Question

re-thinking oil: compensation for non-production in yasuní national park challenging sumak kawsay and degrowth

Answer 1

What is Yasuni's plan?

The Yasun-ITT Initiative was an effort to keep more than a billion barrels of oil in the ground beneath the Yasuni National Park, a biosphere reserve in Ecuador's Amazon.

Main Content

The Yasun-ITT Initiative was a novel development proposal based on the prohibition of oil production in Ecuador's Yasun National Park in exchange for international compensation, either in the form of direct payment or payment for environmental services. My goal is to investigate how different actors in Ecuador, an oil-dependent country, perceive this compensation for non-oil production. I critically engage the 'environmental narrative' surrounding the Initiative inspired by sumak kawsay -a philosophy of life based on non-mercantilist values known as "well living" in English or "buen vivir" in Spanish- and degrowth by conducting a chronological review of the Initiative and forty in-depth interviews with key players. In this article, I argue that viewing the Initiative as an environmental issue rather than a problem of oil rent dependency exemplifies the limitations of sumak kawsay and degrowth as alternatives to development. The Yasun results show that the Initiative ended up reproducing nature valuation fictions rather than de-linking nature from the valuation process. Using a critical political economic framework, this paper demonstrates that concepts like "dependency" and "rent" are critical in understanding the challenges of transitioning away from extraction-based development in developing countries. In summary, Yasun was a "lost" opportunity for a bottom-up debate on what to produce and what not by failing to distinguish between payment for non-production of oil and compensation from environmental services.

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