Meret Haack
Planetary healing through transformation? — Revisiting notions of human-environment relations in Chile
How do state and non-state actors imagine transformation against the backdrop of climate change in Chile? By what means does transformation encompass notions of the planetary and aspects of healing and if so, how are these conceptualized? What role does temporality play when imagining transformation?
I seek to address these questions in my dissertation by investigating the ways human-environmental relations have been reshaped in the constitutional process that unfolded after the social outburst in October 2019. The draft for a new constitution, outlined by a democratically elected convention, identified climate change as an essential threat to humanity and declared nature a legal subject. These suggestions were welcomed as progressive and innovative by many actors, also because the country’s legal and economic system has been perceived as favoring free-market policies and extractivist practices over the past decades. Hence, several sectors of the society hoped for profound political, economic, and social change. However, the constitutional draft was rejected in a referendum held in September 2022 along with a second constitutional draft, which was also declined in the following year.
My project takes the intensified engagement with environmental issues during the constitutional process as starting point to investigate the potential re-configuring of human-environmental relations. While I seek to explore what “transformation” means for diverse actors, I will place particular emphasis on Indigenous and local perspectives.