 Well, hello everyone. Thank you for joining us and sorry for the delay in the, at the beginning. We're going to start now. So we, we don't get too late for the presentation of professor era. And well, hello everyone and thank you for joining us today for this lips presentation. The speaker today is Professor Veronica era associate professor of urban planning and political science at the University of California, Los Angeles. My name is Pedro Ramos. I'm a PhD student here at Columbus urban planning program, and I will be moderating the session. I will begin with a few brief logistical announcements before turning to introduce our speaker. We will be recording today's lecture. So please remember this if you do not wish to be recorded. After the presentation, we will have time for q&a. We will start q&a around 2pm to 15 so that we have enough time for everyone's questions. I will be coordinating q&a with attention to diversity and inclusion. So if you have already had a chance to ask a question, please allow others to do so before asking another one. To ask questions, please raise your hand and I will call you. So with that, I am delighted to introduce our speaker today. Veronica is an associate professor of urban planning and political science at UCLA. She studies the politics of development in global south cities with a focus on Latin America. Her research interests include urban politics, decent realization, civil society participation, social mobilization and environmental politics and policymaking. Dr. Herrera is also an expert on water policy and international development. She's the author of water and politics, clientelism and reform in northern Mexico, and the forthcoming book, both harms and citizen action environmental degradation and policy change in Latin American cities. New projects include work on plastics waste speakers and the global waste economy and all things garbage. So please welcome Professor Herrera. Thank you. Thank you. It's great to be here. How are we all doing today? Yeah, your mouths are full. Wonderful. Well, thank you so much. Let me pull this out. So, let me just begin. So new book coming out in October, I'm going to be fresh out the presses talking about the book and my talk today. So it's a book talk. This picture here on the bottom is taken during field research in Buenos Aires, Argentina, in an informal settlement that lives consumed by both industrial and residential wastewater pollution. Up top in the same community is a mural that was painted by elementary school children that kind of represents their lived experience and also maybe the hope for change. So back to this, this green swamp, which is eutrophication, right? It's the algae bloom. Here, enterprising residents have improvised a solution to the lack of sewers in their neighborhood by running hoses underground to take wastewater from their bathrooms to open lagoons a few meters away. The results are these green lagoons composed of raw sewage and strewn with plastic bottles, hard parts, and bags full of kitchen scraps. The neighborhood sits behind a shell petrochemical processing plant that transmits toxins into the air and the soil and water. Residents I interviewed shared how their children had become diagnosed with lead poisoning and other communities during this research. Other residents shared how they had developed different types of cancers. The neighborhood sits adjacent to the Matanza Rio Chuelo River, which traverses Buenos Aires and once made the top 10 list of the most contaminated places in the world. According to the World Health Organization, one out of four people dies each year from being exposed to either living or working near toxic pollution. 92% of these deaths occur in middle and low income country where the majority of the global population lives and as you all know very well, increasingly in cities. Pollution has been estimated to cause losses of 4.6 trillion a year or 6% of global economic output. So there's lots of different types of pollution that create toxic exposure to human health such as air or land pollution or radioactive waste. I focus specifically on untreated wastewater pollution, a fast growing global problem that has been under examined by both development practitioners and scholars. So don't know how much you know about the wastewater sector, but only about 15 to 18% of all of the wastewater that's generated in all of the world receives any type of treatment. So I'm talking about residential, industrial, agricultural. Medical all kinds of liquid affluence and this problem of course is compounded by a parallel solid waste crisis where three and a half million tons of garbage are produced every day up 10 times in the last century. And only about 9% gets recycled right so all of this is also contributing to water pollution is the solid waste in in the reservoirs. Wastewater pollution. In global south cities has a very long history. Many countries. Speaking about Latin America were inheritors of state led development. So these are programs like import substitution industrialization in the 50s and 60s. Where in the quest for rapid industrialization governments didn't prioritize putting, you know, communities residential communities near or inside of any type of industrial park and away from human settlement. So when cities developed in proximity to these freshwater sources or river banks which most cities have right historically over time have developed near waterways. Over time they over the period of urbanization that really exploded since the 1950s, they developed traditions of putting our backs to the river as I heard that quote over and over and over again, because rivers really became public six for the development of industry commerce and communities. So now we have about 80% of Latin America which is which is urban, and the result over time of all of this dynamic and I could be talking about a lot of different global south cities and focusing on Latin America but really defies widely is that communities have ended up at the river's edge right in the last 50 years urbanization, and governments have failed repeatedly to create wastewater services and treatment procedures that can kind of keep up with this population growth. Okay, so what emerges then from all of this stuff that I'm talking about with sewage and trash and waste are these complex social arrangement. So surrounding this problem of slow environmental harms. So Rob Nixon, who is an English professor has written about the concept of slow violence, which he describes as a violence that occurs gradually and out of sight, a violence of delay destruction that is dispersed across time and space. That's typically not viewed as violence at all. I engage with this idea this kind of got me thinking. And one of the contributions ultimately of the book is to problematize his concept of slow violence and suggest that not all environmental problems have the same temporal dimensions, and not all human, not all urban harms have the same temporal dimension. So, some, some are imminent threats right so new sighting of a toxic waste facility or an emergency like an oil spill. It's a quick duration, and you're going to have the threat of imminent action. This can be perceived more more plausibly as a crisis, and then you may be more likely to possibly get some kind of policy attention. Um, but I'm not talking about those types of harms today. I'm not talking about real slow harms, and I define this by saying my slides are a little wonky with the casting so I apologize they were clear, like they were spaced out. So I have these three categories that I emphasize for defining slow harm. One is having long temporal dimension and steady tempos, these temporal qualities, like slow moving speed, steady tempo, long term duration, make them more easily become part of the everyday landscape so that's the first thing I really want you to think about for this is slow harms that are part of the everyday landscape you're born into it. It doesn't seem like anything other than just what is normal. And then what happens is a sort of type of social numbing, which generates deeply embedded norms over a long period of time were groups in society as well as the state began to see them as socially acceptable and non taboo. Pollution ends up being seen over time as not the state's responsibility to regulate. For example, and other periods of time might be something like foot binding or child labor practices that in certain periods of times in societies were just became everyday practice and not socially taboo until at some point maybe they do become socially taboo. And so the result of these dynamics with certain types of environmental harms is that it becomes a policy arena that's almost impossible to tackle just is so incredibly difficult to tackle complacency or resignation really on, you know, takes over, and the city government looks the other way and attends to other problems and just ignores this work. Um, so these are, again, some photographs will refer to that kind of play. You know, I want to I'm dying to stop this presentation and put distance incentivize where it's supposed to go, but I'm not, I'm not used to hearing things. You guys will experience this we're like oh my slides were and then the cast wrong but that's okay. Okay, so what I do in the book just as a starter. Okay, is to flush out the concept of slow harm and create an original framework for understanding environmental harms as conditioned on two criteria here. Okay, so this can apply to any type of environmental harm. Um, and what I, what I do is I disentangle to criteria one is the deer's graphical proximity modeling harm is concentrated or disperse. Cross top with a temporal proximity to bodily harm, is it an imminent threat that's happening right now hasn't happened yet and you see it happening right now, or is it something that is gradual and has occurred over a long period of time. So the point here is to say that slow targeted harm, which is the focus of the book are the ones that are maybe perhaps most difficult to generate policies. That's what I'm talking about the book, but this is the country thinking about environmental harms or different types of harms in general. So, the point here is to say that flow targeted harm, which is the focus of the book are the ones that are maybe perhaps most difficult to generate policies. They are slow moving gradual and become part of the everyday landscaping and they're targeted on to vulnerable community. Right. So those two things, it's just, you know, one of the most difficult things to generate. And it hasn't been studied that much in this way I think it is really hard to study when not that much happens and how do you how do you have a policy arena that has very little policy. Right. Okay, so the research question for the book then is when do people mobilize around slow harms. And I'm especially interested in thinking about when does this action actually lead on kind of policy shifts on kind of policy. And just to mention this, this photograph, which I was so excited to take because we're doing told research in the same community about it in the different home. There's one home that that that kind of organize this for the entire neighborhood, the water drop off right because groundwater pollution is so intense at this point that water is not potable. So right as we were doing that the shell drop by and as I mentioned earlier this is one of the big culprits and it's got it right there. And you know what I tried to put in the book. And Oxford was like, you don't want to get sued by a shell. Did I just say that. Yes, I did. So anyway, I'm showing you. Okay, there. Okay, so, okay, really quickly literature what is policy change. I'm not in the great. What does the literature say about what do we know about when citizen action unlocks policy change. So really briefly angle hearts post material, so I'm pulling to political science and sociology right here a lot. The angle hearts post material value thesis suggests that those who are materially and physically comfortable or rich countries are ones with environmental concerns and these issues get channeled through ecological political parties so green parties to implement policy. Outside of political science. Others have argued that angle heart is crazy. Of course, low income communities are also have environmental concern, and we should expect to see environmental concern when in the global south when different types of natural resources that communities rely on for their economic livelihoods are being attacked. Literature, there's also race based claims that can also become part of when vulnerable. Mobile. Okay. More broadly, various literatures have suggested that the state is more likely to respond to high profile mass large number of protests activity. Other things like interlap international leadership or resources. This is a big one. And just sometimes it can be a sectoral crisis like maybe you have electricity. Electricity reform as needed as needed and needed but it's not until you have NASA blackouts for extended periods of time that you get a little bit of policy shift like that. In the case of what I'm talking about a lot of people as they help me shape my work I said, what about flooding, what about when they're splitting just do you get attention there that you know. And just different types of political opportunities structure so for example, new laws, new constitutions, new political administrations that create propitious or supportive conditions for changing the policy status quo. I've always been written about this, I find all of this satisfactory and to not explain surprise to not explain my outcomes that I'm examining in my project so what I do is I investigate this question. And when do people mobilize around slow harms across three cities. Okay, with similar characteristics. Okay. So we have a group of methods most similar. And in these three cities, you have quite a few similarity, you have the political seat of power right these are the three capital cities, but it's not just a capital city it's also adjacent as a college. Each of these river that runs the city runs through the federal government's jurisdiction, also the urban local government and something like 20 to 30 other municipalities, which we're talking about electoral democracies these are all three democracies. So they're all different political parties from these cities okay so this is always like my contribution to urban planning where I'm like guys. Okay, politics, because it really matters. You know, trying to get something done. It's, it's, it's, it's, I think officially it's called it's a hot mess. So, that's one thing they all have in common. Okay, another thing they have in common similar population densities we're talking about 10 to 15 million in each of the cities and tense industrialization historically about 25% of the nation's GDP is coming out of this major area. And like I said before, that's contributed to historic long standing levels of intense pollution. And massive public health risk. Okay, so, even though all three cities have these similar characteristics. We see a very different change a very different outcome across the city in terms of policy shifts under the period of time that I'm studying. Okay. So, in Argentina there's an expansive or high amount of policy shift and Columbia I call it stagnated. And in Lima, I would say it's uninitiated very low, low to know, like it's lower now, I'll go back and forth. And what the kind of question I'm trying to answer is like, given this variation what explains this variation. Okay. So, policy shift. This is the outcome I'm trying to explain in the book. What do I mean by this. I'm really interested in the state's ability to regulate the environment. So, I conceptualize it criteria whether they're creating new institutions. Whether they are financing these institutions in a real way really implement really giving them financial resources and whether they're doing different things to increase your regulatory. I break that down. Okay. Oh, sorry. I did a bunch of field field research, my field research slide. That's me drinking method was one of my interlocutors on the, I don't know if you can see that. Um, so this is comparative case analysis I interviewed nearly 200 people in these three locations and these broad broad. I do a lot of process tracing, comparative case analysis. And you can get a flavor here for the types of actors that I interviewed. Um, I also did something that was really interesting, which is sort of social network mapping. I asked some of the folks that were involved in the advocacy networks that I document. Um, take a paper and tell me, what are the different. Actors that you interact with on this. Right. Like, what are the different and go for government officials are different and. Can you tell us whether it's a high level of interaction by doing a kind of. Medium level dotted line. Um, or, or no line or very small line. So, um, 2 lines 1 line dotted line. So I did that and I helped it helped create more data points for me and understanding the relationship between the actors that I was. Okay. So, I mean, and I want to stress my emphasis and qualitative methodology. And this is a process. So, in other words. In this type of scholarship, the order in which things happen matter. Right. And so documenting periodizing this happened first and this happened and then this happened. The third step that was conditioned on the second step, I'm going to throw away the financial ordering and social scientific analysis is a big part of the research that I do. Okay. So, I now want to present the argument of the book, which is sort of it's a theory building book. So, so this is this is the theory and then I'll move on to the case studies to show a little bit of a flavor for the empirics before concluding. Okay, so slow harms when they are attended rely on initial grassroots mobilization by impacted. So let's see how this. This is this is the bad thing about animation if it's not on your computer. It can get wonky so guys don't do this. Um, so the impacted community. This I call bonding mobilization because it relies heavily on bonding capital from strong embedded play space ties with people that have lived with one another for an extended period of time. So I draw on Mark renovator from sociology, Robert Putnam and others that have talked about social capital and social ties network analysis. When in active groups are able to mobilize grassroots pressure conserve to leave a long paper trail with government agencies in the ports, raise smoke signals outside of the community through sort of fire alarm monitoring. This comes from marches rallies filing official complaints, sometimes filing, you know lawsuits. And this type of grassroots activism provides legitimacy to environmental claims that you wouldn't have the impacted community wasn't engaging in claims making. The legitimacy I'm talking about in the eyes of politicians, I could journal right in the eyes of the courts. It's really critical, but alone it's not enough. What's needed are ties that can aggregate these disparate claim. So that's what the big focus of the book is on what I call bridging mobilization. And these are resource external actors, both within the state and society that use new resources and connections with each other to scale up local claim and connect them to the state. So I different actors. I'm not talking about the scope condition is I'm not talking about authoritarian regimes. I am talking about local. And it's not uncommon actually. Bridges. Public officials within the state have backgrounds that come from NGOs or come from activists. So there is a situation. And what they're doing then is when they are effective bridges is they're bringing new resources to bear on the problem at hand. These can include new sources of information expertise, relevant contacts. Organizational or money. And when these work together, that's the advocacy network that I am really investigating here where you can really see changes. In the cases of higher form in this case case of Argentina. So that is kind of the argument of the book is when does it happen it happens when you have these facts. Okay, but how do you get good bridges. Like, we need bridges, how do you get bridges. Well, it's context, it's context dependent depends on the different regions that we're talking about, but I was able to find similarities and patterns for the three South American cities that I examined. And so I want to talk about that I want to talk about the innate what I call the enabling condition is not a cause. So if there is a plane crash, we don't say that the cause of maybe like a technical malfunction, right. But the enabling condition is gravity right you need you need you need both. The same thing here, there were enabling conditions that really I saw to that were really important in the three cases. So background in the three countries that I'm studying. There were long periods of military dictatorship or state sponsored violence, right over many, many decades. And I traced back over this political violence. And examine the extent to which a human rights movement emerged. And you know what they emerge. And the human rights movements were important to help and the regimes or help try to resist against the regime. But they weren't always wrong, and they didn't always last over time. So what I look at is the extent to which the human rights movements that occurred were successful in their human rights mobilization to help bring down the regime and after the war ended, build capacity and strength over time. Were they successful in doing that. And in the cases where they were, which is the case of Argentina, especially, they were able to use their social legitimacy that they developed in human rights claims make to authentically and legitimately deploy a master frame. Where they were able to reframe this long standing historic invisible problem of pollution as a human rights injustice, a human rights violation. There was no ally to do that. There was another condition. And that was, who was the president, and who were the presidents over time. And I found that when the presidents were coming out of the left, when they were ideologically leftist. Right movement, you know, capacity building, and they were economically when the president's economic agenda was not tied to extract it as free. Why I'm going to stop American politics but I guess that's kind of my point is, you want to understand the cause and you got to get into the weeds of the political history a little bit to understand So, in all of your countries, you have a military. That is the main driver of the political violence that I'm talking about. In Argentina, they were easier to subdue the right and the presidents that came after were not were not tied to the right. We're not trying to the extractivist industries that you see in Colombia and especially for real, that are enemies of the human rights. They were not tied to the economic interests that were in a way almost hunting down. So, presidents of the right in Colombia and so I document how they came to power, and they were either military officers like in the case of crew, later on, a former military officers that are now Democrats, or they were linked to military officers. And I mean I'm talking about they were literally on trial. Right, and so they come to power and they part of the cells so it's just for where, like when I thought you were talking about environmental globalization, like, yeah, I know, right that there is this history of whether or not the human rights were squashed or were allowed to thrive that then later becomes relevant for whether or not they have the capacity to join a fight a struggle over environmental justice advocacy. So that is a big thing of the look and something that that I of course you tell much. Okay, so, given all of this, then you know I think you know by now I love cross tabs. So, this is the book and a nutshell. Right, we have the three cases here. That explains based on whether there was higher low bonding mobilization and whether there was high or low working mobilization. There was low a lot because of the enabling condition that was that was human rights and emerge, but then it got squashed over time by the president. What I want to do now is take you to the Argentine. Just so I can show you our picture. You like the most. Okay, all of my slides are cut off. That's okay. Crossroads activism does occur in some localities for the Argentina case I identified at least 10 formal groups in diverse locations with place based grievances that mobilize in their neighborhoods so the protection of a nearby wetlands for example that was being contaminated by these factors rallying for relocation of that petrochemical processing plan I was talking about in a very different I mean we're talking about kilometers and kilometers of distance the very long river so in terms of the territory, and I've got these great maps to the book which I probably should have put in the slides. We are talking about very distant locations right that are that are mobilizing another one rallying against an open air landfill that is getting into the river and getting into, you know, that's that's here that brought out hundreds of people. One grassroots one grassroots activists that I spoke with told me we were like ants, building quietly slowly over and over and over again. If you ever do research in these areas you don't you talk to people and I mean a lot of the work is they're just running around trying to figure out who they're supposed to talk to right people don't know because it's constantly changing we went to the ministry environment went to the governor's office they sent us to the mayor's office the mayor's office and the city council city council center right and that's the work that these folks are doing. Um, it was important work it was fire alarm monitoring kind of work smoke signaling there were some newspapers that picked it up, but they were really pro feel claims that were just connected and fragmented. This began to change in the 2000s when NGOs became involved in that time to reach out to the pollution issue, and I identified eight such organization. These were NGOs that were not service providing, but they were kind of rights based NGOs, and they worked through policy briefs litigation and lobbying somewhere engaged in organizing, but most were trying to take on policy change types of cases. They were focused on rights based missions, but also worked with different institutional mandate dates such as the right to a scene environment nature citizen participation, the right to information and accountability. When they began to work on the river pollution issue. They really changed the nature of what they were talking about from being individual local claims to this collective rights violation. They built this collaborative network. But helping them. Um, so they talked about pollution in a new way as a human rights violation very much in the way that I have been talking about. They connected these different local grievances. Cancer lead poisoning wastewater pollution. Into one overarching problem with the same route. And in a broadly resonant appeal. Around a human rights violation that as I've told you was in Argentina at that time. Very resonant and had this kind of like social legitimacy. Right. Um, they deployed this message through publications media interviews up at conferences, social media, and in meetings with government. So they were extremely successful in especially getting media coverage and changing the public narrative about the river as unmentionable or forgotten to a real environmental disaster that was a rights violation. Why were they so successful. Tracing back the institutional history. Most of them were linked to the expansive. Most of them were linked to the expansive human rights movement that began in the 1980s surrounding the military crime. This is a very famous and actually at this point I'm with internationally famous human rights organization. These were the mothers of the disappeared. Children that were taken from the political prisoners in the 1970s by the military government who didn't want to. They were also very Catholic and they didn't want to. The women to have abortions who were pregnant and killed and so they basically told their baby. All of these women were searching for their children and then there were the mothers that helped bring down the regime. And so I found that. Many of these human rights activists then later on and this is one organization but there were many many other there were like 15 other organizations that just human rights organization. They went on through the years them and their and their kind of those that came after went on to form NGOs. For democratic accountability for missing persons, prison reform, reforming the judicial system constitutional reform and really importantly in all these cases, the right to information. This was a major thing and transparency. They did a lot of work on this. For example, three of the eight groups that I document for the river remediation movement work together previously on a policy brief to unstack the Supreme Court the Supreme Court had been stacked. And actually help lead constitutional reform in the 2000s. Later on, new presidents come to power the Kirchner's who are center left. And when they come to power this vast network of human rights actors. Not only are they working in NGOs, but a bunch of them now go and work for government because they are now under this presidential regime that's like open to them. The president, for example, had his colleagues his friends in the 70s and present wasn't present, but you can look at in Brazil same thing. The other stuff was in prison and see this. So, the generation of people at that time that became president, which side they were on in the 70s, were they kind of potentially political prisoner, because they were left. And have they been imprisoned or had their friends been imprisoned or were they more conservative right. That ends up mattering today for how our politics are playing out and how issues like environment or other types of important urban planning. Um, so those low level bureaucrats became key bridges and I documented dozens of sharing work activity river between the bridges within society and within this. So you have this strength of human rights movement in terms of messaging. And really importantly, this this led to an enduring policy shift that was really accelerated when a group of residents filed a court case for damages for the river pollution. And the NGOs that I've been talking about filed briefs to be included as co defendants in court case. Um, so, after admitting the NGOs as third parties suit suit the court handed down a historic Supreme Court ruling and favor the right to a clean environment. This would become the most important instance of environmental litigation in the country and the first collective action lawsuit. The ruling held dozens of government entities and industries responsible for the pollution and mandated a comprehensive policy and remediation and both leaders accountable. So this is really and this leads to a couple of things. Well, let me go back. I want to mention that the really important thing, the judicial advisory committee, the judge then because the NGOs were so dominant. They, the judges. A judicial advisory committee that put these NGOs on a committee to help the judge oversee implementation of the polling. They became powerful. Um, they had a pre existing advocacy network access to the media academic. Resources. One of them told me the truth is that the courts themselves know little about the environment, rivers, water, housing that are where the experts and we are the ones that have been here all along. So, this is what I find in the Argentina case that the policy is really expensive. Um, across the region. You have the creation of new institutions, multi. Regulatory, which is really, really huge. Times of money that is in the body. New regulators, new inspectors that are doing cadastral mapping of industry. They're shutting down industries that are. Um, I actually. A lot of you. Um, and I interviewed, I was able to interview some industries that were being shut down or haven't shut down. All the kind of corroborate that this is just something that you, you know, read about. Um, and. It really helped build regulatory capacity that had been lacking. Um, and so this is a big transforming our case. Um, and I document in the book sort of more details about about the policy about about about the challenges of river and it's not perfect, but. I'll just leave you with this quote, which is the director of the public works. Um, uh, office in Buenos Aires, I was interviewing him on his garbage boat. I was out and. They grab garbage regularly on. And he said to me, this river once gained international attention when it made the list of the top 10 most. World. Journalists would flock from all over the world to come here and be on this boat and take these pictures for their further for their headlines. And they, the story was, you know, the most contaminate place in the world and that's what would sell. Now they come here and they see that this part of the river, not the entire of her, but this part of the river looks like this. And they're just they're disappointed. We can't write this story. Um, so he really stressors a long way to go. But the improvements have been real. Okay, so I've already talked about this. Is it okay if I go to 10. Yeah. Um, so, so that's the Argentina case and just gonna talk briefly about this is my slide before this is how you do your slides. Don't have animation and then it comes out correctly. These are notes to myself. Um, before I before I conclude. So, the other two cases in Columbia, I call it stagnated. But what I mean by that is there have been advances, but they haven't really developed and they've been pushed back. Lots of strong local activism in the Columbia case. Um, but, um, like I said, you know, seven grassroots organizations, but like I said, it's not enough to have really active local grassroots energy. It's important, but it's not enough. NGOs that were involved were small environmental and just focus on environmental claims. They didn't focus on anything. And so the attention that the river got was really for those who care about the environment. And it didn't have a more resident broad appeal that could cross linked other to other audiences. When I trace back the histories, I find that environmental issues in Columbia were not connected to a preexisting human rights movement. Really because of this protracted nature of the of the Colombian armed conflict. There was a lack of transitional justice that occurred human rights. Really, the human rights groups were really crushed over time by conservative president today. There is a leftist president for the first time in Columbia ever. Okay, but, um, so, who actually was the mayor during during this time in, in Bogota, but he's the first leftist president 2023 ever. Okay, before it was very historically conservative administrations that were very aligned with abstracted. Um, if you look at the some of the most dangerous places, fire and all the time for Brazil is one. So you see that human rights groups were were really not not allowed to flourish and develop over time. So human rights frames are not a resident frame for environmental fact human rights is very interesting also by the military. They have co-opted the human rights frame and also have put up they have the military has a human rights office. So that military officers when they do go to trial, their human rights can also be a read these documents can also make sure to be protected. So they're not accused of things without evidence and all of this. So that's another way to undermine this kind of mobilization really really interesting. Want to nerd out about that attitude. Um, and then for the Peru case. There is a little bit of activism, but it's not. It's only about imminent threats. Okay, so that that's only about rapid targeted firms number back when it's about different types of harm. It's not about. So they're really disconnected and there's essentially no bridges whatsoever. I look, the proof case is an interesting case because you're looking to document the presence of nothing, but it's important to document it so you look at all the places. Right. In the judiciary and look at all the places that you found things for the other cases of active and document that nothing happened in those spaces. So it's a, it's a, it's a case of zero, but it's important to do it, you know, the same extent that you're doing the other cases so that you can really have that leverage of the person. Um, in Peru, the environmental institutions were really. This is the case in many global South countries were really inserted from above. It was not something from below. There were overnight, like 15 environmental institutions that were created as part of a trade agreement with the US because the US said, well, we want to put your, your bananas and whatever else you're enjoying out here. It's coming from Peru. It needs to have, we need to have environmental institutions for us to sign this trade agreement. Peru's environmental institutions were not homegrown. They were imported from outside. And so they're not, they're not getting to look forward to. They were created to be ignored. And our. Um, and the bridges or strong bridges or some kind of bridging. In other words, external resource outsiders. To help develop. Like, you know, to help activate rights from below to help make folks aware on the ground of their rights. Those two things. Um, okay. So are you ready to for this to be over? Let me conclude. Um, okay, so three things I want to say my conclusion here. Number one, um, slow harms are really widespread. It's a pervasive problem. And oh my goodness. Yeah. I'm a little CDS. So it's, I'm, I'm like, I'm only obsessing about a little bit. So three, three issues here. Number one, I really want to stress that slow harms are pervasive problem. And that we need to think about them in terms of environmental harms in terms of the temporality of the threat. That then influences whether or not it's likely that there's going to be collective action. Okay, so that's the first thing is like, not all harms are the same. So we have to think about how many dragons for farmers have to slay for any kind of policy problem you're trying to address. Okay, so this is like the thorniest. I was going to say Harriet's dragon, but dragons don't have hair so earliest, I don't know, to bear. And then the political problems. So it's a political problem issue. So low harms and environmental harms are absolute problems like all urban planning problems. The problem is political. And so we need to understand them as political problems, but the usual suspects don't apply here political parties don't get anywhere near that's because environmental issues are common for resources and they're not. Private foods that can be exchanged. So political. And then math and Congress also you're not that much active there. Instead, what you're seeing is and let's see how this comes up on my slides is something that I'm calling this and let environmental regulation. Okay. Subnational environmental regulation is is is really being pushed. And almost held single handedly by citizen groups. It's not a very interesting bureaucracy that's insulated and has things that come from the European model. That's what we have been led to understand about regulation is like it's supposed to look this way because that's how it looked in Europe or let's have looked in the US. However, many years ago, but in the global South regulatory institutions are being created at the same time as some as as economic development. And you have a completely different trajectory of institutional development. Start there and not start from trying to explain why are models almost like you're why are models like the US. And even though the type of mobilization talking about is rare. And the type of policy shift I'm talking about is not perfect. It's not comprehensive. It's not ideal. And it might sound disappointed like is that all we have and it's like, yes, this is all we have. If we don't have this, we don't have any. And it's important for us to recognize that the laws are fine. There's no problem with the laws. We got all the laws. We have all the laws. We have the Constitution. It's not the institutional change that needs to happen as much as in viewing the pre existing institutions with actual power to act and make you sure that they do their job. And that's what these movements were about. It was about holding public officials accountable for the job they were already supposed to be doing. It's not like the laws really need to change that much. The laws are low. Fine. And that is when the pressure from below and the civil society organizing is really critical. So that is, I think that's a big contribution of the book and just kind of the new stuff that I'm working on. Finally, participation in the city. Who gets to participate? Who is excluded? There are land use conflicts that really arose here. There were a lot of people that were relocated that, you know, people don't want to be relocated. Right. And so they say, well, now you're not living close to contamination anymore. And now you're living somewhere supposedly better, but not everybody necessarily got a voice and location. Question about how do you adjudicate between the rights of environmental movement and the rights of housing. How do communities communicate on the agenda over time is another issue that I could talk more about in the Q and a and finally spill over effect. When we're going to form in one policy arena. Like environment, like housing, like any number of other issues. It's strong. Get relationships get that big collaborations get resources and then move on to other policies. What extent do you need that pre existing. Network building and establish relationships to get anything done. In, in these urban settings where you have a high level of we can sit. And that's a lot of what I've been thought as well. So I'll stop there. Thank you so much. I welcome questions. Are you going to take it or do. Okay, that's a great question. Thank you for that. I think there's a couple of things that I saw that. Wait, one is, um. Being multi pronged at work. So having lots of different parts of government and lots of different. Activities. With new attack. I think that another thing that I heard from activists was, you know, for example, in the bullet. Mayor and he was an ally, but then basically said, if they, if they want to take care of the birds, they need to go to the. The activists who had been working on this for like 30 years and had put their lives on the line and he just told me he's like. He's only got another year. So we don't be here. And we'll just wait him out. If we can't stop him, we'll wait him out. So they sued. And they just waited him out. So I think that. It's important to remember that civil society. This is like my favorite thing civil society matters because elected officials come and go. Over time and so the network. Outside of city government and the external networks of opposition that. Or sometimes you can work actively and sometimes you have to work behind. Yeah, so I'll give you an example. So, um. So within all of the stuff that I'm studying. One example is. That local officials can't just treat the wetlands. They dry up the wetlands. A lot of, but sometimes. But, um, sometimes. Sometimes it is actually now. Every question I think what I was trying to do is try to cast it as something that could apply just to kind of get people. Bridges are important people. Have expertise in a particular job as an NGOs. That they work on, and then they go and work in government with that same expertise and that agency. Right. And they go back and forth. Now, sometimes that can mean collusion and bad, lots of bad things. But sometimes it can, if you're, if you're working for something towards the public good, and actually doing your doing the job of the mission that it is, it can actually help. Reinforce and continue like this is kind of what I was saying earlier is continue the work. So you start the work. And then in the state. And then maybe your, your positions over and you go and you work in an NGO, continue the same type of work because again, these are the same mission that that these are. And actually there's a really great book called water warriors that look at disgruntled officials and looks at how even in authoritarian setting. And the, the, the allyship of public officials who are willing to do the work on the inside and the very quiet, like, behind the scenes way, and sometimes the work is just to like, let the activists do it and not stop them. Right. So there's different forms of allyship sometimes it's proactive, sometimes it's just sort of like letting work happen. But yeah, I think, I think you need both state and society. Great question that no that's a great question. So, in the first part of the theory chapter in the first part of the chapter, I talked about risk, complex risk perception, and how a lot of why so so I don't know if any of you have heard of this book by have your ass. And they basically, they theorize are sociologists and they theorize about environmental suffering and how a lot of why I'm throwing some residents and a lot of time. I think that is very rare actually in the case of I exam and look I talked about like local leaders who have some education, some money and just to themselves were impacted. And started to come in for neighbors. But yeah, I know it's like a survey. And as a survey, I would say the norm is to be so confused. And so, thanks to all of you.