Does the rise of populism in Costa Rica mean the end to the country’s green credentials? Perhaps, but it doesn’t have to be that way. In a previous article by one of us on the ancient roots of polarization, we saw that Costa Rica began to face many new challenges after crossing the “mega-threshold” of a million citizens around 1960.
Far-sighted leaders initially managed the challenges this posed for unity and cooperation in the 60s and 70s by creating a welfare state that was the envy of the region. But the gains from this in terms of societal cohesion and trust in the leadership had to be balanced against escalating national debt. Two global oil shocks in the 70s brought the dangers of this sharply into focus. And this is also how Costa Rica’s environmental journey began.
Up to this point, the forest had been widely seen as an expensive luxury or even as a barrier to development. The land on which it grew could only be used by cutting down the trees. But a number of forward-thinking entrepreneurs began to recognize the potential to monetize the forest as a tourist attraction and as an important provider of environmental services like carbon offsets, water provision, and biodiversity.
Governments soon cottoned on as well and began to develop highly effective initiatives to restore the forest and pioneer forms of payment for environmental services that would eventually spread to other countries all around the world. From the 1980s, forest cover went from a low of around 20% to a high of more than 60% today. It worked because going green was commercially attractive, but the genius of this approach was that it also greatly strengthened Costa Rica’s national identity as a country that cares for its biodiversity.
One of the great lessons of the past forty years has been the power of positive incentives to replace perverse incentives in the management of global goods. Positive incentives and strong environmental institutions have been at the core of successful policies and conservation actions worldwide. Most of today’s tropical deforestation is caused by misguided government policies and incentives. Subsidies to the extractive and agriculture sector are key drivers of biodiversity loss and climate change everywhere.
Getting away from perverse incentives associated with poorly designed subsidies, taxes, weak institutions, no credits or irregular rights systems is a global aspiration as expressed in the Target 18 Global Biodiversity Framework published by the Convention on Biological Diversity. This Global Framework currently aims to transition from nature negative scenarios (where every year we have fewer plants and animals) to nature positive outcomes by 2030 (where we steadily increase biodiversity year on year).
Costa Rica overcame the traditional set of perverse incentives enabling the country to achieve more effective forest conservation by using direct payments to forest owners for the provision of environmental services, in particular services associated with carbon sequestration, water provision and biodiversity conservation.
At the same time, Costa Rica developed a coherent institutional framework for management of the environment by establishing a single Ministry responsible for all natural resources, removable or not, thereby avoiding unnecessary conflict and competition between the Ministry of the Environment and the Ministries of Energy, Mining, Water, and Agriculture.
Going from perverse to positive incentives, having strong institutions implementing the environmental rule of law, while also establishing greater policy coherence in relation to central government plans and budgets, all turned out to be key elements in the restoration of Costa Rica’s forest cover. These achievements also allowed Costa Rica to become an influential voice on the international stage.
The future of environmentalism and conservation efforts in Costa Rica depends not only on transitioning from perverse to positive incentives but also the political climate in which policies are generated and implemented. Over the past 40 years governments in Costa Rica have been formed by a range of parties from centre right to centre left. During much of this period, the country was governed by two parties; Liberacion Nacional (centre left) and Unidad Social Cristiana (centre right).
These two main parties achieved impressive results in terms of environmental policy and institutional development. Then a third party emerged in the 2010’s as a spinoff from the main two Parties. In contrast with other countries in the region, when the government changed in Costa Rica the new administration retained the commitments of its predecessors to environmental policies despite political rivalries and disagreements on many other issues. Today, however, a populist government that won the last two elections without having formed a political party, poses a new threat to Costa Rica’s environmental record.
In addition to material incentives, new research at Oxford’s Centre for the Study of Social Cohesion (CSSC) suggests that there are at least three antidotes to polarization that could help to safeguard the future of environmentalism in Costa Rica. One antidote lies in the country’s vision of the past. Experiments at the CSSC have shown that recognizing a group’s shared experiences and common ancestry can create powerful feelings of psychological kinship capable of motivating action on environmental issues.
To counter populist and evangelical threats to the environment will require strong institutions, political stability and environmentally conscious citizens. But to accomplish those things also requires new ways of restoring the forms of cohesion that allowed Costa Rica to cross the mega-society threshold in the 1960s. Some of the roots of that cohesion are still present: a genuine love of nature, a reverence for the country’s history and its founding figures, a sense of national pride in egalitarian values.
A second antidote could be to develop new and more coherent vision for the future – one that is unifying, inclusive, and disconnected from the culture wars that have been tearing many of the world’s democracies apart. Environmentalism in Costa Rica is at risk of becoming too closely associated with elite ideologies and institutions but what if it could be recast in terms that feel more relevant and meaningful to everyone? Research at the CSSC has shown that the funeral of Pope Francis created powerful forms of cohesion that bound mourners to each other and motivated donations to environmental causes.
Pope Leo is now also actively championing stewardship of the environment as a core theme of spiritual significance for Costa Ricans, cutting across divisions of class and ethnicity. Even though people may associate conservation with elite groups and schools of thought, experience has shown that ecotourism is a very important source of jobs and income at all levels of society. In rural areas, where the people may not strongly identify with elite conservation groups, nature-based tourism is still the most important source of jobs.
And finally, building and spreading visions of Costa Rica’s past and of its future will require new kinds of centrist leaders, with the charisma and powers of persuasion to compete successfully against divisive populists in public debates. Barrier-crossing leaders can lift us all out of polarizing ways of thinking and behaving. Such leaders can inspire with courage and vision and take arguments onto new moral grounds. Where are such leaders to be found in Costa Rica? Who will build on the conservation legacy of the past fifty years? At present, many Costa Ricans are unaware of how that legacy was created and how to preserve it. The first step in creating young leaders with a positive vision for the future, may be to educate them about their own past.
By Carlos Manuel Rodriguez (Executive Director, OSA Conservation, Costa Rica) and Harvey Whitehouse (Professor of Social Anthropology, University of Oxford)
