Making the Frontier: Contested Development on the Coast of Patagonia

Abstract

This project uses critical development theory to examine relationships between rural residents pursuing multiple livelihoods in remote spaces, globalized industries that dominate these sparsely-populated edges of the global economy, and state agents tasked with serving both groups in Chile’s Aysén Region. Since the 1980s, southern Chile has emerged as an aquaculture frontier. But state officials, aquaculture operators, and rural residents enact the frontier differently based on their distinct social projects. Following Chile’s return to democracy in 1990, state officials introduced new social programs and conservation initiatives. They provided services, subsidies, and public employment which rural residents incorporated into their longstanding pursuit of multiple livelihoods. This allowed for the maintenance of a delicate status quo. Residents benefitted from these programs while continuing semi-subsistence activities and aquaculture grew exponentially, diversifying Chile’s export sector and fueling the national economy without employing rural residents. A series of harmful algal blooms (HABs), however, have upset this status quo. These dynamic phenomena exhibit a toxic vitality and the distributed causality behind them makes them difficult to predict even as they grow more severe. Evidence suggests that HABs, which were once unheard of in southern Chile, have worsened due to aquaculture operations and rising temperatures in the southern Pacific. Whatever their causes, they have destabilized the region: residents of Aysén now regularly protest state inaction in the face of threats to their livelihoods and the degradation of their once pristine coastline. Whereas before both state officials and rural residents saw the sustained occupation and development of the coast as their primary goal, it has become clear that the development favored by state officials—one that privileges multinational corporations over rural workers and growth over sustainability—is incompatible with the goals of residents. Thus, HABs are more than symptoms of global climate change and coastal contamination; they inspire the contestation, negotiation, and reorganization of Chile’s development project. Through strikes, blockades, and ship seizures, rural residents pressure state officials to distribute public funds as compensation for their lost livelihoods and the contamination of their landscape, effectively linking the moral and political economies in defense of their communities.Doctor of Philosoph