On Monday 4 December 2023 at 16.00 CET Maite Hernando Arrese will publicly defend her PhD thesis entitled ‘Let it flow: Navigating hydropower conflicts in southern Chile’. The defense will take place in the Omnia Auditorium and will also be broadcasted live (a link will appear in the events box, in the upper left corner of the screen). The full thesis can be read online or downloaded (usually from the first day after the PhD defense onwards) from the repository of Wageningen University PhD theses or by clicking on the DOI link.

Summary

This thesis explores the perseverance of resistance to hydropower development in southern Chile, despite a paradigm shift from large hydropower dams to small hydropower in recent years. Based on a review of secondary sources and 17 months of fieldwork (2016-2019) in the Mapuche Indigenous territories of Curarrehue and Panguipulli, this study examines how Mapuche community and environmentalist defenders navigate the socio-environmental conflicts that hydropower development generates in their territories on the one hand, and the political role of hope for social change that motivates community leaders to work on development alternatives amidst conflict and despair, on the other.  

Globally, small hydro development is embraced by governments and private businesses through generous subsidies and prompt authorization based on the belief that it is an eco-friendly alternative to large dams. However, growing scholarship provides evidence that small hydropower generates considerable social and ecological impacts. Consequently, this thesis questions the taken-for-granted assumption that, by having a lower installed capacity in megawatts, a project with these characteristics produces fewer social or ecological impacts.  This implies that the consequences experienced in Indigenous territories should not be minimized or ignored. 

The overarching research question of this thesis is: How Indigenous communities and environmentalist leaders navigate the socio-environmental conflicts that hydropower development generates in their territories? The structure of this thesis is organized around four sub-questions that compound four chapters: 1) What are the different technopolitical registers of hydropower development in Chile? 2) What are the ontological backgrounds of water that hydropower projects encounter in Indigenous territories? 3) How do community leaders navigate social unrest, resistance, and ideas regarding energy development related to small hydropower projects? 4) What is the political role of hope in the conflicts caused by hydropower projects in Mapuche territory? These questions follow an analytical logic that frames the phenomenon of hydropower development conflicts within a political and historical background and the experiences of the local inhabitants. 

To address these questions, this thesis builds on sciences and technology studies (STS), ontological politics, political ontologies, political ecology, critical and reflexive ethnography, and feminist scholarship for conceptual, theoretical, and methodological guidance. Accordingly, this thesis is divided into two sections. The first, which corresponds to chapters 1 and 2, is based on an extensive literature review and secondary sources that analyze the historical and political background of hydropower development in Chile and the rise of social movement activism following the STS approach. The second, which corresponds to chapters 3 and 4, is based on empirical data from ethnographic fieldwork, which follows a micropolitical ecology, critical and reflexive ethnography, and social movements approach to understand the social impacts of small hydro development in Indigenous Mapuche territories. In general, research traces how hydropower development is territorialized, and the reasons for opposing them put forward by social movements. In doing so, a collaborative research approach with community leaders, which comprises elements of participatory and visual ethnography, facilitates the examination of small hydropower impacts, regardless of whether the projects have been built.