Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
across the whole hemisphere. Ministerial statements from the summits have called for
mechanisms for incorporating non-governmental views other than business through con-
sultation and dialogue, but there is a gap between the rhetoric and the reality, with many
Latin American governments actively resisting attempts to open up trade decision-
making to greater input from civil society.
There is a series of historical and political reasons for this suspicion regarding the par-
ticipation of civil society actors in trade policy in Latin America. Besides the Mexican
government's bitter experience of the NAFTA negotiations, which I discuss below, there
is also a prevailing fear about loss of competence or sovereignty for decision-making in
this area. This relates to a concern that the numerical and
nancial superiority of orga-
nized civil society in North America would serve to compound existing underrepresenta-
tion of less developed countries within the region in trade negotiations. With the
exception of Mercosur (the Common Market of the South), many of the initiatives for
the inclusion of civil society actors in trade-negotiating processes within the Americas
have come from North American governments, a path set most clearly by the Clinton
Administration in the context of the NAFTA negotiations.
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The politics of mobilization
This section explores the forms of mobilization within the environmental movement,
around each of the three key trade agreements. The aim is to generate insights into how
groups claim rights to participation, and to make use of those spaces that exist within
trade policy arenas described in the next section or protest either the lack of such spaces
or the limits imposed by the ways in which they are currently constituted.
The NAFTA and its handling of environmental issues generated signi
cant, though
uneven, degrees of mobilization by environmental groups in each of the three countries
party to the agreement. The emergence of transnational relations between environmental
NGOs (ENGOs) in Mexico, the USA and Canada was, in many ways, unprecedented.
Initially, this was centred around collaboration between border organizations in the USA
and Mexico,
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but developed well beyond this.
There were nevertheless important
di
erences in structure, constituency and strategies that organizations adopted that were,
to some extent, determined by nationality (Hogenboom, 1998, p. 141).
In some cases such di
ff
erences were a driver of the transnational alliances that were
formed. In Mexico, for example, the lack of openings at state level was an important
reason for Mexican ENGOs' alignment with foreign groups which had more political
clout. Mexican groups also relied on counterparts elsewhere for access to information
about the negotiations, which their own government was failing to provide. This was par-
ticularly true of more critical groups with less access to government. RMALC (Mexican
Action Network on Free Trade), for example, worked with the Canadian group 'Common
Frontiers' and the Alliance for Responsible Trade and the Citizens' Trade Campaign in
the USA. Such transnational ties served to amplify the in
ff
uence of weaker groups in
Mexico that, through connections with allies in North America, got to participate in key
policy arenas where decisions on NAFTA were being taken. This participation took the
form of hearings in the US Congress which, through exposure in the USA, helped to
secure access to Mexican o
fl
cials, evidence of what Keck and Sikkink (1998) call the
'boomerang e
ect'. For US groups, ties to Mexican groups helped to improve their
credibility in presenting positions that went beyond their own narrow interests as well as
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