!Patagonia Sin Represas! Hydropower Development and the Competing Spheres of Power in Argentine and Chilean Patagonia

Bell, Joseph Mac Weld (2017) !Patagonia Sin Represas! Hydropower Development and the Competing Spheres of Power in Argentine and Chilean Patagonia. Undergraduate thesis, under the direction of Marcos Mendoza from Sociology and Anthropology, The University of Mississippi.

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Abstract

The central question of this research thesis is: How have public-private partnerships to develop hydropower been shaped by competing forces in corporate, state, and civil society and how have these forces impacted the HidroAysén and the Represas Patagonias projects in Chile and Argentina, respectively? This thesis focuses on the competing discourses of the corporate, state, and civil society, along with their relative strengths, weaknesses, degrees of risk taking and risk sharing, and the level of public and private investment. As of December 2017, the HidroAysén project in Chilean Patagonia has been indefinitely halted, but on the other side of the border the Represas Patagonia project in Argentine Patagonia was recently approved. In this tale of two hydroelectric dams in the Southern Cone region of South America, I argue that there are two primary factors which have impacted and determined the outcomes of each project: 1) the configuration of the public-private partnership that is involved in each project and 2) the strength and scale of civil society and opposition movements. The private-public balance of corporate and state investment confronted by a well developed and transnational opposition movement created a set of factors which stymied the progress of the HidroAysén project; whereas, the public-private balance of corporate and state investment faced by a relatively weak and a predominantly regional and national opposition movement resulted in the approval of the Represas Patagonia project.

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