Environmental Attitudes in a Climate-Vulnerable State: Rainforests, Oil, and Political Competition along Ecuador’s Extractive Frontier December 2014 Revision of paper presented at August 2014 American Political Science Association Annual Meeting in Washington, D.C. Draft only; Please do not cite wit

Across Latin America, rural, indigenous, and impoverished citizens have been mobilizing on behalf of the environment in an effort to protect their land and water. However, to date, we have very little evidence of what motivates environmental concern in developing countries. In contrast to the value-driven post-materialist argument that environmental issues are a concern only of the relatively affluent in advanced democracies, we offer an argument based on selfinterest. We analyze original data from a 2014 national survey in Ecuador to claim that three interest-driven hypotheses better explain attitudes towards the environment. First, following literature developing in geography, we claim that vulnerability to livelihood-impacting environmental changes greatly enhances interest in environmental issues. Second, we argue that political competition may mediate environmental concern. Third, we claim – particularly for respondents in the Amazon region subsample – that a respondent’s location on the “extractive frontier” (i.e. whether they live in an area where extraction is under consideration) will affect their environmental concern. Using original survey data from Ecuador – a country whose Andean and Amazonian ecosystems are being threatened by environmental change – we assess the explanatory power of post-materialism against the alternatives of vulnerability and selfinterest. Our statistical results strongly support the argument that populations threatened by environmental change and who are on extractive frontiers (where mining and oil concessions are being considered) are more likely to express concern over the environment, but that these factors are conditional upon electoral competition. We further support our findings using qualitative evidence from in-depth interviews with government and community leaders in Ecuador during the summer of 2014. Led by Inglehart (1990, 1995, 1997), many have argued that interest in environmental issues is part of a bundle of post-materialist attitudes held by the left-leaning affluent individuals whose material needs had been met. Such post-material values celebrated diversity and progressive politics across a range of areas. Inglehart and his colleagues based this theory largely on evidence from Western Europe, where prominent Green Parties emerged beginning in the 1980s. More recently, scholars such as Konisky, Milyo and Richardson (2008), McCright and Dunlap (2011) and Arbuckle and Konisky (2014) have argued that value-related causes, such as competition by individuals in government, ideological and partisan affinities, and religious beliefs, respectively, highly impact survey respondents’ level of concern relating to environmental issues like climate change. These studies add further credence to the widely held claim that values shape attitudes on environmental issues. However, new survey evidence from the developing world indicates that the poor who live off the land those on the front lines of climate change and other manifestations of environmental degradation have even stronger perceptions of the importance of such problems. Based on an unprecedented nationwide survey in Ecuador with a rural oversample, this paper argues that vulnerability theory, as argued by geographers and political ecologists, better explains citizen environmental attitudes in the developing world, where affluent citizens are the minority and Green Parties have not taken hold. Our argument is based on the idea that environmental attitudes reflect individuals’ self-interest, and specifically, the extent to which environmental degradation impacts individual livelihoods. After a brief review of the state of the literature on comparative environmental politics and political attitudes, this paper reviews post-materialism and its claims, considers the other hypotheses we test: “vulnerability theory” from geography as well as our own theory of the political economy of environmental concern. We present these three hypotheses, operationalize them, report several statistical models, discuss our findings, and then conclude. We find that, at least among Ecuador’s multifaceted ecosystems with developing world income inequalities and demographics, a different set of causes of environmental awareness must be explored. These results should help bring political scientists into the discussion of climate change and vulnerability in the developing world, which has, to date, been dominated by other social sciences. Post-materialism and Its Challengers: Vulnerability Theory, Electoral Competition, and Framing in Local Extractivist Debates Post-materialism did aspire to explain more than just the affluent European economies. The original argument, as articulated by Inglehart and Flannigan (1987), sought to explain leveling in the curvilinear relationship between economic development and income inequality that occurred in “mature industrial societies (1987, 1291)” only. That argument, based loosely on Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, was that after basic needs were met (as they most frequently were in affluent nations), they were free to address “less basic” issues like environmental protection (as well as quality of life, womens’ rights, etc.). However, in his 1995 piece, Inglehart appropriately 2 Brechin makes the connection between “post-materialism” and Maslow’s Hierarchy on page 794 of his 1999 piece. criticized scholars of the “boom” in environmental interest, through a statement which holds equally true today: “much of this research is limited to the tip of the iceberg, focusing on what people think about environmental problems without probing into why they think it or how deeply they are committed” (1995, 57). Using cross-national World Values Survey data from 43 countries at the time, Inglehart’s conclusions were two-fold: 1) that post-materialist cultural factors – defined as “emphasizing self-expression and . quality of life” – were critical, but that 2) “people are concerned about the environment because they face serious objective problems [such as air and water pollution]” (1995, 57). Brechin (1999) critiqued the “post-modernism plus objective problems” theory, arguing that while it was true that citizens from poor countries were more concerned with local environmental problems, there were no patterns of difference in views of more abstract and global problems between the respondents in rich nations and those from poor ones. Carrying Brechin’s concern further, we seek in this paper to more systematically explain differences in the attitudes of survey respondents, but as being related more to environmental vulnerability, local extractivist debates, and political competition. To test these hypotheses, subnational samples are needed. In sections below, we explain the selection of Ecuador and the sample sites within the country, but first we briefly describe the arguments which drive our explanations. Formerly just the purview of human and political ecologists, vulnerability theory seems ripe for consideration by political scientists as a source of political attitudes. Over the last several years individual characteristics – such as access to information and local social networks – have been brought into consideration of this theory at the household level, and national policies, international assistance, and impacts of globalization have been brought in at more aggregated levels of analysis (Fussell 2007, 158). To Adger (2006, 268-269), vulnerability (“the susceptibility to be harmed”) is the flip side of resilience, “the magnitude of disturbance that can be absorbed before a system changes to a radically different state as well as the capacity to selforganize and the capacity for adaptation to emerging circumstances. ” In his 2006 review of the literature, Adger emphasizes the need for giving greater consideration to human factors in vulnerability, as “the common property resource tradition, for example, stresses the importance of social, political, and economic organizations in social ecological systems, with institutions as mediating factors that govern the relationship between social systems and the ecosystems on which they depend” (269). Still, Adger states that there has been little in the way of a synthesis of social and ecological factors into considerations of vulnerability, and he acknowledges the challenges of “developing metrics that incorporate both human well-being and recognize the relative and perceptual nature of vulnerability” (274). While an elusive set of indicators linking ecological and social/political vulnerability has not yet been found, in this paper we follow Carlin, Love and Zechmeister (2014) in seeking to use public opinion to study these issues. However, we address what Adger references above as “the relative and perceptual nature of vulnerability” by considering citizens’ perceptions of their vulnerability in relation to particular empirical manifestations of environmental degradation. The “extractivist debate” frame argument is based on claims (Yashar 2005, Silva 2009) that 1990s neoliberal reforms in Latin American demobilized labor and other traditional groups, but, according to other scholars (Arce 2014, Yashar 2005), may have opened spaces for the mobilization of other groups such as indigenous communities in their efforts to control natural resource extraction. Protests to resist oil extraction reached their zenith near the Peruvian town of Bagua, in 2009, where 32 people were killed and hundreds were injured. Clearly, that event galvanized the debate in Peru, and authors like Arce (2014) and Vasquez (2014) have claimed that localized debates over whether to open up environments to extraction have a great effect on public opinion and citizen mobilization. As with vulnerability, extractivism in developing areas often taps into individuals’ self-interest when it comes to environmental concern. Extractivist efforts can harm the land and water upon which poor, rural, and indigen