Tree Plantations in Chile: Towards a More Sustainable Model?

Pine and eucalyptus plantations in Chile remain at the heart of the country's development model, but they are under a legitimation crisis steaming out of a deep social discontent due to their local socio-ecological effects. After problematizing the Chilean plantations as a (neo) extractivist process, this paper locates their expansion in a historical context and focuses on the analysis of the turn in the direction of a green economy, under which the forestry policy is being restructured, searching for an apparently more sustainable model. Based on a review of literature and the policies associated to the referred turn, I argue that the discursive and practical elements it articulates offer opportunities for a new expansive phase of plantations. This phase is marked by a combination of nature appropriation strategies that not only look for the last resource frontiers but also the generation of new appropriation spaces, materialized in concrete opportunities for a new material expansion