The Role of the State in Large-Scale Hydropower Development
heavily rely on ‘nationalist’ control and extraction of resource. Similarly, in Chile, almost every expert interviewed for this thesis expressed surprise and bafflement at the level of public participation in protests for and against HidroAysén, couched in a larger debate about the country’s future economic prospects (interviewees no. 8, 24, 25, 31, 33). This, again points to the need for a better distribution of costs and benefits. Is the state the only institution capable of managing this distribution? The three case studies discussed in this work exist along a continuum of state involvement in the hydropower debates. On one end, the Ecuadorian government has re-centralized energy planning and taken a top-down approach to decisions about energy planning. It has determined priority projects for development, such as CCS, and enabled regulatory mechanisms to ensure their development, to the detriment of existing procurement, territorial planning, and environmental regulation. Thus, the state is actively pushing the limits of its executive capacity to internalize and provide solutions to conflicts among affected stakeholders near CCS. Perú, in light of the plans for Inambari, is somewhere in the middle: the Executive power and its ministers have carried out an integration agreement and are now testing its potential implementation ‘on the ground;’ local opposition has, for now, stalled the project. In this sense, Perú illustrates how, as currently designed, post-facto hydropower assessment procedures fail to achieve consensus early on and will continue to prevent new developments. At the other end, we find Chile, historically a very liberal country where the state has no stake in the energy sector beyond that of regulatory and technical oversight. The litigation about HA has unexpectedly unified critics and supporters of the plant on a call for a more active government capable of internalizing conflict and risk associated with energy megaprojects, particularly upgrades to the country’s transmission network. There are alternative means to legitimize and reach wider consensus around hydropower projects before development begins. A possible model is to expand on the capabilities of independent, technical institutions at a regional level. Domestically, independent regulators and operators are currently beholden to the Executive branch. In Ecuador, both CONELEC and CENACE respond to the political authority of the Executive branch. These agencies have !
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