strengthen and build the infrastructures needed for transformation in response to climate change. Please join us.