Chile's Environmental Laws and the HidroAysen Northern Patagonia Dams Megaproject: How is This Project Sustainable Development?

摘要

Chile has taken important steps toward creating a more comprehensive environmental regulatory system. Beginning in the early 1990s, Chile's aggressive approach in creating Latin America's strongest free market economy and negotiating free trade agreements stimulated national legislators to improve the country's environmental laws and regulations, as well as its enforcement capabilities. Chile's most recent development achievement-accession to full member status in the Organization of Economic Co-operation and Development ("OECD")-culminated in the formation of both a cabinet-level Ministry of the Environment with a potentially robust enforcement and oversight branch within that Ministry. This Article assesses Ley 20.417, and Chile's legal precedent regarding environmental decisions, through the lens of the proposed HidroAysen project to construct a series of hydroelectric dams in Chile's northern Patagonia Aysen region. This project, easily the country's most controversial environmentally-related project to date, has generated both national and global attention. This Article concludes that the HidroAysen project does not qualify as sustainable development under Ley 20.417, despite the Chilean Supreme Court's decision approving the power-generating portion of the project; no legal action has occurred to date on the transmission part of the project. However, even if the project ultimately is considered sustainable development from a technical standpoint, the court of public opinion has resoundingly rejected it.