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AbstractEnvironmental impact statements are designed to enable rational calculation of the ecological risks of proposed development projects and to serve as a basis for institutional decision making. In Mexico, a neo‐extractivist "boom" has led to massive ecosystem loss and environmental activists are increasingly under threat of violence. Now these same activists and the residents affected by development projects have targeted these bureaucratic instruments as key points of legal intervention and political mobilization. This article analyzes how volunteer scientists conduct independent audits of environmental impact statements and how their work provides the grounds for critiquing the state's performance of public reason. Independent audit constitutes an innovative form of administrative politics that seeks simultaneously to hold bureaucrats accountable and open the decision‐making process to the participation of excluded actors. [expertise, governance, environmental movements, science, Mexico]

Analysis of the role of NGOs as mediators of change may yield important theoretical insights into the processes by which neoliberalizing projects become embedded in and consequently transformed by specific settings. In recent decades, NGOs have played an important role in mediating intertwined and often contradictory processes of political and economic liberalization in countries around the globe. However, changes to the political context in which NGOs work have altered the nature of the interventions these groups make. This article examines how members of a Mexican NGO community centered in the provincial city of Tulancingo, Hidalgo, rework cultural idioms of mediation to position themselves as legitimate intermediaries linking rural cooperatives, state officials, international donors, and global activist networks. Their strategies for confronting their own entrapment in processes of structural reform illuminate the constraints faced by Southern activists in negotiating possibilities for social change after the Washington Consensus. They also underline the importance of renewed attention to the role of intermediaries in enabling and enacting structural change.

This article develops the concept 'economies of affect' to argue for increased anthropological attention to the roles of affect in facilitating economic transformations. The article draws on evidence from two ethnographic field projects, one in Mexico and the other in Indonesia, to show how affect was mobilized to create subjects commensurable with neoliberal norms. We show how embracing and crying and discourses about love and grief were conjoined to transformations that entailed the cessation of state guarantees and the introduction of market norms. In posing affect and its articulation with questions of economic change as an object of anthropological inquiry, the article argues for the utility of a notion of affect in contrast to other approaches that have stressed emotion. We argue that affect is useful because it is inherently reflexive and intersubjective. Affect refers to relations practised between individuals, in contrast to emotion, which still bears the spectre of a psychological individualism.RésuméCet article développe le concept des «économies de l'affect» pour attirer l'attention des anthropologues sur le rôle de l'affect dans la facilitation des transformations économiques. Il s'appuie sur les résultats de deux projets de terrain ethnographiques, l'un au Mexique et l'autre en Indonésie, pour montrer comment l'affect a été mobilisé pour créer des sujets pouvant être appréhendés selon les normes néolibérales. Les auteurs montrent comment l'étreinte, les pleurs et les discours sur l'amour et le chagrin ont été associés à des transformations impliquant la cessation de prestations de l'État et l'application des lois du marché. En faisant de l'affect et de son articulation avec le changement économique un objet d'étude anthropologique, l'article affirme l'utilité d'une notion d'affect se démarquant d'autres approches qui mettent l'accent sur l'émotion. Les auteurs affirment que l'affect est utile parce qu'il est, par nature, réflexif et intersubjectif. L'affect renvoie aux relations pratiquées entre les individus, à la différence de l'émotion, toujours marquée par le spectre d'un individualisme psychologique.

Indagamos sobre el cierre operacional de la mayor empresa pública de transporte colectivo de superficie de Chile, ocurrido durante los primeros años de la dictadura. Dicho proceso fue impulsado tras la adopción de las políticas económicas neoliberales por parte del régimen, cuyos principales objetivos fueron la reducción del gasto fiscal y el cese de funciones de diversas reparticiones estatales, entre ellas la Empresa de Transportes Colectivos del Estado (ETCE). En ese marco, observamos las consecuencias que trajo el abandono por parte del Estado de una actividad estratégica para el funcionamiento de la ciudad y las dificultades que este hecho acarreó a los habitantes de las áreas donde operaba la compañía. El proceso fue parte de las transformaciones económicas, políticas y urbanas registradas por la transición desde un modelo desarrollista a neoliberal. Mediante una revisión de fuentes oficiales, prensa y bibliografía, reconstruimos el fin de las operaciones, el desmantelamiento y la venta de bienes de la ETCE, interrogándose sobre el destino de una empresa pública en un contexto ideológico que favorecía la participación del sector privado en el área.

Scholarship related to environmental questions in Latin America has only recently begun to coalesce around citizenship as both an empirical site of inquiry and an analytical frame of reference. This has led to a series of new insights and perspectives, but few efforts have been made to bring these various approaches into a sustained conversation across different social, temporal and geographic contexts. This volume is the result of a collaborative endeavour to advance debates on environmental citizenship, while simultaneously and systematically addressing broader theoretical and methodological questions related to the particularities of studying environment and citizenship in Latin America. Providing a window onto leading scholarship in the field, the book also sets an ambitious agenda to spark further research