Researcher and visiting Fulbright Hays Student, Clare Beer, will undertake almost 12 months of field work in the chilean Patagonia during 2019. Her project about “Nationalizing Nature: Conservation, Economy and Chile´s route of parks” will be supported by the Departments of Geography at the Pontificia Universidad Católica and Universidad de Chile, as well as the Terram Foundation.

As she states in her dissertation abstract of which we partly reproduce here :” This dissertation research examines the Route of Parks project, a first-of-its-kind, public-private partnership between the Chilean state and American eco-philanthropist Kristine Tompkins to protect 1,500 miles of land in rural Patagonia. The project aims to drastically transform Patagonia from an extractive, agrarian economy into a conservation economy based on tourism and ecosystem services. This begs the question of how such an ambitious plan for environmental protection is emerging in a country known for extractive capitalism par excelllence.

Using qualitative and ethnographic methods over twelve months of fieldwork, I will investigate how conservation-as-development and the Route of Parks project became commonsense in Chile. Through my findings, I seek to advance understandings of the relationship between land conservation, capital accumulation, and political statecraft in Chile, and beyond.”

In her project overview she states: “Kristine Tompkins and her late husband Douglas have protected more private land than anyone else in history. Since the early 1990s, the American couple has invested over $200 million in a two million-acre private conservation estate, with eight reserves in Chile and five in Argentina. On January 29, 2018, Mrs. Tompkins finalized an historic agreement with the Chilean state, donating one million acres to create five national parks and expand the boundaries of three existing national parks in Patagonia. In return for what is considered the largest private land donation ever received by a national government, the state is converting an additional ten million acres of adjacent public lands into new national parks. This single agreement increases the amount of federally protected land by nearly 40 percent, resulting in a contiguous corridor of 17 national parks running 1,500 miles north-to-south along the remote highway Route 7. Eponymously named the Route of Parks (RoP), this mega conservation project is drastically re-imagining Route 7 and Patagonia as a whole. Where once the state courted extractive industry, big business, and ranchers to settle and develop these distant lands, it now pursues rural economic development through a conservation economy based on tourism and ecosystem services”..

“Through a yearlong ethnographic investigation, my research aims to advance understandings of the relationship between land conservation, capital accumulation, and political statecraft in Chile, and beyond. Case Significance: This case is compelling not only because it constitutes a globally unprecedented public-private conservation partnership, but also because it comes at a pivotal moment in Chilean environmental history. In recent years, the government has taken steps to ‘green’ the economy as a safeguard against the future fiscal uncertainties of climate change, clean energy transition, and eventual depletion of domestic copper stocks – the country’s most lucrative natural resource and primary export commodity. The Road of Parks project indicates that conservation policy also plays a role in Chile’s green economic strategy. This, too, is unprecedented.”