Eco-eco Seminar: "Re-thinking oil or doing-as-usual" by Lucia Gallardo

Eco-eco Seminar: "Re-thinking oil or doing-as-usual"

Lucia Gallardo Fierro, ICTA PhD candidate. Her presentation is based on empirical research results around the Yasuní-ITT Initiative. 

Date: Wednesday, 7 October 2015

Time: 14.00 pm- 15.30 pm

Location: Room Z/023 ICTA-UAB

When president of Ecuador, Rafael Correa cancelled the Yasuní-ITT Initiative on August 2013, he said that ‘the Initiative was ahead of its time and could not be understood’. Why did the Initiative fail? And how did the different social actors understand a compensation for non-production of oil?  Lucia Gallardo argues that the Initiative was not a result of a long-term social pact. It was institutionalised as a “conflicted- solution” of a broader conflict: the dependency of our economy on oil production and the need to overcome it. Through a chronological analysis, she organises the decisional process of the Yasuní-ITT Initiative in five steps: “The Dispute”, “The Inside and Outside’, “The Fallacy”; “The Link” and “The Breakdown”. This chronology incorporates both the relevant elements of the case study, as well as the external decisions that influence its cancelation. The conceptual turns, but especially the argumentative fallacies of the Initiative, show the (de) politicisation of the conservation debate, where the dichotomy ‘life or petroleum’ did not help to build the link between the economic transformation demands and the post-oil economy needs. The sources used for this chronological analysis are: A review of official documents; an analysis of (at least 1.000) press releases between 2007-2014, the twenty President’s Correa speeches, the 40 ‘Enlaces Ciudadanos’, the data about the Yasuní and the (40) semi-structured interviews.



Lucía Gallardo Fierro is an ICTA PhD candidate since 2012. Her presentation is called Re-thinking oil or doing-as-usual. It is based on the provisional results of her thesis about the ‘Yasuní-ITT Initiative’.  During the last 20 years, Lucía has been working on environmental issues. As an activist (1997-2004) she follows the issues related to the protection of the traditional indigenous knowledge, the bio-piracy activities and issues of food sovereignty. She also has participated officially and as an activist on international negotiations about Access to Genetic Resources and about Traditional Knowledge and Climate Change. She has experience as an environmental advisor for different ministries in Ecuador. She led the formulation of the National Policy for Protection of the Tagaeri and Taromenane people (2007) and she was part of the technical group who promoted the Yasuní-ITT Initiative to the government (2007-2009).