Professor Barandiarán, Global Studies, explores the interplay of science and the environment in neoliberal Chile

But what if the experts weren’t independent? What if a country’s education system wasn’t set up to produce knowledge, but to generate income? Could the public trust that the government and its advisors were acting in the public interest?
 
Those are the questions Javiera Barandiarán, a UC Santa Barbara assistant professor of global studies, explores in “Science and Environment in Chile: The Politics of Expert Advice in a Neoliberal Democracy” (MIT Press, 2018).
 
Given its history, Chile was an ideal country to study. After a U.S.-backed coup led by Gen. Augusto Pinochet in 1973, the country was ruled by a military dictatorship until 1990. In that time the country adopted economic policies Barandiarán describes as “neoliberal” — which she defines as “a political ideology that privileges market-based solutions to collective needs over those that the state can provide.”
 
Barandiarán, who was born in Chile and studies environmental politics in Latin America, noted that while the country was held up as a “success story of political transition and stability,” many Chileans were disillusioned. Why? In addition to inequality and a fragile prosperity built on debt, she learned, there was widespread anger over what many Chileans saw as the abuse of the environment to benefit business and political elites.
 
To understand the dynamics at play in the environmental review of industrial projects in Chile, Barandiarán studied the interplay of state and science in four environmental conflicts: an epidemic at salmon farms across the Chilean Sea that led to the layoff of 25,000 workers; a polluting paper and pulp mill whose toxicity caused thousands of swans to disappear; a state-backed plan to move three small glaciers to “protect” them from a proposed mine; and a hydroelectric dam project planned in rural Patagonia.

News Date: 

Wednesday, December 19, 2018