Bargaining the dark side? Fragmented extractivist governance under hybrid political arrangements in the Chilean copper and lithium industries

Abstract

This article examines how bargaining power is exercised by an extractivist state across political arrangements and spatial scales within global extractive production networks. Focusing on Chile’s copper and lithium sectors, it introduces the concept of fragmented extractivist governance: a mode through which the state selectively deploys neoliberal, rentier, and developmentalist logics to shape who benefits from, and who bears the costs of, resource-based exploitation. The article contributes empirically by analysing Chile’s hybrid governance dynamics, and conceptually by theorizing multiscalar state strategies that (re)produce territorial inequalities, challenging conventional views of state cohesion in extractive economies.