Pay to Preserve: The Global Politics of Ecuador’s Yasuní-ITT Proposal

Abstract

Published by Palgrave MacmillanThe case to leave nearly 900 million barrels of oil underground in Ecuador’s Amazonian Yasuní National Park demonstrates the significance of transnational networks in the institutionalisation of alternative norms for global environmental governance. Through complex local and global networks, the Yasuní Fund, governed with UNDP, has created a potential model of replication for other developing, megadiverse countries that are trapped in the petro-curse and yet seek solutions contributing towards sustainable development and social justice. What makes the Yasuní-ITT initiative unique is its call to protect the environment and the indigenous societies that live within it by paying for avoided carbon emissions. Such a plan unites global climate change goals for a post-Kyoto solution that involves the South with Ecuador’s constitutional and normative base of living in harmony with nature, sumak kawsay in Quichua (el buen vivir in Spanish) or ‘the good life’.

Keywords

• governance
• climate change
• Copenhagen UN Climate Change Conference 2009
• Kyoto protocol
• carbon emissions | carbon leakage
• biodiversity