6. Extractive States and Prospects for Environmental Action

This conclusion most explicitly draws out the comparative lessons to be learned in the cases of Ecuador and Venezuela. Extractive states rather than the actions of charismatic leaders are key to understanding social, political, and environmental dynamics in both countries. Populism is a symptom or response to extractivism, not the other way around. We summarize our argument that democratic and accountability deficits associated with populist moments in the Americas predate the Chávez and Correa administrations and persist after the end of their terms. If anything, in their early moments both presidents embodied hopes, long percolating among largely dispersed and local movements in their respective countries, of a mode of state–society–nature relations other than the verticalism, exclusion, and extractivism that defined political culture across democratic and authoritarian regime types alike in both countries. Endogenous and exogenous factors ultimately deflated these hopes in both cases, lessons which enhance our understanding of populist moments and extractivist states in the Americas and beyond.