Governing Aquaculture Frontiers: Export-Driven Regimes, Networks, and Environmental Inequality in Southern Patagonia

• In Event: Environmental Sociology Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 17: Community, Place, and Local Engagement

Abstract

This paper examines how salmon aquaculture governance in Southern Chile operates within an export-oriented development framework that shapes how regulatory priorities are defined and negotiated. While aquaculture is promoted as a key component of the global blue economy, its expansion in Southern Patagonia has generated sustained socio-environmental tensions linked to ecological change, territorial claims, and uneven distributions of environmental risk.

Drawing on a mixed-methods research design combining qualitative interviews, policy analysis, and social network analysis, the study focuses on governance processes surrounding aquaculture expansion in Puerto Williams and neighboring territories. Interviews were conducted with scientists, local and regional officials, Indigenous representatives, civil society organizations, and environmental NGOs. Social network analysis is used to examine patterns of actor centrality, coalition formation, and the role of bridging actors who connect state agencies, industry representatives, and local stakeholders across regulatory arenas.

Within an export-oriented policy environment, economic indicators such as production continuity and market stability tend to carry particular weight in regulatory deliberations. Biological thresholds, territorial concerns, and Indigenous claims enter governance debates unevenly, often gaining visibility when framed in relation to broader questions of industry stability. In contexts of uneven state presence, private actors may also expand their role in territorial governance by providing material support and local investments, a dynamic that can stabilize operations while reshaping expectations about responsibility and regulation.

Environmental inequality in aquaculture frontiers thus emerges not simply from formal exclusion, but from the relational configuration of governance priorities in which economic, territorial, and biological considerations are weighted differently. By integrating political economy and network analysis, the paper advances a relational account of extractive governance in peripheral territories.

Author

• Camilo Leon Felipe Godoy Pichon, University of Florida