Lying at the foothills of several active volcanoes, the colonial-era town of Antigua is a fitting meeting point for civil society groups gathering in Guatemala from across Central America to prepare for one of the most consequential United Nations climate change conferences in a decade.
States attending Cop30 in Brazil in November will set the climate change roadmap for the next 10 years, as the world moves closer to catastrophic levels of warming.
Against a backdrop of international aid cuts and rising authoritarianism, the Vulnerable Central America Forum has drawn delegations of NGOs from some of the most climate vulnerable countries in the world: Guatemala, Costa Rica, Honduras, El Salvador and the Dominican Republic.
The conference was organised by the Guatemalan NGO ASEDE, which focuses on community empowerment and is a local partner of Irish NGO Christian Aid.
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“The system is collapsing,” says Enrique Garcia Hidalgo, the Latin American representative for the Network for Empowered Aid Response, speaking at a panel discussion.
“Recent reports show that around one-third of international NGOs and aid organisations are downsizing, merging, or shutting down,” he says. “But beyond losing international aid, our governments are now actively choking civil society.”
Four of seven Central American countries are ranked at the bottom half of the Global State of Democracy Initiative. The index measures civil liberties in 154 states, with Nicaragua ranking 143rd, El Salvador 94th, Honduras 91st, and Guatemala 83rd.
In Nicaragua, under the repressive dictatorship of Daniel Ortega, “executive interference and criminalisation have reached such levels that they have triggered political displacement of people”, says Juan Pablo Oliva, a consultant specialising in disaster risk management and climate change.
In El Salvador president Nayib Bukele has introduced controversial measures focused on mass incarceration, which are perceived to have reduced gang crime and improved order and security. “However, in other areas – such as limits on government power and criminal and civil justice – there has been a noticeable decline,” says Oliva.
Under legislation passed by El Salvador’s legislative assembly in May, any foreign funding of civil society groups – which Bukele largely views as antigovernment – will be taxed at 30 per cent.
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Meanwhile, environmental activists in Honduras continue to face lethal risks. In Guatemala there is “a strong trend of criminalisation and misuse of the judicial system, especially against human rights defenders and environmental activists”, says Oliva.
“Even in Costa Rica, considered a full democracy, a [democratic] decline has been observed over time in several governance indicators,” Oliva says.
“This is worrying, as it goes against the progress needed to improve internal governance, and could negatively impact the country in the future.”
“When we see patterns of global democratic backsliding similarl to what we’re experiencing throughout the Americas that’s a problem, because we also see a weakening in international co-operative institutions like Cop,” says Dr Shauna Gillooly, an assistant professor of international relations and security at the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile.
“One of the biggest weaknesses of these global governance institutions is the fact that compliance is dependent on how far states are willing to go; how much states are willing to participate in institutions like Cop, which assume that states have total control of their national territory and their national resources, and in some places in South and Central America, quite frankly, that’s just not the case,” says Gillooly.
“There are non-state armed groups; there are criminal structures and cartels that are actually in charge of territory in these areas and the natural resources that go along with them.”
The role of NGOs at Cop meetings is largely limited to observing and lobbying state delegations. Gillooly says institutions like Cop should consider how civil society groups could be granted voting power, which has long been restricted to state entities.
“It’s important to reimagine what international co-operative institutions, especially around issues like climate change, might look like in a context of global democratic backsliding and that means being open to imagination and what other types of actors are also important at the local and international levels,” she says.
“Now, I understand that creating a space like this could be really complicated,” says Gillooly, “because who do you decide you’re going to include? How do you decide who you’re going to include? Who decides who is included?
“There is quite a lot of bureaucratic space between a proposal like that and actually seeing it enacted,” she says. “But I think if Cop is serious about giving civil society organisations this type of space, then they’re going to have to change something.”
– This reporting was supported by the Simon Cumbers Media Fund
