The "Greening" of Costa Rica : : Women, Peasants, Indigenous Peoples, and the Remaking of Nature / / Ana Isla.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter University of Toronto Press Complete eBook-Package 2014-2015
• VerfasserIn: Isla, Ana,
• Place / Publishing House: Toronto : : University of Toronto Press, , [2018]; ©2015
• Year of Publication: 2018
• Language: English
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (224 p.) :; 4 figures, 1 map

Since the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, the concept of sustainable development has become the basis for a vast number of “green industries” from eco-tourism to carbon sequestration. In The “Greening” of Costa Rica, Ana Isla exposes the results of the economist’s rejection of physical limits to growth, the biologist’s fetish with such limits, and the indebtedness of peripheral countries.Isla’s case study is the 250,000 hectare Arenal-Tilaran Conservation Area, created in the late 1990s as the result of Canada-Costa Rica debt-for-nature swaps. Rather than reducing poverty and creating equality, development in and around the conservation area has dispossessed and disenfranchised subsistence farmers, expropriating their land, water, knowledge, and labour.Drawing on a decade of fieldwork in these communities, Isla exposes the duplicity of a neoliberal model in which the environment is converted into commercial assets such as carbon credits, intellectual property, cash crops, open-pit mining, and eco-tourism, few of whose benefits flow to the local population.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Figures and Tables -- Preface and Acknowledgments -- THE “GREENING” OF COSTA RICA. Women, Peasants, Indigenous Peoples, and the Remaking of Nature -- Introduction: The “Greening” of Costa Rica -- Part I: Foreign Debt, Debt-for-Nature, and the National System of Conservation Areas -- 1. The Political Economy of Costa Rica’s Neoliberal State -- 2. Political Ecology, Debt-for-Nature, and National Conservation Areas -- Part II: Embodied Indebtedness: The Remaking of People and Nature -- 3. Nature and People in the Arenal-Tilaran Conservation Area -- 4. Biological Diversity and the Dispossession of Peasants’ Knowledge -- 5. Forests and Peasants’ Loss of Access -- 6. Ecotourism and Social Development -- 7. Women’s Microenterprises and Social Development -- 8. Mining and the Dispossession of Resources and Livelihoods -- 9. The “Greening” of Capitalism -- Abbreviations -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index