Elites and environmental governance in Latin America: a framework for studying a contentious issue

Abstract

This paper seeks to outline key concepts and hypotheses for the study of elites in environmental governance in Latin America. It starts with pointing to an alleged “black boxing” of elites in most studies of environmental governance in the region. It further discusses different definitions of elites and views on how elites change in the general literature, and proposes a resource based view on elites embedding them in the control of four different kinds of resources: economic, political, social and knowledge. This is followed by a discussion of the relationship between elites and non-elites and the importance of the dynamics between different elite groups. The paper ends with an outline of how to study elites in environmental governance in Latin America.