Multilevel business power in environmental politics: the avocado boom and water scarcity in Chile

ABSTRACT

The production and export of avocados in Chile have experienced explosive growth since the 1990s, severely threatening local communities’ human right to water. Despite contentious activities and protest, there has been scant reaction from public authorities and policy continues to strongly support avocado exports. We explain this by analyzing the role that business plays in water politics and the different means it has to counter the search for political influence by aggrieved communities. We argue that the outcome is a product of the multilevel deployment of business power. Based on quantitative and qualitative data, we use process tracing methods to unveil business power mechanisms at the local, national and international levels and their connections. We contribute to the cross-fertilization of business power analyses in comparative political economy and environmental politics, and to the understanding of the under-researched multilevel dynamics of business power and the related politics of scale shift.

KEYWORDS:

• Business power
• water politics
• multilevel analysis
• scale shift
• Chile

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank Paola Bolados, Lucas Christel, Belén Fernández Milmanda, Justine Fontaine, Kathy Hochstetler, Pierre-Louis Mayaux, Ingrid Wehr, the reviewers and the editor from Environmental Politics for their insightful comments and contributions at different stages of this article. The usual caveats apply. The authors are also thankful for the financial support received from the Center for Social Conflict and Cohesion Studies (COES) under Grant CONICYT/FONDAP/15130009, the Center for Climate and Resilience Research (CR2) under Grant ANID/FONDAP/15110009 and the Observatory of Socioeconomic Transformations under Grant ANID/PCI/MAX PLANCK INSTITUTE FOR THE STUDY OF SOCIETIES/MPG190012.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. The subnational administrative system in Chile distinguishes between regions, provinces and municipalities, the latter being the smallest unit. Petorca is the name of a province as well as a municipality within that province. Unless otherwise stated, when naming Petorca we refer to the province.

2. Data from Biblioteca del Congreso, Estadísticas Territoriales, https://www.bcn.cl/siit/estadisticasterritoriales.

3. Data from the Atlas of Economic Complexity, http://atlas.cid.harvard.edu.

4. Data from Catastro Fruticola V Region years 2008 and 2017, ODEPA-Ciren, Ministry of Agriculture, Chile.

5. The following macroeconomic data come from the Central Bank of Chile. Data on exports come from the WITS database, SITC classification.

6. A milder reform in the early 2000s introduced fines for non-use of water rights.

7. Data from Biblioteca del Congreso, Estadísticas Territoriales, https://www.bcn.cl/siit/estadisticasterritoriales.

8. Ibid.

9. Relatives of other prominent politically connected families (such as the Frei and Alvear families) have also been associated with investments in avocado plantations in Petorca (Budds 2004).

10. Data available at: https://www.servel.cl/ingresos-y-gastos-de-candidatos/.

11. Our calculations based on data from Bolados et al. (2018). We deflated the reported amounts and converted to constant US$. Data came from World Bank WDI database (GDP deflator 2018) and the Chilean Central Bank (2018 average exchange rate).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Agencia Nacional de Investigación y Desarrollo (ANID) [ANID/PCI/MAX PLANCK INSTITUTE FOR THE STUDY OF SOCIETIES/MPG190012]; Center for Climate and Resilience Research CR2 [ANID/FONDAP/15110009]; Center for Social Conflict and Cohesion Studies (COES) [ANID/FONDAP/15130009].