Presentation short abstract

This paper analyses how social movements in Magallanes contest Chile’s green hydrogen frontier. Drawing on 2024/2026 fieldwork and HMPA, it highlights conflict-transformative strategies, barriers, and post-development visions confronting a progressive yet extractivist government.

Presentation long abstract

Chile has become a strategic site within the emerging green hydrogen frontier, promoted as both a decarbonization solution for Europe and a development pathway for the Global South. Drawing on a historical materialist political ecology perspective (Martinez-Alier, 2015; Brand et al., 2022; Kalt et al., 2023), this paper builds on the analysis of how the frontier in Magallanes is produced through state–corporate alliances, green finance, and narratives of progress that obscure colonial continuities (Escobar, 1995; Gudynas, 2011; Svampa, 2019) and uneven territorial transformations. Drawing on earlier work on the structural limits of hydrogen’s transformative potential (Tost & Rammer, forthcoming) and Chile’s gH₂ policy-making via Historical Materialist Political Analysis (HMPA), the paper integrates findings from field research in late 2024 and early 2026.

Based on interviews, participant observation, and engagement with local social and environmental justice actors, the paper examines how movements interpret, resist, and reimagine the frontier. Rather than focusing on coordination among movements, the analysis centres on the conflict-transformative strategies (Temper et al., 2018), political practices, and future visions mobilised by actors as they confront a progressive government that discursively aligned with their claims yet materially advanced an export-oriented, extractivist hydrogen model.

Findings highlight three dynamics: (1) how enclosures of land, energy, and knowledge reproduce patterns of dependency; (2) barriers movements face contesting frontier-making in uneven “contact zones” (Cezne & Otsuki, 2025); and (3) situated and pluriversal post-development visions— ranging from territorial self-determination to agroecological futures —that challenge the imaginary of hydrogen-led green industrialization.