ABSTRACT
The creation of the Environmental Ministry and Environmental Courts at the beginning of the 2010s in Chile has sometimes been interpreted as an important policy change. However, we argue it is rather a marginal modification that, despite advancing in certain aspects, does not change the policy regime. In this chapter, we show that environmental institutions have neither slowed down nor accelerated the dynamics of the commodity boom, as changes in the environmental subsystem are nested in a largely unchanged extractive regime. Our narrative of the institutional path of environmental institutions in Chile is based on a large literature review about Chilean environmental policy since the 1990s, several case studies about specific laws or conflicts, and nine interviews with policymakers, private sector officials, environmentalists and academic experts. Our analysis allows us to go beyond the impression of strong environmental protection that high-profile cases such as Hidroaysen, Barrancones or Dominga might create, to consider the big picture of weak environmental institutions in both legal attributes and enforcement. Following our theoretical framework, changes in play in the environmental subsystem affect only marginally the larger game of the extractive regime.
