Climate Change and Latin America: New Democracies in a Warming World

This paper addresses the challenges posed by climate change to democracy. Democracies might face new obstacles if they prove incapable of more effectively addressing the problems posed by global warming than autocracies, and by the pressures the changing climate will place directly on democracies” institutional capacity. Democracy in Latin American and the Caribbean offers a suitable regional case to study this question as relatively new, middle-income democracies whose governing capacity will be more directly threatened by climate-induced crises than highly developed democracies. To establish expectations for democracy in the twenty-first century, this paper suggests a research agenda for this issue that would examine the effects climate change might have on public opinion, institutional capacity, and the possible appeal of “environmental authoritarianism.”