Palavras-chave
Climate policy conflicts
Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs)
Socio-ecological controversy
Chilean environmental legislation
Resumo
This article analyzes the legislative process that culminated in Chile’s 2024 Peatland Protection Law (Law 21.660), employing critical discourse analysis to examine the parliamentary debates that shaped this regulatory framework. Unlike previous studies on environmental governance in Chile—which have focused on identifying specific conflicts, characterizing extractivist patterns, or diagnosing institutional fragility—this work exposes the socio-technical controversies underlying peatland governance. It demonstrates how global climate commitments (NDCs) articulate with—and often clash with—local extractivist realities, offering an analysis of peatland governance at the intersection of legal regulation, ecological knowledge, and political economy.
The study shows that environmental legislation does not emerge solely from scientific or political consensus, but from contentious negotiations in which knowledge, power, and economic interests are co-produced. The analysis identifies three central axes of controversy: the strategic mobilization of scientific knowledge; the negotiation of legal frameworks around conservation and regulated extraction; and the institutional compromises through which sustainability is translated into policy under unequal conditions of power and oversight.
The Chilean case illustrates how a regulatory process, such as the construction of a climate agenda, is subject to controversial dynamics, which relativize the characteristics of local economies and socio-ecological dynamics, thereby generating weaknesses in normative strength. The article contributes to debates on environmental governance by demonstrating the limits of implementing Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) when global commitments encounter entrenched power relations and unequal regulatory capacity.
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Este trabalho encontra-se publicado com a Licença Internacional Creative Commons Atribuição 4.0.
Direitos de Autor (c) 2026 Mauricio Onetto Pavez, Ronald Cancino Salas, Romy Hecht, Claudia Mansilla