Hydrosocial displacements: Sources and impacts of collaboration as a response to water conflict near three Chilean mines

Industry and scholarly attention to Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR), Social License to Operate (SLO) and Creating Shared Value (CSV) has contributed to the emergence of collaboration between mining stakeholders as a desirable response to conflict over water. This article examines why and how new collaborative mechanisms have emerged in practice, and with what effect on socio-environmental dynamics in communities under pressure from the impacts of mining and climate change. The research is based on qualitative fieldwork among civil society, the private sector, and the public sector near the Escondida, Los Pelambres, and Andina mines in Chile, as well as among national-level representatives of each of these stakeholder groups in Santiago. Results indicate that companies’ discursive emphasis on collaboration reflects actual changes in industry practice that are an improvement of community relations methods. However, the ways this collaboration is currently carried out may result in a transformation and displacement of harms at the root of conflict, rather than permanent solutions to them. Whether, how, and where harms are transformed and displaced depend upon the interaction of geographical and social factors, with the negative impacts of mining tending to flow downstream and/or from more powerful to less powerful communities. These findings are conceptualized in a framework of “hydrosocial displacements,” which adds explanatory and predictive capacity to scholarship in political ecology on the hydrosocial cycle. In addition, the framework offers a policy tool for stakeholders to assess the context of water conflicts and achieve solutions—rather than displacements—of their causes.