Natural Resources, Environment and Sustainability: 70 Years of ECLAC Thinking

ECLAC's intellectual production in its 70 years of existence has been vast in different areas of development. This book analyzes and contextualizes the main milestones and ideas of ECLAC's economic thought on natural resources, the environment and sustainability, organized into the two major stages that have characterized institutional life: the structuralist (1948-1990) and the neostructuralist (from 1990 onwards). Based on a systematic review of the literature, ideas such as the link between productive specialization in natural resources and unfavorable terms of trade, formulated in the fifties; sovereignty over natural resources, in the sixties; the early enunciation of the principle of common but differentiated responsibilities, in the seventies; the styles of development and the environment, in the eighties; spurious competitiveness, in the nineties, and the governance of natural resources, the style of sustainable development with equality and the great environmental impulse, in the first two decades of the twenty-first century. ECLAC's neostructuralist thought is dynamic, open and constantly renewing itself without losing its structuralist tradition. The book also provides conceptual elements to formulate an ecological neo-structuralism.