Reconstituting the Neo-structuralist State: the political economy of continuity and change in Chilean mining policy

The Chilean governance model of resource extraction challenges the view that post-neoliberalism is an opposing development model rejecting the Washington Consensus, which is constitutive of neoliberal governance. Instead, post-neoliberalism is continuity with change, where marketised governance in mining is maintained by the Chilean state yet certain policy agendas are introduced in response to the failures of staunchly private sector-driven development. Neostructuralism follows the logic of productivism, which emphasise the depoliticisation of copper management and the political exclusion of voices critical of the model. However, it breaks away from the typical mode of neoliberalism because there exist political spaces for contestation of copper policy, particularly through the re-regulation of labour practices and the passage of royalty law to address Chile’s vulnerabilities to external factors affecting copper production. The article contributes to the understanding of continuities and changes in post-neoliberal Latin America by unpacking the elements of natural resource governance in one of the most widely cited successful cases of a mining-based development model in the developing world.

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