Global Links and Environmental Flows: Oil Disputes in Ecuador

Patricia Widener
Additional contact information
Patricia Widener: Patricia Widener is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Florida Atlantic University. Her research interests include oil disputes, oil impacts and oil disaster recovery, which she has examined in Ecuador, the Philippines and Alaska.

Global Environmental Politics, 2009, vol. 9, issue 1, pages 31-57

Abstract: Employing the works of Spaargaren and Mol, the intersections of "environmental flows," including both material flows (the extraction, transportation and exportation of oil) as well as non-material flows (community and environmental campaigns), are examined along an oil supply chain. Four communities in Ecuador are studied in order to reveal how a community's spatial and social dimensions influence its response to the construction of an oil pipeline as well as its establishment of advocacy networks. By holding constant the point of contention, these cases reveal that grassroots and professional organizations in communities most integrated in petroleum's commodity chain are least coupled with transnational campaigns. In contrast, environmental groups in areas least experienced in the environmental and health burdens associated with residing near oil facilities establish denser international ties. From these findings, this article calls for the insertion of community deliberation and community monitoring as necessary links in the flow of oil. (c) 2009 by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Date: 2009

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdfplus/10.1162/glep.2009.9.1.31 link to full text (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: http://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:tpr:glenvp:v:9:y:2009:i:1:p:31-57

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.mitpressjournals.org/loi/glep

Access Statistics for this article

Global Environmental Politics is edited by Peter Dauvergne

More articles in Global Environmental Politics from MIT Press
Series data maintained by Christopher F. Baum ().