Resilience can have desirable and undesirable consequences. Thus, resilience should not be viewed as a normative desirable goal, but as a descriptor of complex systems dynamics. From this perspective, we apply resilience thinking concepts to assess the dynamics of inequality, spatial segregation, and sustainability in Chile’s capital city of Santiago. Chile’s economy boosted since democracy was restored in 1990, but continuity of neoliberal reforms and transformations of Pinochet’s dictatorship (1973–1990) seem to have locked Chilean cities in resilient, albeit unsustainable, patterns of uneven development. Socio-economic data from Santiago shows highly resilient patterns of urban inequality and segregation from 1992 to 2009 despite democratic efforts, political agendas and discourses packed with calls for reducing poverty and inequality. We present a conceptual model based on the notion of stability landscapes to explore potential trade-offs between resilience and sustainable development. We mapped Santiago’s spatio-temporal inequality trends and explored if these patterns support an inequality-resilience stability landscape. Analysis of temporal and spatial distribution of development assets across four human development dimensions (i.e., income, education, health, democracy) revealed potential socio-political and spatial feedbacks supporting the resilience of inequality and segregation in Santiago. We argue that urban sustainability may require breaking this resilience, a process where bottom-up stressors such as social movements could play a key role.

The last decade has witnessed the proliferation of socio-environmental conflicts across Chile, characterized by the resistance of local communities against extractive and industrial projects. Increasingly, these conflicts have revealed the multiple injustices experienced by communities living in sacrifice zones. A sacrifice zone can be defined as a segregated place where the quality of life of its communities is compromised in the name of progress and capital accumulation. By focusing on socio-environmental struggles taking place in Quintero-Puchuncaví Bay, Coronel Bay, and Hualpén-Talcahuano Bay, three highly polluted and industrialized areas in Chile, this article explores the views and practices developed by grassroots activists in their quest for resisting and moving beyond the capitalist and extractivist model of development. By conducting a thematic analysis of semi-structured interviews with 32 socio-environmental activists, this qualitative study provides a detailed account of how they understand a sacrifice zone and resist in these areas. Furthermore, it describes alternatives to capitalist and extractivist development envisioned and enacted by grassroots movements, expanding on the notions of territorial sovereignty and “buen vivir”.

From a theoretical approach based on political ecology and environmental justice, we assess how forestry development has generated socio-spatial dynamics of environmental degradation and water scarcity in southern Chile. Through historical-geographical and ethnographic methods, we discuss how and why the spread of forestry plantations has significantly influenced social and environmental degradation of the Mapuche's modes of living. In response, during recent decades a political articulation of a Mapuche social movement is observed. Their demands include land, autonomy, rights and opportunities to frame their own development strategies. Within the internal diversity of this movement, a key principle is reversing the spread of environmental degradation by recovering the native forest and its natural water cycles, which have been disrupted significantly by the increasing of forestry plantations. We explore these dynamics of the Mapuche movement from an environmental justice approach.

Este artículo analiza los impactos socioambientales, hídricos y culturales de la creciente extracción de litio en la cuenca del Salar de Atacama en Chile, desde las contribuciones del programa modernidad/colonialidad y las discusiones decoloniales de la Ecología Política. El litio en tanto mineral estratégico para las políticas de transiciones verde globales representa una eco-colonialidad gatillada por los metabolismos de la electromovilidad que reproduce asimetrías estructurales e históricas entre el Norte y Sur Global, que contribuyen a la agonía socioambiental de la cuenca del Salar de Atacama. Se analizan testimonios de las comunidades Lickanantay y fuentes documentales, evidenciando las tensiones en torno a los derechos territoriales implicados en los metabolismos socioambientales del litio. El trabajo concluye que la extracción de este mineral avanza a costa de una sobreexplotación ecosistémica insostenible para las comunidades indígenas, y las cuencas de los salares, planteando la necesidad de replantear alternativas de transiciones justas y sostenibles.

Revisamos las respuestas sociales a la privatización del agua en Chile. A través del análisis de dos estudios de caso —HidroAysén y Pascua Lama—abordamos el problema de cómo estos mega-proyectos han generado las condiciones socio-políticas para el surgimiento de nuevos sujetos hídricos que, en el proceso de su constitución como sujetos, han ido configurando los contornos de un movimiento social por el agua de escala nacional. Abordamos el surgimiento y desarrollo del movimiento desde la perspectiva de las políticas de escala, concluyendo que la agenda de cambios empujada por los nuevos sujetos hídricos apunta a transformar el modelo privatizador del agua hacia otro que conciba el agua como un bien común, abriendo nuevos espacios para democratizar y crear modos más sustentables de gobernanza hídrica en el país.