A Just socioecological transition : history, tensions and futures in Chile

Abstract

This dissertation examines the Just Socioecological Transition in Chile from the perspective of assemblage theory. In recent years, the governance of sustainability transitions has become a central concern among scholars, policymakers, and international organisations seeking to respond to the global environmental crisis. However, scholarly and policy debates on transitions increasingly recognise that these transformations raise important questions about justice, inequality, and power. While much of the literature has addressed justice as a normative principle, less attention has been given to how justice-oriented transitions are assembled in practice through heterogeneous processes that connect intellectual debates, institutional arrangements, and political actors, particularly in Global South contexts.

To address this gap, this dissertation addresses the following research question: how is the Just Socioecological Transition assembled in Chile? The research adopts a case study approach that combines multiple qualitative and review-based methods. These include a state-of-the-art literature review, an integrative bibliometric analysis, interpretive and historical analysis, document analysis, event mapping, and semi-structured interviews with policy actors, civil society representatives, and experts. The research is presented through six interconnected publications.

The findings show that the Just Socioecological Transition in Chile emerges as a dynamic assemblage formed through interactions between intellectual debates, political actors, and institutional processes, and later incorporated into state action. The research identifies two key mechanisms explaining its emergence. The first is additive contextualisation, through which global debates on just transitions were reinterpreted in relation to Latin American realities. The second is policy experimentation, through which the concept was translated into state institutions and policy instruments. The results also reveal significant frictions during implementation related to competing interpretations of the concept, tensions between ambitious policy discourses and concrete measures, and challenges associated with participatory governance. Finally, the study identifies strategies aimed at stabilising the concept through political-administrative, social, and international forms of legitimacy.

The dissertation contributes to three fields of research: sustainability transitions, public policy, and extractivism. It advances an empirical understanding of justice in transitions, analyses how normative concepts are assembled within public policy processes, and documents how justice-oriented transitions emerge in extractive economies such as Chile. Drawing on assemblage theory, the dissertation shows that the Just Socioecological Transition is assembled outside state institutions and is later incorporated as a component of established policy assemblages through policy experimentation and institutional stabilisation.