Consultation’s overburden: Indigenous participation in the extractives industry in the Salar de Atacama, Chile

Abstract

Mineral extraction landscapes are infamous for their histories of spectacular ecological destruction and corporate-Indigenous community conflict. In contrast, until recently mining company activity and Indigenous community responses in the Salar de Atacama, northern Chile, have been marked by a somewhat mundane political and environmental dynamic characterised by invisible, shifting and short-term benefits for locals and unspectacular contests. However, the effects of extractive industries are cumulative and complex. In this paper, I examine the operation of relatively new Chilean regulation relating to environmental and social impact of mining that includes obligatory consultation between proponents and Indigenous peoples. Relying on new regulation, Indigenous people have expanded their repertoire of response to mining, refusing extractive development’s proffered benefits and entering negotiation with powerful outsiders on better terms, but there are also social costs. Using the critical terms of community leaders who protested about the “overburden” of new projects mounting up in consultation with proponents, I examine the structural and temporal problems generated by new regulatory process. Through ethnographic material derived from engaged anthropology, I show how community administrative and political labour to respond to the technical processes of consultation is at once mundane and exhausting. I argue that community work to consider and respond to proposed extractivist projects “exceeds” the progressive politics of recognition and new Chilean regulatory frameworks of consultation and left unaddressed, generates additional negative effects. I suggest that regulatory processes regarding the social impact of extractive industry should take seriously the implications of overburden.