In 2008, Ecuador became the first country to grant legal rights to nature. In this article, I examine how this happened. I show that while proponents of nature's rights acted during a key political moment, their efforts were successful due to the presence of environmentalist social movements that elevated the environmental agenda at the national level during prior decades, and due to the power of indigenous organizations and their call to recognize Ecuador as a “plurinational” polity, demanding respect for indigenous territories and ways of life and incorporating politicized versions of indigenous beliefs about the environment. The study considers the consequences of mobilization for legal innovation and institutional change, and shows the complexity of struggles over the environment in the global South. It is based on research at the Ecuadorian National Legislative Assembly archive, semistructured interviews with respondents involved in the politics of nature and the constitutional assembly, and secondary historical sources.

In this introductory article, we present the special issue and outline our research agenda on extractive development, social mobilization, and policy impact in Latin America. We propose a shift in analytical focus from the study of resistance to studying the policy and institutional impacts of mobilization. We outline possible outcomes of interest and conditions contributing to the attainment of policy and institutional change. These conditions include movement characteristics -such as coalitions, repertoires, and alliances with state actors -and the socioeconomic, political, and ideational conditions that shape and constrain patterns of mobilization and the likelihood and durability of its impact. We also sketch the core themes and findings of the articles comprising the special issue, which cover sectors including mining, hydroelectricity, oil extraction, and accompanying infrastructural expansion across Central and South America. Several of the articles show how mobilization led to policy change while others caution against being overly optimistic about policy change without durable shifts in the structures that keep development models that prioritize the large-scale extraction of natural resources in place. We conclude by identifying pending questions and avenues for future research.

Opposition to the social and environmental impacts of large-scale mining has become more visible in Chile since the early 1990s, yet not all mining projects catalyze mobilization. Building on the concept of defensive mobilization, I argue that opposition is more likely when a project is perceived as a threat to some members of a community. Using a data set of all major mining projects submitted for environmental licensing since environmental impact assessments were implemented in Chile, I identify the conditions under which mining projects lead to opposition. The results, based on binary logistic regression analysis, show that projects threatening agrarian and indigenous communities, where threats to existing water and land uses are especially salient, are more likely to be opposed. Community challenges are also more likely for projects majority-owned by international investors. About four out of every ten proposed projects have faced opposition, and only a handful of projects have ever been definitively rejected, even as projects that are found to violate regulations are increasingly fined and challenged in court as well as facing protests and public scrutiny.

This article examines how different repertoires of women's activism influence gender earnings equality across countries. We develop a typology of three forms of mobilizationprofessionalized women's activism, labor women's activism, and women's activism in popular movements-emphasizing distinct actors, patterns of claims-making, and inter-organizational ties among women's organizations and other civil society groups in multi-organizational fields. Based on data on membership and co-membership ties built using World Values Surveys, we test the effects of different repertoires of women's activism on earnings equality between women and men in 51 countries. We also consider a gendered development model and the role of welfare states as main explanatory variables in accounting for the gap in earnings. Our findings suggest that even in the presence of these alternative explanations, women's activism matters. Furthermore, women's organizations with access to institutional politics, through either direct advocacy or ties to unions or professional associations, have had the most success in promoting gender earnings equality. Our research contributes to prior work on social movement outcomes by conceptualizing women's mobilization in the context of fields and further testing its effects on distributional outcomes in a comparative perspective.

Activists opposing urban water privatization often continue organizing even after water infrastructure returns to the public sector. Why? Analyzing water privatization and renationalization in Greater Buenos Aires, Argentina, I argue that as these policy changes unfolded, activists from neighborhoods lacking necessary infrastructure organized not only about privatization but also around place. Place-based mobilization emerged from a longstanding lack of services as well as environmental threats like flooding and pollution affecting residents’ daily lives. While privatization activated collective action, amplified by a broader economic crisis and protest cycle, it was organizing grounded in local environmental conditions and associational spaces that sustained it. The analysis, based on historical and interview data, reveals continuities and disjunctures between neoliberal and state-led modes of social provision, showing how place makes large-scale policy changes tangible and shapes patterns of collective action in a major South American metropolitan area.