Towards a social-ecologic transformation of the economy: a Latin American perspective

Latin America is the most unequal region in the world and its integration in global value chains is mainly specialised in the extraction of natural resources and low manufactured production sectors. The expansion of middle... [ view full abstract ]

Latin America is the most unequal region in the world and its integration in global value chains is mainly specialised in the extraction of natural resources and low manufactured production sectors. The expansion of middle classes and the occidental consumption model of high revenue groups contributes to an increasing pressure on ecosystems. The strategies of maximizing GDP growth in the short run in most Latin America countries results in weak political and economic systems, diminishing capacities of social integration and expanding the environmental and urban imbalances. The main objective of this paper is to propose a conceptual framework for the implementation of social-ecological transformation policies in the unequal and environmentally degraded Latin American societies. Our principal hypothesis is that only social-ecological transformation policies of the existing economic structures (consumption and production-energy patterns, distributional regimes) will make possible a transition to an equitable and sustainable welfare model in Latin American societies, advancing to the realistic strategic goal that all citizens have access to sufficient thresholds of well-being while ensuring the well-being of the new generations. The method used in this paper is to provide a set of basic economic, social, distributional and ecological indicators and well-being gaps and propose the main interrelationships between economic, social and ecological policies able to sustain transformations in the Latin American social-ecological systems to make them more equal and resilient. The result is the formulation of priority policy objectives and strategies to link social equality and environmental sustainability. This includes changes in consumption patterns and the distributive processes which articulate the profiles and capacities of satisfaction of needs, and in the interactions with the production systems and the energy and urban development models. The change of production systems is necessary to move from an accumulation pattern centered in natural resources and low productivity services towards production processes that combine the control of air, water and soil pollution with less carbon intensity, with the objective of decoupling economic growth and emissions with an energy production more intensive in the abundant renewable resources of the continent. The expansion of social services (mainly education, health, housing, transport and antipoverty networks) needs a new institutional framework and a sustainable productive base. It must include the intensification of value added by services to natural resource extraction (with more adapted information and communication technologies, automatization, traceability) and on policies of escalation of a sustainable elaboration of natural resources, in particular towards selective capital goods and mass consumption goods such as healthy food and housing equipment with local value added. The social appropriation of monopolistic, urban and natural resource rent extraction under new socially and environmentally conditions will be a central instrument for financing new green investment programs that ensures the social-ecologic transformation. These rents should be oriented to the productive reconversions and the expansion of the services that replace and compensate the restriction of the activity of the traditional extraction and carbon intensive sectors in the context of integrated productive districts and attention of urban and rural housing and social equipment needs.

 Keywords: consumption pattern, production system, socioecological systems, extractivism, Latin America