Science and Environment in Chile: The Politics of Expert Advice in a Neoliberal Democracy by Javiera Barandiarán (review)

This timely and important study uses four environmental conflicts and their respective environmental impact assessment (EIA) processes to examine the politics of expertise, science, and environmental protection in neoliberal Chile. Barandiarán argues that Chile’s “umpire state,” unlike an “empire” state with the power and resources to “‘make the world it wants to govern’” (James Scott, Seeing Like a State), is “rooted in the belief that markets aggregate and process information better than governments, which cannot possibly know everything necessary to manage the economy” (6). This umpire state model, combined with the subsidiary principle established in Chile’s constitution—the state may do only what the law expressly permits, and private entities may do all that which is not expressly prohibited by law—has created a situation in which who does science, what counts as science, and how science should be used in policy-making are wholly unresolved and contested questions.

The consequences of the market-driven umpire state are manifold, from anemic public funding for science, a lack of agreed-upon standards for scientific research, and unclear boundaries between scientists and industry consultants. Barandiarán finds that Chileans suspect both state- and industry-sponsored science of being tainted by financial and political conflicts of interest, even as the primacy of market ideology has led to the belief that “the amount of funding drives legitimacy, so that good science is expensive science” (123). The devaluation of science and lack of consensus on scientific standards, combined with layers of distrust and tension between scientists, consultants, government, and the general public, have marginalized science and scientists from policy-making, development debates, and responses to environmental crisis.

Barandiarán uses four case studies and their respective EIA processes to illustrate the implications of Chile’s neoliberal system for science, governance, and environmental protection: salmon farming, the Celco Arauco mill, the Pascua Lama mining project, and the HidroAysén hydroelectric dam initiative. Each represents a major environmental flashpoint in an important industrial sector that generated substantial public debate, mobilization, and dynamics of conflict and accommodation among the actors involved. These were environmental conflicts of national import, and this book offers a fine-grained analysis of each, based on archival research and an impressive number of interviews (approximately 100). Each case study examines knowledge production processes and conflicts over the value of science, with different outcomes that foreground the difficulties of establishing scientific legitimacy in Chile’s neoliberal democracy.