ABSTRACT
The rise and fall of Environmental Impact Assessments (EIAs) reflects faith followed by disillusionment with science-led, technocratic policies, a shift characteristic of the move from the late 20th to the early 21st century. This chapter charts this trajectory and illustrates with an analysis of over 20 years of EIAs from Quintero-Puchuncaví, a polluted industrial hub on Chile’s central coast, how EIAs have failed to respond to demands for more stringent, fair, and democratic environmental protections. EIAs must be reimagined to remain relevant and effective in a world facing environmental turmoil and exhaustion. EIAs have worked by erasing, through baseline studies, the memory of pollution and normalising increasingly polluted environments, and by focusing attention to the future through predictions of impacts. Care, trust, and legitimacy must be brought into EIAs, along with new questions focused on recognising the life forms brought into being by recurrent rounds of industrial development.
