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CIAO DATE: 10/02
Thinking About Environmental Security: Southeast Asia and the Americas in Comparative Perspective
Frank McNeil and Jeffrey Stark
North South Center
University of Miami
October 2001
This paper is styled a 'work-in-progress' with good reason. It is the latest, not entirely ripe fruit of a North-South Center project, the 'commonalities' study, about the shared challenges facing the developing nations of Latin America and the Caribbean and the developing nations of Asia, particularly those of Southeast Asia. These views have taken their shape, over more than three years, from the authors' reflections about their extensive interviews in both regions with policy 'influentials' and knowledgeable academics, as well as through participation in occasional conferences.
In the beginning, the interviews were open-ended. The first question was simple: 'Do you believe there are commonalities in the developmental experiences of Latin America and the Caribbean and Southeast Asia?' To say 'yes' then, which most did, was not the obvious response, though it is today. Samuel P. Huntington's notion of a 'clash of civilizations' was receiving much attention, particularly in the United States (Huntington 1996). Three years later, with respect to East Asia, though perhaps not with the Middle East, his Kiplingesque vision has receded in importance. This happened in East Asia because events sapped the 'clash of civilizations' of its vigor.2 These events included the Asian finan-cial crisis, the failures of 'top down' governance and institutions and, of course, spreading environmen-tal damage. Today, Asia - Japan and Singapore excepted - appears to have more in common with Latin America than supposed in the heyday of the 'Asian way.'
As time went on, the authors, guided by their interlocutors' views, narrowed the scope of inquiry to two large, intimately related issues:
To be sure, few interviewees failed to mention the financial crises that, at one time or another, have wracked both regions. As one distinguished Thai economist said, referring to Latin America's currency crisis in 1994-1995, 'Even though the causes of the Asian financial crisis were different, we probably did not pay enough attention to what happened earlier in Latin America.' Today, however, economists are seeking to derive insights of general applicability from the respective financial troubles of each region.
To the vast majority of the people with whom we spoke, the parallels with respect to civil society and the environment seemed a more interesting object of study, precisely because they were largely terra incognita insofar as comparative analysis is concerned. For example, though 'top down governance' is not as familiar a usage in Latin America as it is in Southeast Asia, the failures of authoritarian rule sparked the rise of civil society in Latin America, just as they did in Southeast Asia, notably in the Philippines, a bit later in Thailand, and, in the post-Suharto confusion, Indonesia. While civil society may be a headache for governments, it is a fact of life. Few believe that an effective address to the problems of development is possible, absent civil society participation.
Similarly, though international conservation organizations have global lists of 'hot spots,' places where rich ecosystems are at grave risk from spreading environmental damage, little social or political analysis of a comparative nature is evident in their publications. Understandably, they are given over to descriptions of the 'hot spots' and the programs to help preserve them from devastation. The environment is a huge subject. Our interlocutors, however, concentrated particularly on issues related to environmental security. As they saw it, environmental security meant the relationship between ecosystem damage and conflicts and major economic, political, and social tensions of various sorts, including contention among stakeholders over the use of environmental assets. We found this a useful point of departure, and we have sought to build upon it.
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