Conceptual and Analytical Diversity of Environmental Governance in Latin America: A Systematic Review

The analysis of environmental governance and the analytical frameworks used to study this concept in Latin America show that the term is diffuse and polysemic. The term governance refers to democratic societies that theoretically encourage the plural participation of actors in decision making to solve public or collective socioenvironmental problems. However, in Latin America, there is a broad social perception of a democratic deficit that affects the socioenvironmental sphere. The objective of this work is to determine the main trends in studies on environmental governance in Latin America, the most commonly used analytical frameworks and the predominant approaches to characterize the scientific and political uses of the concept. A systematic literature review is carried out on databases in English and Spanish, and 140 articles that consider environmental governance using various analytical frameworks are analyzed. The main finding is the predominance of a critical perspective on the effectiveness of environmental governance, as well as the associated institutional components and social organizations, because the democratic practices that should support it are questionable.