Yves SUREL - Professor
David GARIBAY - Professor (université d'Auvergne)
Patrick LE GALES - Director of Research at CNRS
Olivier DABENE - Professor (Sciences Po)
Natacha GALLY - Associate Professor (université Paris 2 Panthéon-Assas)
Launched as part of the Initiative for the Integration of Regional Infrastructure in South America IIRSA), the construction of a bi-oceanic corridor intends to link the Atlantic with the Pacific hrough the Amazon river. This project finds its roots in the economic assessment that explains under-development by the existence of a gap in terms of infrastructure. A unified program of land lanning proposed by IIRSA was conceived in order to bridge this gap. The full implementation of his program would reduce trade barriers and integrate marginalized territories to the productive conomy. However, the implementation of the Amazonian axis raises many environmental and ocial issues that have sparked a critical discourse regarding the legitimacy of the project as well as pposition movements whose mobilization led, in some cases, to the formation of local conflicts. his study considers the Amazon as a laboratory for the study of a confrontation between two ompeting paradigms: the conquest of the frontier as a driver of economic growth and the reservation of the lung of the Earth. Based on data collected on three of the IIRSA's Amazonian rojects (in Colombia, Ecuador and Peru), this study uses a comparative approach on different evels (international, national and local) in order to conduct a cross-reflection on multi-level overnance (regional integration, local governance) and to examine power relations between two ntagonist development models.