Environment and socioeconomic inequalities in Latin America: notes for a research agenda

Abstract

One key objective of the desiguALdades Research Network is to overcome the excessive focus on topics related to the state and national social configurations, and unveil instead the interdependent trans-regional relations present today in the various economic and non-economic dimensions of inequality. A research agenda about the connections between environmental challenges and the deepening of inequalities in Latin America is supposed to address several aspects. At the outset, one must recognize that phenomena associated with inequality are more relevant than those linked to poverty alone, which, in addition to its intrinsic importance to the social sciences, carries immediate implications to the formulation of adequate public policies. Likewise, one also needs to replace the focus on the economic aspects of inequality, and explore its non-economic aspects, which are directly tied to the complexity of the social relations and much more akin to the goals of the network. Hence, the proposed research agenda pays special attention to consumption patterns and their growing inter-regional homogenization, because among other aspects, these reveal interdependent variables embedded in recent inequality trends. In fact, making use of consumption patterns allows one to analyze key processes unfolding today, especially their interrelationship with other phenomena and processes, such as globalization, the differences between situations of inequality in national and local levels, the predominance of increasingly speculative financial capital, not linked to production and thus decoupled from the real economy, as well as key actors who are behind in these processes and who turn these into structural causes of deepening inequalities in Latin America and elsewhere.