Socio-environmental conflicts towards power plants projects in Chile (2005-2016): A configurational analysis

Last decades have witnessed increasing occurrences of socio-environmental conflicts towards the installation of power plants of all kinds. Depending on the cases, these conflicts led either to the construction or the abortion of the project. Most of the literature used to treat these occurrences individually, without evaluating systematically the incidence of conflicts in the construction -or not- of power plants. Therefore, this article proposes an analytical framework to find out under what conditions an environmental conflict achieves its objective to stop the construction of the power plant, or fails. To do so, we proceed to configurational analysis, using QCA methodology for 26 cases of conflicts in Chile. The results points out a complex causality, in which no single condition is neither sufficient nor necessary to produce the outcome. Additional analysis highlights the only relative importance of articulation between social movements and traditional political actors in producing succesful outcomes. These findings lead to a better understanding of the dynamics of socio-environmental conflicts, offering thus a significant contribution to the growing literature on the consequences of social mobilizations.