The stakeholders' relationships and the formation of environmental inequalities in the Valdivia plant, Los Rios region, Chile: a case study of environmental inequality

Much of the literature on Environmental Justice documents if a community suffering from an environmental hazard is non-white or low-income, ignoring the community’s context and relationships between them. These relationships reflect the formation of environmental inequality as the continuous shaping and shifting alliances between multiple stakeholders. By following Pellow’s model of Environmental Inequality Formation (2000), this thesis investigates the role that different stakeholders play in the formation of Environmental Inequalities by looking at the events that conforms the Valdivia Plant’s Cruces River pollution, in the Valdivia province, Los Rios region, southern Chile. This thesis was conducted using a qualitative method and case study approach to review the case literature and to gather, code, and interpret secondary sources of information, including archival records and historical documents in the written form of news and texts. The information about the Valdivia plant case was gathered between 1994 and 2007. The results from this thesis show that the stakeholders involved in the case study participated actively and influenced the formation and avoidance of Environmental Inequality, stepping away from traditional assumptions of a “perpetrator-victim” scenario where vulnerable communities are passively bearing the pollution. Accordingly, this thesis also examines the different outcomes that stakeholders can achieve, by comparing the Maiquillahue Bay and the Cruces River stories of success and failure regarding the pollution and environmental inequality coming from the Valdivia Cellulose Plant. Moreover, the purpose of this thesis is to identify the broader causes of Environmental Inequality, moving beyond the common race/class explanations, and looking for structural and local forces that may explain the Environmental Inequality phenomenon. Future research directions in EJ studies should aim to incorporate the multi-stakeholder perspective when looking for the causes of environmental inequality, and to further research locals’ active resistance to environmentally unequal situations.M.S.Includes bibliographical referencesby Gabriela E. Ullo