Participatory Innovations and Environmental Politics: Challenges and Pathways Towards Substantial Citizen Inclusion in Decision-Making on Dams in Brazil and Chile

Latin America is not only a region characterized by severe environmental conflict and contention over the use of territory and natural resources, the subcontinent also provides a remarkable range of experiments in terms of democratic innovations that could foster citizen participation in decision-making on these issues. Our contribution analyses citizen entry into decision-making about environmental politics in Latin America – given through three particular types of democratic innovations, participatory planning, regional councils and public consultations. Despite such formal inclusion of local communities, environmental movements have not always found sufficient space in the institutional arena to block or renegotiate large infrastructure or resource exploitation projects which bring about controversial social and environmental impacts. We aim to answer the following research question: How can participatory formats foster substantial citizen participation in such a contested policy field? We systematize both challenges for substantial citizen participation and scrutinize conditions and mechanisms for overcoming them. Conceptually, the analysis rests on coalition and resource mobilization theory. More specifically, we analyse if new participatory formats yield incentives for citizens to mobilize and articulate their interests through institutional venues (e.g., via consultations), if they chose to use other rather contentious strategies (like protests), or how both strategies run in parallel. The latter can either ensure that participatory innovations are not bypassed by public decision-makers in the first place or force them to implement the results of realized participatory formats, because they often remain rather consultative than binding. In fact, interest mobilization is often done through alliance of local communities, NGOs, farmers, indigenous peoples, students and professionals with the local governments and municipal administrative actors. An important issue we explore are bargaining and resource exchange processes: Resistance to large infrastructure projects encompasses struggles for environmental justice, often in opposition to growth-oriented profits and capital accumulation. We presume that besides legitimacy and human rights protection claims, technical expertise will constitute a crucial resource that opponents to large-scale projects need to mobilize. Often, public decision-makers play a “no alternative game”, for instance, insisting that dams were the only solution to overcome the energy challenges of a country. Thus, a subordinate research question we seek to answer is: How do opposing movements mobilize against such arguments and use technical expertise that may contain very different views of development and knowledge about the environment? Empirically, we draw on a cross-case comparison of decision-making processes on dams in Brazil and Chile. Both countries codified a similar set of participatory innovations; among others, both countries ratified ILO resolution 169. We analyse four anti-dams’ movements in Brazil and Chile, with diverse social, political and environmental contexts (Most Different Systems Design) in order to deduce similar, generalizable patterns. We draw on these examples to show what factors enable substantial citizen participation and constrain it.