Social Mobilization and Regulatory Politics: How Socio-Environmental Movements Engage with the Environmental Regulation of Pascua Lama

PAUL HASLAM; JULIETA GODFRID

Boston

Congreso; LASA ANUAL CONFERENCE; 2019

Latin American Studies Association

Effective implementation of legislation is essential to generating the legal-institutional feedback loops that provide activists with the traction that is necessary to realize objectives (Silva 2018; Tosun and Workman 2018, 338-9). The bi-national Pascua Lama mining project, located on the Argentine-Chile border, which offers a unique opportunity to comparatively examine these processes since it offers as a single same set of facts (the mining project), and similarly-inspired social mobilization in two different institutional contexts. In Argentina, activists focused efforts on the failure to implement national glacier protection legislation passed in 2010, but had limited potential to influence regulatory agencies located at the provincial level, where political opportunities remained closed. In Chile, reform of the environmental institutions in 2010 created feedback loops that opened new opportunities for activists to seek direct influence over regulatory rulings. This paper examines the factors that contribute to the ability of activists to engage with regulatory agencies, and the consequence of that engagement for the realization of activist policy objectives. In terms of the influences on activist strategy, we consider the role of the political settlement in each regulatory jurisdiction; the institutional capacity and political ability of regulatory agencies to act independently of political power; and the influence of the regulatory example coming from the other country. The paper draws on extensive fieldwork conducted with social-environmental movements and regulatory authorities in San Juan, Buenos Aries, the Huasco Valley, and Santiago.