“Subsidizing the State:” The political ecology and legal geography of social movements in Chilean water governance

Abstract

Water conflicts are increasingly spilling into the streets in Chile, as communities struggle to make their voices heard in formal decision-making forums. However, these growing social movements are doing much more than just marching. Combining insights from political ecology and legal geography, this article approaches water governance as a complex field of struggle in which social movement resistance plays a crucial role. In the case of the Alto Maipo hydropower conflict in central Chile, social movement actors have taken on a wide range of roles that they feel should correspond to the state: monitoring the hydropower company, documenting citizen concerns, and demanding accountability from government agencies. Attention to the legal dimensions of this struggle reveals how this work of “subsidizing the state” was built into the new institutional order ushered in during the Pinochet dictatorship, and how the capacity of social movement actors to mold this space to their advantage has been restricted by the legal framework for water governance. While there has been considerable attention to the role of resistance from water user associations in reshaping neoliberal water reforms in other parts of Latin America, the Chilean case highlights the need to also consider social movement actors from outside of the conventional water sector who struggle to defend in-stream uses not recognized under the law. Faced with limited legal recourse in the courts and little legitimacy in decision-making forums, Chilean activists have pursued alternative strategies that have expanded the scope of their resistance and built broader political pressure for change.