NILAS Research Seminar - Jorge Ernesto Rodríguez Morales
Seminar
Date: Friday 19 September 2025
Time: 14.00 – 15.30
Location: Library of the Nordic Institute of Latin American Studies (House B, Floor 5) & Zoom*
Refracting Extractive Capitalism in Climate Governance: Glocal Regimes, Vulnerability, and Climate Strategies in Latin America
Global climate governance calls for more ambition in adaptation and mitigation, yet transformative pathways remain marginal in countries’ NDCs. States are often treated as the key actors, but they have shown limited capacity to reduce vulnerability as climate risks intensify. I argue that to understand these failures we must look beyond the state, through the lens of what I call glocalized regimes—sector-specific, historically grounded configurations of ideas, institutions, and interests that refract global capitalist logics through local realities. From these glocalities, I analyze how adaptation is shaped by regime grammars in three extractive cases: bioenergy in Brazil, agribusiness in Uruguay, and mining in Peru. Historical institutional evidence shows that these regimes systematically narrow the space for transformative climate strategies, producing isomorphic, regime-preserving pathways that are projected into global climate governance as NDCs. Economic growth imperatives, energy security discourses, and export-oriented development models—combined with state–private convergence in extractive expansion, bureaucratic strongholds, and investor-led “adaptation”—stabilize these regimes while simultaneously co-producing vulnerabilities and maladaptation. The findings suggest that meaningful transformation requires de-institutionalization across core and structural levels—land, water, energy, and property rights; trade and FDI regimes; fiscal frameworks and mandate design, inter alia—rather than reliance on technical fixes, expansionist strategies, or reactive responses to climate threats.
Jorge Ernesto Rodríguez Morales – Postdoctoral Fellow, Dept. of Geosciences (Natural Resources & Sustainable Development), Uppsala University. PhD in Economic History (Univ. of Salamanca) & PhD in International Relations (Stockholm Univ.)
The research seminar on Latin American studies is open to scholars interested in Latin American issues. It welcomes the presentation of papers from researchers and PhD students from different social science disciplines.
The seminar takes place on Fridays 14:00 – 15:30 every other week at the Library of the Nordic Institute of Latin American Studies (House B, Floor 5).
*For further information on the research seminar please contact: researchseminars.nilas@su.se.
Organizer of the seminar: Thaïs Machado Borges
Last updated: September 4, 2025
Source: Nordic Institute of Latin American Studies