In cities across the Global South, residents living alongside degraded urban waterways are chronically exposed to chemicals, heavy metals, and pathogens from deteriorating infrastructure, industrial runoff, and deficient sewage systems. Unlike natural disasters, these slow environmental harms are difficult to perceive and to connect to long-term health consequences, making them particularly challenging threats around which to mobilize. Why have some governments taken steps to address them while others have done little or nothing? Veronica Herrera’s Slow Harms and Citizen Action tackles this question through a most-similar-systems comparison of wastewater river pollution in three Latin American capital cities—Buenos Aires, Bogotá, and Lima. Herrera, who in Water and Politics (2017) examined clientelistic control over water provision in Mexican cities, here shifts the inquiry from the politics of distribution to the politics of slow harm recognition—asking what happens when water becomes the medium of harm rather than of provision. The result, grounded in years of fieldwork and nearly 180 interviews, reorients the terms of debate for scholars of comparative environmental politics, urban governance, and contentious politics.
The book’s analytical framework rests on a distinction between bonding mobilization—local, place-based organizing by affected communities—and bridging mobilization—the aggregating work of resourced external actors such as NGOs, universities, and state allies who amplify resident concerns and push for policy change. Herrera argues that bonding alone is insufficient: it must converge with bridging to produce significant government action, measured along three dimensions (institutional change, financial commitment, and regulatory capacity). Two enabling conditions increase the likelihood of that convergence: prior experience with human rights movements and center-left presidential administrations. Engaging critically with Rob Nixon’s (Reference Nixon2011) concept of “slow violence,” Herrera proposes a typology classifying environmental harms by temporal proximity (imminent to gradual) and geographic distribution (concentrated to dispersed). The most analytically central category—slow targeted harms—combines long temporal duration with geographic concentration on marginalized populations in informal settlements, making mobilization doubly difficult: harms are hard to pinpoint, and those affected possess the least political power.
The three cases illustrate a sharp divergence. In Buenos Aires, high and diverse bonding mobilization along the Matanza Riachuelo—organized around sanitation, landfill opposition, and wetland conservation—converged with bridging actors whose collaborative histories were forged within post-dictatorship human rights networks. The emblematic outcome is the landmark 2008 Supreme Court ruling (Mendoza), which mandated basin remediation and created ACUMAR, a new tripartite regulatory authority: an “expansive policy shift” enabled by Kirchnerist center-left administrations and Argentina’s comparatively low dependence on mineral extraction. Bogotá presents a counterintuitive paradox: despite possessing one of the region’s most advanced constitutional environmental frameworks—the 1991 “ecological” constitution, acciones populares—bridging remained fragmented. NGOs relied on a conservation frame with less political resonance and never reframed river pollution as a human rights violation; decades of armed conflict had decimated the human rights movement, foreclosing the cross-sectoral coalitions that proved decisive in Argentina. The result is a “stagnated policy shift” that disrupts any straightforward institutional explanation. Lima stands at the opposite pole: an economy where extractives account for 67% of exports, environmental institutions created to satisfy trade requirements rather than regulatory ambition, and an armed conflict legacy that associated civil society organizing with terrorism. These conditions left the NGO sector dependent on government consultancy contracts and reluctant to confront the extractive sector, the Supreme Court aligned with mining interests, and the Ombudsman’s Office consumed by the fast targeted harms of mining conflicts rather than the slow contamination of the city’s drinking-water source. The result is an “uninitiated policy shift” in which the advocacy networks that proved decisive in Argentina and Colombia never formed.
Herrera’s framework, precisely because of its analytical power, opens several lines of inquiry that its empirical richness makes it rewarding to pursue. The Peruvian case already suggests that the variables the framework treats as independent may be historically produced in ways the comparative architecture has yet to fully explore. The comments that follow concentrate on the Argentine case, where the book’s theoretical framework opens particularly productive questions at the intersection of empirical specification and conceptual refinement.
A first line of inquiry concerns the genealogy of Argentina’s contentious repertoire. Herrera locates the enabling condition in the post-dictatorship human rights movement, but the barrios populares at the book’s center—La Matanza, Esteban Echeverría, Avellaneda—were shaped by a parallel tradition of territorial contention: the asentamientos of the 1980s and the piquetero movement of the 1990s, through which residents of the conurbano bonaerense learned to block roads, occupy land, and negotiate directly with the state over the terms of territorial belonging (Vommaro Reference Vommaro2014; Cravino and Vommaro Reference Cravino and Vommaro2018; Vommaro Reference Vommaro2017). Rossi’s analysis of the piquetero movement (2017) shows how the “stock of legacies” deposited by those cycles of contention became available resources for subsequent mobilizations. The environmental claims along the Matanza Riachuelo emerged from communities that had spent decades fighting for land, services, and survival. Disaggregating those two genealogies would reveal whether the enabling conditions for bonding mobilization are more path-dependent, and potentially less transferable, than the framework currently assumes.
A second avenue concerns the causal mechanism through which bridging produces policy change. In Argentina, what moved the Matanza Riachuelo from decades of inertia to the Mendoza ruling was not bridging in the abstract but a specific pathway: strategic litigation, judicial receptivity, and a court willing to issue a structural remedy. Recognizing this as a form of legal mobilization (Epp Reference Epp1998; McCann Reference McCann1994) would sharpen the framework’s comparative edge. It would also make it possible to specify whether bridging operates by reframing slow environmental harm as a rights violation, by producing legally legible forms of causation for diffuse and temporally extended damage, or by sustaining organizational pressure across electoral cycles. Engaging more explicitly with this legal-institutional specificity would enrich Herrera’s causal model both empirically and theoretically, and open a frontier for comparative research in contexts where judicial receptivity cannot be assumed.
A third question bears on scalar architecture. The bonding mobilization score for Argentina in Table 1.3 is coded uniformly “High,” yet Chapter 3 reveals communities making claims that differ sharply in targets, languages of grievance, and institutional interlocutors. This points to a dimension of the argument that could be further specified: how dispersed local demands were translated, aggregated, and scaled up into a unified national claim. This is not a secondary empirical detail but precisely the point at which bridging becomes politically consequential. Clarifying this process would also help address a conceptual issue built into scalar analysis itself: what is lost, transformed, or rendered less visible when qualitatively different forms of marginalization are aggregated into a common scale of mobilization. Different forms of marginalization do not simply vary by degree; they shape the kinds of claims that can be joined together, the institutional arenas in which they become legible, and the scales at which they can be politically effective.
That question connects to a final reflection on the book’s engagement with the North American environmental justice tradition. The environmental justice framework’s spatial logic—racial residential segregation as the primary mechanism distributing harm—does not travel unmodified to Herrera’s cases. Along the Matanza Riachuelo, marginalization is produced through labor precarity, informality, and migrant origin; along the Rímac, through centuries of colonial extraction and the subordination of indigenous territorial rights—configurations that Quijano’s coloniality of power and Segato’s colonial matrix illuminate more directly (Quijano, 2000; Segato Reference Segato2010). The axes along which marginalization is produced shape the languages of grievance, the institutional interlocutors, and ultimately the coalitional forms available to affected communities. Herrera’s empirical material already gestures toward these distinctions; a more explicit engagement with how the constitution of marginalization varies would bring the book into even richer dialogue with Latin American political ecology.
Slow Harms and Citizen Action accomplishes something rare: it shifts the terms of the conversation. Perhaps its most enduring contribution is the reframing of civil society environmental advocacy not as a complement to state regulation but as its functional substitute—what Herrera calls “citizen-led environmental regulation,” understood not as a second-best arrangement but as the dominant form of environmental governance across much of the Global South. For scholars of comparative environmental politics, Herreraʼs book offers a framework that makes slow harms analytically visible; for urban scholars, it theorizes cities as the sites where bridging becomes structurally possible; for students of contentious politics, it recovers forms of agency that existing frameworks systematically miss; and for Latin Americanists, it provides a model of rigorous, fieldwork-driven comparative research that sets a new standard. It deserves a wide readership — and the sustained engagement its arguments will undoubtedly provoke.
