Citizenship and the Politics of Nature: The Case of Chile's Alto Bío Bío

Abstract

To date, most treatments of ecological citizenship have been concerned with identifying the ways in which particular approaches to citizenship might provide political tools for working toward more sustainable futures. The present analysis builds on an alternate perspective, which instead treats nature and citizenship as dynamic interconnected sites of power relations. While not dismissive of the existing literature, this approach is partly informed by a concern for promoting a more democratic politics of nature, rather than simply “greener” practices of citizenship. Furthermore, it calls for a more empirically-based analysis of the way in which nature is politicized by different social actors. By way of putting this perspective into practice, the essay examines the case of a conflict over hydroelectric development on the Bío Bío River, in southern Chile, seeking to document the way that nature is constructed vis-à-vis the country's dominant citizenship regime, and also to identify the insurgent voices of alternate ecological citizenships. This is achieved by comparing the discourses of nature and citizenship employed by various actors in the conflict, including proponents of the dams, environmentalists, and the Pehuenche indigenous people, whose lands were at the centre of the struggle. While environmentalists and the Pehuenche can be seen to have advanced significant challenges to the market-based citizenship of Chile's post-dictatorship liberal democracy, the failure of the resistance ultimately led to a re-consolidation of the central ideological components of the existing eco-political order.

Notes

¹ A detailed elaboration of the foregoing arguments, along with a more thorough analysis of existing literature on the topic of ecological citizenship, is available in Latta (2007).

² I am significantly indebted to John Meyer (2001) for this term. With somewhat similar intent he deploys the term “political nature”.

³ Elsewhere (Latta, 2006), I explore some of these practices of normalization in the case of the Alto Bío Bío. In particular, the pressure exerted upon the Pehuenche by their increasing insertion into the cash economy facilitates their recruitment into “marketized” citizenship through a diverse range of development projects aimed at cultivating an entrepreneurial rationality.

⁴ All translations from the original Spanish are those of the author.

⁵ It is highly ironic that Ralco supporters should portray the process leading to the approval of Ralco as one of objective evaluation, since bureaucratic decision-making procedures were circumvented on several occasions due to pressure from interests within the ruling Concertación government (Moraga, 2001). Nevertheless, their confidence in appealing to the validity of EIA as a decision-making mechanism speaks to a broad acceptance that this kind of technical/scientific approach is the appropriate means for solving value conflicts.

⁶ For a summary of the major tenets of ecological modernization theory, as well as some of the debates in the literature, see Mol and Spaargaren (2000).

⁷ While a majority of the Pehuenche originally expressed opposition to Ralco, by 1998 Endesa had been successful in convincing most of the affected that they had no option but to accept the relocation package being offered by the company, leaving some seven families to resist alone for another five years.

⁸ It is difficult to translate the exact sense of the terms “arreglo de platas”, which literally means an arrangement or solution of money. The following comes closest: “Buyout solves decade long conflict, RALCO: $800 THOUSAND [pesos] TO PEHUENCHES”.