Nuestra casa comienza en Chacao: ecoautoridades, burocracia y transición energética en torno a una carretera eléctrica en Chiloé, Chile

Abstract

Latin America has experienced an increase in environmental conflicts related to the development of non-conventional renewable energy sources. The result of militant research, this article analyzes the political mobilization of a group of people on Chiloé’s largest island in response to the environmental evaluation process of a transmission line in 2020. My interlocutors' points of disagreement with the project lie, on the one hand, in the realization of citizen participation processes under adverse sanitary conditions in the context of the pandemic. On the other hand, they are related to previous experiences with the impacts of electricity-related infrastructure in other parts of Chiloé. I describe the opposing notions of anthropocenic ecoauthority pushed by both my interlocutors and state institutions. While the state institutions took a productivist perspective, focusing on the urgency of economic reactivation to address the impacts of the pandemic and the need to accelerate the construction of transmission infrastructure for decarbonization, my interlocutors' communication campaign argued for the politicization of energy and its broader impacts on the territory. Both perspectives are situated within the long history of the Chiloé archipelago as an internal frontier in relation to Chile.