Keywords

1 Introduction

The Patagonian territory we know today was shaped hierarchically, not by the mythological beings and beliefs of its native peoples but through the visions and decisions of central powers from northern latitudes. The great national interests and the profitability of large enterprises based on the exploitation of natural resources sustained the early colonization of Patagonia and the well-being of their original and new inhabitants. Since then, the ways of accessing the benefits derived from nature have diversified, and antagonisms between alternative demands over nature have emerged. From a sociocultural point of view, Patagonia is currently a place where diverse cultures and their different relationships with nature meet. However, influences of extraterritorial cultures on the access to ecosystem services (ES) and the social distribution of their benefits prevail over local cultures. The nineteenth-century imaginary of Patagonia as a vast land of opportunities open to big business with ancient inhabitants decimated or “pacified” created resistance expressions that have emerged during the last decades from local communities, including the descendants of first-nation’s genocide survivors (Blanco and Mendes 2006).

Most of these resistances hold “nature” and the emerging disputes over the different views on nature-society relationships as their emblem. While some actors value Patagonia’s pristine environment, others defend the need to use natural resources under a new extractive logic (neo-extractivism). In this context, local people appropriate academic and political concepts to support their claims.

In contrast to previous fragmentary views of natural resources and the environment, the concept of ES integrates the diversity of demands and values of a society in relation to nature, either as a source of primary products or of less tangible contributions to well-being (MEA 2005; Díaz et al. 2015). More importantly, the ES approach allows to visualize the synergistic or antagonistic relationships (trade-offs) that arise between the opportunities of supply, capture, and distribution of ES benefits, disaggregating beneficiaries as “winners” and “losers” of the possible decisions of nature use.

In comparison with the research on ES values, and despite their relevance for the achievement of more sustainable trajectories, the role of beliefs (Raymond and Kenter 2016), shared intentions (Tomasello et al. 2005), and imaginaries (Archibald et al. 2020) that influence values, norms, and behaviors has been much less studied. A strong influence of psychosocial factors affecting values and intentions or decisions of management has been illustrated for different SES (e.g., Mastrangelo et al. 2014), but we still have a poor understanding about the dynamics of those factors on long-term nature conservation. Against the tendency to understand and influence the behavior of complex systems by focusing on proximate and dominant factors, Meadows (1999) highlighted that factors acting at higher hierarchical levels, like paradigms (“the shared ideas in the minds of society” or “deepest set of beliefs about how the world works”), provide significant, sustained, and beneficial effects on the redesign of the system or governing policy. In other terms, it is not just how much people value a particular good or service but the expectations that people have about what is real/unreal and normal/abnormal around their social existence, the social imaginaries – what shapes the high leverage points capable to move SES into more sustainable trajectories. A challenging question is to what extent those imaginaries can or should be changed and into which directions (Lotz-Sisitka 2010; Stephenson Jr 2011).

In this chapter we offer a theoretical and hermeneutical exploration of the main nature-society imaginaries (NSI) that coexist in Patagonia, with emphasis in their consequences for biodiversity and the provision of ES, nature governance, and nature contributions to people’s well-being. We analyze the interplay between different NSI and their transformative vs resistance roles on nature’s governance in the context of four main drivers of change in Patagonian SES, namely, land dispossession, industrial forestry expansion, touristification, and damming of rivers for hydroelectric uses. In the next sections, we firstly provide some insights about social imaginaries and their role on the relationship between societies and nature (Sect. 2), and then we present a conceptual framework for the analysis of the roles of collective imaginaries within the context of SES (Sect. 3). Next, we apply the conceptual framework to understand the role of imaginaries on land-use decisions and the application of alternative management practices, for selected study cases within the Patagonian region (Sect. 4). Finally, we synthesize main results and discuss the possible contribution of this conceptual framework to a better understanding of SES functioning (Sect. 5).

2 Social Imaginaries

Conceptual basis and definitions: Social imaginaries are depicted as social institutions that create a shared universe of meaning to which a society owes its unity and coherence. They constitute “socially constructed schemes that allow us to perceive something as real, explain it and intervene operatively” (Pintos 2005). They are historically given constructions of meaning that are naturalized and that have an autonomous existence, independent of social subjects and allow us to make reality intelligible, and ultimately give a specific orientation to society over a determined period (Díaz 1996; Agudelo 2011).

The concept of social imaginaries contains a tension between what “should be,” established in a top-down manner, and a more dynamic “what is,” as emerging from social self-organization. Social imaginaries act as homogenizing agreements with a social cohesive function and constitute the necessary innovation to adjust these agreements to variable local challenges. Thus, social imaginaries have elements of both moral structure (what is right) and moral agency (what is worth striving for); they are a blend of “how things usually go, but this is interwoven with an idea of how they ought to go” (Taylor 2003). This tension between the normative and the factual understandings implies conflicts, but, eventually, it also generates changes, risks, and progress.

Archetypal narratives like the “myth of progress” or “foundational myths” are good examples about how social imaginaries may support “normal” social behaviors. However, it is central to this chapter to note that imaginaries do not necessarily constitute constructs that identify and determine a certain society in a homogeneous and exclusive way. For example, social imaginaries embodied by minorities offer a pressure on the status quo, leading to conflicts with dominant imaginaries, with different social and environmental consequences in the long term. Rather than fixed and formal normative institutions, here we understand the social imaginaries as the semi-unconscious expectations that people have about what is real/unreal and normal/abnormal around their social existence, including stabilizing and/or transformative aspirations.

Social imaginaries about nature-society relationships (NSI)

Imaginaries of each social group change over time due to multiple factors (socioeconomic, sociopolitical, marketing factors) ranging from value transformations to the influence of social networks.

The fundamental characteristics of the main imaginaries manifested in Patagonia, along two main imaginary axes, are: intergenerational and territorial significance (Fig. 19.1). Despite its schematic nature, this exercise provides a starting point to support subsequent analyses. Based on the emergence and domain of individualism and equality principles, modern social imaginaries overcome the community and hierarchy principles leading to a “vertical world of mediated access” which characterized the premodern social imaginaries of European societies (Taylor 2003). But, this moral agency of modern social imaginaries contributed to the rise of individual initiatives, innovations, wealth, more needs, and also, the big environmental challenges that humanity faces today. Environmental or nature-society imaginaries were examined by Buckles (2018), who described the two extreme perspectives of a continuum, from Taylor’s modern to postmodern social imaginaries, by opposing different time scales (contemporary vs. intergenerational-oriented focuses), technological styles (high-input technological control of natural resources vs. low-input demanding of process management), and complexity conscience (reductionist vs. holistic understanding), among other aspects (Fig. 19.1). Within the range of greatest intergenerational significance, the sustainability criterion is only the starting point of a multiplicity of environmental imaginaries that, in the direction of a growing ecocentrism, finally meet with the deep ecology (e.g., McGregor 2004).

Fig. 19.1
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Simplified imaginaries about nature-society relationships (NSI) and their preliminary characteristic features for the analysis of Patagonian cases

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The western and dominant NSI normally excluded the visions of indigenous cultures. However, indigenous knowledge and worldview make up the conceptual framework of the Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), in recognition of its practical and symbolic relevance for peoples and communities around the world (Díaz et al. 2015). Of course, we continue talking about imaginaries whose expression in actions and lifestyles can be highly variable in the Patagonian territories. After all, imaginaries are not always aligned with individual and collective behaviors and actions toward the environment. A main distinctive aspect of indigenous worldview usually consists in a nonmechanistic but supranatural and holistic conscience about human-nature interconnectedness, leading to environmental accountability and stewardship.

Although the holistic vision and awareness of the interconnections between the human and the natural world is not absent in postmodern NSI, in indigenous NSI this interconnection is mainly associated with the supernatural dimension, spirituality, and symbolism (Skewes et al. 2012; Rojas et al. 2020). Another distinctive feature of indigenous NSI is the place occupied by the concept of territoriality (Montalba et al. 2005). Under the indigenous vision, the territory is not merely a geographical area, soil, subsoil, water, animals, plants, or even the people that inhabit the place; the territory is all these dimensions together, plus culture, memory, the right to decide on natural resources as well as to exercise its own organizational forms, and people’s identities. However, indigenous communities are not homogeneous in their beliefs, depending on their livelihoods (rural versus urban), level of identity (self-recognition as a part of an indigenous collectivity), possession of land, and belonging to indigenous communities, among others. Therefore we cannot assume a single imaginary that represents all indigenous people in Patagonia.

One of the best-known indigenous cultures of Patagonia is the Mapuche culture, the prevailing ethnic group in the region today, in terms of population size and visibility of claims. In the Mapuche worldview, human well-being, history, culture, and the territory are deeply and inextricably linked to each other (Tricot 2020). While this vision may have emerged from long-term/historical interactions between ecosystems and well-being, it is not always expressed in the context of transformed SES, territories, and geographies.

3 The Role of Nature-Society Imaginaries on Nature’s Governance

Humans actions depend on their perception of nature and environment. In order to guide our case analysis, we envisaged four ways in which social imaginaries may influence natural capital and well-being (Fig. 19.2).

Fig. 19.2
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A conceptual framework for the analysis of collective imaginaries’ roles within the context of socio-ecological systems. The numbers identify four ways in which social imaginaries influence natural capital and well-being from ES: shared values and/or shared perceptions (1 and 2), shared expectations (3), and shared behaviors (4)

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First, social imaginaries affect the ways in which manufactured goods and services contribute to well-being through the shared values or shared perceptions of their importance that the same imaginary presupposes (Fig. 19.2, path 1). At one extreme, modern NSI associate well-being satisfaction to consumption of numerous goods, some of them involving high-impact technology (e.g., dams). At the other extreme, postmodern NSI question consumption based on those technologies. Implicitly, the former NSI suppose a weak sustainability and therefore a broad substitution capacity between natural and manufactured capital, while the latter assume a strong sustainability and therefore a relatively low substitution capacity.

Second, the imaginaries also influence the ways in which natural capital mediates well-being (Fig. 19.2, path 2), from a productivity perspective under the modern imaginary to an intergenerationally responsible use, which privileges sustainability over economic growth (postmodern imaginary). Therefore, the contribution of goods and services from nature to well-being not only depends on their flow rates, as usually acknowledged in previous frameworks (Díaz et al. 2015; Potschin-Young et al. 2018), but it is also modulated by NSI that influence the extent to which nature contributes to well-being.

Third, taking into account how natural capital and its services contribute to well-being, NSI are able to affect that capital through shared expectations about what should or should not be done in terms of the practices and management decisions (Fig. 19.2, path 3).

Finally, NSI may affect the natural capital by social self-organization in opposition to top-down expectations about “what should be done” (Fig. 19.2, path 4). Governance is related to the perception of future scenarios linked to risk analysis and actions from each stakeholder. The notion of power between involved parties is part of the social imaginary and helps to guide the actions undertaken by the stakeholders based on risk-benefit calculations and the possibilities of cooperation or conflict that may occur between them.

Power relationships emerge as a key factor influencing the course of events. For example, some stakeholders’ actions may drive ES conservation by preventing opposing actors with conflicting views on land use. Other stakeholders may try to use their political or economic influence to impose their own imaginaries of development with a particular perception of the future, the risk involved, and the management of environmental resources. This lack of consensus among actors (e.g., distrust between opposition groups and government) may create conflicts for management of natural capital. Particular imaginaries around management and conservation of natural capital and land-use planning that influence ecosystems and ES may lead to a confrontation between different development and governance models.

The NSI are characterized not only by the values, beliefs, norms, and practices that they promote but also by the magnitude of the social forces that they exert on SES. Thus, NSI can promote transformations (transforming forces), or they can endorse resistance against other drivers. The coexistence of these forces underlies different distributive conflicts or access to available ES. Furthermore, here we emphasize that behind the main drivers of SES changes examined here, opposing or antagonistic NSI can be recognized and characterized by forces of cohesion, transformation, or resistance they can exert on SES.

4 Case Analysis on Four Main Drivers of SES Changes in Patagonia

To illustrate the suitability of the social imaginary concept for understanding transformations (and their corresponding resistance) processes in the region, we determined (i) land dispossession, understood as the “peaceful” or violent, legal or illegal displacement of the former occupants of the land in favor of more powerful social actors (e.g., the “Conquest of the Desert,” or land grabbing) and current expressions of this phenomena (e.g., green grabbing); (ii) forestry expansion, including the replacement of native forests to industrial plantations; (iii) touristification, understood as the landscape transformation into objects for tourist consumption; and (iv) the transformation of territories through damming rivers for hydroelectric use. For this, we performed conventional literature reviews with best-studied cases. We acknowledge the limitation of inferring from secondary data, as opposed to, for example, ethnographic research. On the other hand, we judged the selection of published studies as the best way for covering a wide variety of views around the four selected cases.

4.1 Land Dispossession

The colonization of the Patagonian territories involved the eradication of most indigenous people, by the military campaigns known, ironically, as the “Pacification of Araucanía” (1861–1881) in Chile and the “Conquest of the Desert” (1869–1888) in Argentina (Hasbrouck 1935). Subsequently, the national governments promoted the establishment of military settlements in strategic areas and the sale and concession of public lands to private landowners, mostly foreign settlers. Once these territories were administratively incorporated into the national territories of Argentina and Chile, the objective was to develop Patagonia based on the agricultural model, in correspondence to the national economic ideal based on European development.

Biographic, traveling, and historical literature provide great testimonies that sustain social imaginaries about Patagonia nature. One of the most clear expressions of such imaginary is reflected in the psychological and ideological profile of Domingo F. Sarmiento, an educator, thinker, journalist, writer, military, politician, and finally, one of the most influential presidents of Argentina (1868–1874) during the “Conquest of the Desert.” Pastor and Mora (2013) analyzed the imaginary of Sarmiento in four axes: (i) representations of nature, where the idea of the “desert” only populated by Indians contrasts with the idea of productive lands, and urban development (as stated in the title of his famous book Facundo: Civilization and Barbarism, 1845); (ii) the differentiation and racial discrimination – the foreign colonist dominating technology against the lazy Indian and the speed and dynamism against slowness and immutability; (iii) ideal societies, where the United States was a development model to follow; and (iv) exemplary lives and professions of scientists and technologists. Sarmiento’s imaginary about the “South” was externally influenced by the vision of Argentina of the English explorer and writer Francis Bond Head published in 1926 (“Rough Notes Taken During Some Rapid Journeys Across the Pampas and Among the Andes”) and other European writers (Jagoe 2008).

Land dispossession during the Patagonian settlement stage

Land grabbing by actors inside or outside the national territories usually involved the displacement of original inhabitants. This shaped the Patagonian territories since the late eighteenth century, when the settlement policies of Argentinean and Chilean governments displaced native peoples and promoted the occupation by foreign and domestic settlers. Through different mechanisms, European immigrants enjoyed privileged access to land, giving place to extensive sheep production systems in Argentina and Chile, originally in the hands of English settlers and English capitals, and German farmers in Chile. Numerous historical testimonies show that these colonization policies depicted indigenous cultures as an obstacle to development. Briefly, “Argentine oligarchy detested the reality that it imagined as a threat, and sought to become independent from the American past by building a new country through expansion and replacement: the territory is desert, its vastness is a scourge, its inhabitants are savages, their past is shame, their future, if any, is in the image and likeness of Europe” (Harambour 2019). Following the conceptual framework (Fig. 19.2), during the period of colonization of Patagonia, the management of the territories and their natural resources was shaped under the imaginaries of modernity, leading to a clear division between the winners and losers of this process.

The National Parks systems or precluding settlements for the intergenerational well-being

A second mechanism of occupation was the creation of national parks, partially driven by border policies of each country and partially supported by the imaginary of nature conservation inspired by pioneers from the northern hemisphere. These actions, promoted from imaginaries aligned with the intrinsic value of biodiversity, were confronted with imaginaries of sovereignty and identity of the first nations still present today. The national parks systems of Argentina and Chile were mainly developed on empty or previously eradicated territories. These displacements for conservation reasons in Patagonia created severe conflicts some of which persist until the present date (Serenari et al. 2015, 2017a, b).

In Argentina, the creation of the national parks system in Patagonia was originally linked to tourism development (Aizen and Tam Muro 1992). These socioeconomic and cultural changes occurred as a result of specific actions taken by the National Argentine Government through the Directorate of National Parks enacted in 1934, which shaped a particular productive model that gradually became the single economic engine of the region (Bessera 2006). The Directorate had two main objectives: the conservation of the natural resources and the consolidation of territorial sovereignty near to international borderlines. These actions were in line with a particular social imaginary that conceived nature as pristine, understood as “free from human interference” (Carpinetti 2006). This implied, in practice, the eviction of rural settlers that resided in the areas. The preservation of scenic beauty and the desire to populate Patagonia with European descendants imposing elitist land-use models resulted in the marginalization and disregard of the rights of these rural communities (Carpinetti 2006).

Successive development models, mainly from the nation’s capital, continued delineating the area’s trajectory. During the Peronist government (1946–1955), tourism in Argentina went through a deep transformation that favored “social tourism” by promoting popular leisure and recreational activities for the working class (Méndez 2016). This completely changed the physiognomy of towns like the emblematic San Carlos de Bariloche, which constituted one of the “targets” of this new social tourism policy.

Land grabbing nowadays

Current expressions of land grabbing in Patagonia can be classified into two basic types: (i) the acquisition of large areas, frequently by foreign investors, and (ii) the growing territorial claims of the descendants of formerly displaced, native peoples.

During the last decades, the acquisition of large land tracts by foreign investors has reached a prominent public status in Argentina, where the economic and legal conditions of the 1990s favored acquisitions and at the same time the dispossession of rural sectors with precarious land tenure (Murmis and Murmis 2012; Zoomers 2011). In Chile, new land acquisitions have been motivated by conservation objectives, not only by foreign buyers but also by local NGOs and other philanthropist individuals and organizations. The nature and dimension of this phenomenon has been reviewed by different authors (Di Giminiani and Fonck 2018; Holmes 2014, 2015). For example, the acquisitions made by foreign investors like Douglas Tompkins, Joe Lewis, Ted Turner, and Luciano Benneton on the Argentine side (Gorenstein and Ortiz 2016; Murmis and Murmis 2012; Smit 2017) are worth highlighting. Part of these acquisitions, particularly those by the Conservation Land Trust Foundation (Tompkins Conservation), pursue conservation objectives, either for their use value (e.g., ecotourism) or for the intrinsic value of biodiversity. Particularly in Chile, private protected areas are rapidly expanding and represent an important portion of the national territory (Rivera and Vallejos-Romero 2015).

While private conservation initiatives mostly fit into the postmodern imaginary (e.g., intergenerational responsibility, holistic integration, respect for diversity), modern and development visions of this phenomena have accused private protection initiatives of blocking productive uses of natural resources (Tecklin and Sepúlveda 2014). Thus, setting aside productive lands for conservation purposes has been qualified as a case of capital accumulation using politically correct motives or green grabbing (Holmes 2015). The indigenous imaginary generally rejects these two visions, by considering them forms of market-driven instruments that ultimately harm their ancestral rights in the territory (Meza 2009; Serenari et al. 2017b).

These new forms of conservation are highly contested, and their societal acceptance is still to be determined. Nonetheless “this imaginary has helped forge a hegemonic front among resident, corporate, and state actors supporting eco-regionalism: Southern Andean Patagonia as a space committed to green development” (Mendoza et al. 2017).

The Argentina´s “Land Law ” (Law 26,737) was enacted in 2011 setting the maximum surface by province that can be owned by foreigners, but it was made more flexible by the successor government in 2017. This law was initially promoted by an organization of small and medium farmers (Federación Agraria Argentina), in response to the impact exerted on this sector by the demand from foreign investors with high purchasing power. In Chile, while the attempt to enact a law limiting the extension of private reserves (presumably in favor of forestry enterprises) failed, the imaginaries behind private conservation have been successfully incorporated within the Chilean legislation, through, for example, the “Derecho Real de Conservación” (conservation easement) (Tecklin and Sepúlveda 2014) enacted in 2017.

On the other hand, the indigenous actions against these forms of appropriation of land in detriment of their own territorial claims have been the object of negative public reactions, violent repressions, and judicial persecution. In response to indigenous claims, the governments have promoted new institutions such as the “conservation communities” (Tecklin and Sepúlveda 2014), the “comanagement of protected areas” (Sepúlveda and Guyot 2016), and the “Espacios Costeros Marinos para Pueblos Originarios (ECMPO)” for the protection of customary uses practiced by indigenous communities settled in the coastal zone of Chile. They represent different syntheses between a certain recovery of indigenous territorial rights and the postmodern imaginary of relationship with nature (Araos et al. 2020; Candia 2013).

Far from an apparent “pacification,” the present decades are also the scene of new territorial disputes arising from conflicting imaginaries. In relative terms, the most recent stage of this long-lasting process of land grabbing is characterized by the following: (i) the gravitation of claims for land restitution than for further dispossessions, (ii) claims are featured by descendants of the many ethnic groups (e.g., Mapuche, Kaweskar, Yagán) who, even though no longer live in communities, are still organized around self-recognition of their cultural legacies and their ancestral rights over the territory (Zorondo-Rodríguez et al. 2019), and (iii) after several generations of apparent silence and invisibility, new demands include expressions of power, such as roadblocks, arson attacks, and the occupation of public and private lands. These shared ideas and expectations, from self-recognition to public interventions, clearly constitute a new imaginary, a type of neo-ethnicity (Bergesen 1977; Moynihan and Glazer 1975). This neo-ethnicity revives, for example, in the Wallmapu ancestral notion of the Mapuche’s territory at both sides of the mountain range (Barrera et al. 2019; Vitar 2010). Faced with the imaginaries of a desert, first, and of a land free of Indians, later, Mapuche demands for the restitution of their territories have awakened Argentines to the existence of other imaginaries that are not willing to disappear (Aliaga 2019).

4.2 Forestry Expansion

Whether as sources of natural resources , water and climate regulation, scenic beauty, biodiversity, or cultural identity, the Andean-Patagonian forests are an inescapable component of the narratives and social imaginaries about this region. Both modern and postmodern NSI about forests and forestry have contributed and still contribute to explain the current gravitation on Patagonian landscape.

Collisions between modern and postmodern NSI are clearly illustrated by the trajectory of Patagonian forestry. The next cases are aimed at illustrating the interplay between different NSI, scientific knowledge, and different stakeholders, around the access to which are perceived as antagonistic goods and services provided by forest ecosystems.

Transformations and deforestation of native forest lands during the early settlement period

Since the settlement times (early twentieth century), Argentine and Chilean governments promoted visions of state territoriality based on export-oriented agrarian capitalism, where landowners (mainly Europeans) established oligopolistic control over production and distribution networks to foreign markets (Bandieri 2009). These policies led to the increase in livestock (high stocking rates), mainly sheep, and promoted the overuse of forests by affecting natural regeneration dynamics (Gea-Izquierdo et al. 2004).

In the Chilean zone of Aysén as well as other Chilean forested zones in Southern Patagonia, the scarcity of land for ranching purposes and the directives from the central government led to extensive forest burnings that cleared large portions of the original forest cover (Robinson 2013). For example, Bizama et al. (2011) determined a loss of approximately 23% of native forests and also an increase in the number of forest fragments (<100 ha) as a result of the settlement processes in the Aysén River area during the twentieth century.

A quite different situation occurred in the Argentinean side of southern continental Patagonia, where the ranchers had a positive perception of most of the native forests that occupy less than 2% of the total area by providing shelter and good forage for animals (Peri et al. 2013), timber for rural construction, fences, and firewood (Peri et al. 2019). In Tierra del Fuego, the first settlements occurred in the grasslands and ecotone areas with Nothofagus antarctica forests . Through the years, and when the displacement of the native people was effective, the ranching moved to the southern areas where native forests were the dominant land cover. The girdling (capados) and burning of trees in large areas of forests were a common practice to increase the pasture allowance for livestock, leading to the degradation of most of the N. antarctica forests in the Chilean side of the Tierra del Fuego island and more than 30,000 ha (representing 4% of total forest original cover) of N. pumilio in the Argentinean side (Collado 2001).

The imaginary of the forest industry in Tierra del Fuego Island

An early perception of the native forest as the main obstacle for regional development allowed certain land conversion of the island’s forests to other uses, including grasslands and commercial plantations. However, starting a few decades ago, the public perception of foreign forest companies reduced forestry investments. This was because of society’s concern about large-scale forestry environmental impacts and potential antagonisms between forestry and nature-based tourism and the belief that forestry benefits are better secured by relatively small local companies as compared to big foreign enterprises. On the Argentine side, the discrediting of foreign companies increased after the war between Argentina and Great Britain for the Malvinas Islands in 1982.

The above sketched tension between modern and postmodern imaginary about forests and forestry can be illustrated by the case of the US-based Trillium Corporation, who acquired 625,000 ha on the Chilean and 185,000 ha on the Argentinean side of Tierra del Fuego (near 70% of the forests available for timber purposes) and sought to implement a large-scale logging project in Tierra del Fuego during the 1990s. Then a conflict started between Trillium Co. and environmentalist organizations in Argentina and Chile (Klepeis and Laris 2006), when NGOs and scientists suspected that logging rates exceeded forest resilience, generating losses in ES provision for the next generation.

The environmental movement in the case of Argentina was based on the number of hectares to be harvested each year, which overlooked the sustainable silvicultural proposal of Trillium. Environmental groups defended that big companies were unable to sustainably manage forests, as compared to smaller ones (Gamondes Moyano et al. 2016), and that large foreign companies were less prone to protect the natural resources as compared to local companies, against available information on the contrary (Martínez Pastur et al. 2007; Gea Izquierdo et al. 2004).

On the Chilean side, Trillium proposed the innovative Rio Condor sustainable forestry project (272,729 ha) to extract timber and enhance socioeconomic development in Tierra del Fuego. The imaginary of modernity associated with timber extraction found opposition from environmental groups, forest scientists, but also from within the government and the forest industry. After a 13-year dispute, the project was dismissed in 2004. Goldman Sachs, a global investment banking firm, acquired the loans and land and finally donated the property to the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) which created Karukinka Park. This conservation ensured the long-term protection of Nothofagus forests but also had negative economic impacts for local communities (e.g., Cameroon and El Porvenir on the Chilean side of Tierra del Fuego).

On the Argentinean side of the Tierra del Fuego Island, the company stopped their operations during several years and finally started again in 2019, but the conflict limited the development of the forestry sector due to the negative social perception and the native forestland availability. Nowadays, the company continues their operations at a lower scale (harvesting, silvicultural management, removal of cattle from forests, sawmill and secondary industry, and export of dry timber wood).

Chile’s industrial forestry expansion and Mapuche struggles for land

The expansion of large-scale industrial plantations based on nonnative tree species (Pinus radiata and Eucalyptus sp.) was imposed as a development model in Chile, and it was assisted by the controversial Law Decree 701 subsidy, which covered up to 70% of plantation costs. This process led to the replacement of thousands of hectares of native forest between the early 1970s and 1990s, with well-documented negative effects on biodiversity and ES (e.g., Heilmayr et al. 2016; Braun et al. 2017), which became to be known as the “Chilean native forest tragedy” (Hoffmann 1998). Despite the environmental and social impacts of native forest replacement, the plantation expansion model continued without much resistance until the 1990s when a great national awareness of the transformative power of nonnative tree plantations occurred, channeled through the actions of eminent scientists, civil society organized groups, and national and global environmental NGO.

Native forest replacement concentrated in central-southern Chile and northern Patagonia, where Mapuche communities are mainly located (Araucanía region). Industrial plantations were aligned with the modern imaginary against the imaginary of those who defended indigenous territorial identity and became the center of the Mapuche conflict (Latorre and Pedemonte 2016). The “Chilean forest model” based on plantations became internationally known for its economic success (Clapp 1995; Salas et al. 2016; Mora 2018) but at present suffers a legitimation crisis that derives from deep social discontent due to its socio-ecological effects at the local level (Mora 2018).

The recent stage of forest expansion in northern Chilean Patagonia has been problematized as a (neo) extractive process set in Chile’s turn toward a “green economy” which provides a framework within which forest policy is restructured, seeking an apparent more sustainable model (Mora 2018). On the one hand, the discourse of governments and the forest companies considers plantation as the only alternative for “sustainable development“in these areas, which reflects the renewal of the modern social imaginary currently framed in the green development model. Forest plantations become, specifically, the representative element in the construction of the territory as a productive cluster (Farris and Martínez-Royo 2019). On the other hand, opposing perspectives from organized local communities consider forest expansion as an imposition of extractive models that cause serious effects on their economic, environmental, and cultural system (Montalba et al. 2005). A central element of indigenous resistance to forest expansion is the imaginary of water as a common good rather than a human right vision which has been co-opted by neoliberalism. Among other effects, the plantations generate water scarcity, depriving the communities of this common good, while the native forest ensures the water supply: “Las forestales fuera de secar las aguas de las vertientes, esteros o ríos, también impiden que llueva. Ya que al exterminarse el bosque nativo huyen también los poderes o energías de las aguas, por eso los hermanos de más edad dicen: Los animalitos del agua se van, el Mowelfe wigkul (concepto que refiere a las fuerzas que posee la montaña) está dentro de la forestal” (Montalba and Carrasco 2003; Montalba et al. 2005), which can be translated like “The forestry companies outside of drying the waters of the springs, estuaries or rivers, also prevent rain, because when the native forest is exterminated, the powers or energies of the waters also flee. That is why the older brothers say: The animals are leaving the water, the Mowelfe wigkul (a concept that refers to the forces that the mountain possesses) is within the forest.”

The commons’ imaginary (Appadurai 1986) can be understood as a response to recent changes in our social, economic, and political lives, particularly those associated with economic globalization, decline of place-based communities and social identities, and global environmental and economic crises (Wagner et al. 2012).

4.3 Touristification

Patagonia is identified with notions of pristine, exotic, adventurous, uncontaminated, wild, majestic, and freedom, which feed the touristic stereotype that becomes its symbolic capital (Dimitriu 2002; Rodríguez et al. 2014; Decasper and Servalli 2016). For these reasons, this region was early perceived as having the potential to be sold as a destination and then promoted as such via market mechanisms, a process typified for other regions and localities of the world as “touristification.”

During a touristification process, the landscape per se does not immediately transform a place into a touristic destination, it must be conceptualized as such by particular actors (Dimitriu 2002; Bertoncello 2006; Merlos and Otero 2013; Nuñez 2018). Certain territorial aspects are privileged over others and highlighted to prospective customers, and these characteristics end up forming part of the social imaginary these regions are associated with. In this sense, territories become commodified, which means that the landscape is reconfigured and acquires certain economic value for people that can live or not inside the territories. In other words, places become products (Dimitriu 2002). Returning to our conceptual frameworks (Figs. 19.1 and 19.2), touristification processes can be seen as an expression of the modern imaginary about the relationship between society and nature, a shared behavior which influences the way in which natural capital is transformed into “consumer products” (shared expectations, governance) and the way it contributes to well-being (shared values and perceptions).

A brief history of Patagonian touristification

Some decades after the emergence of “social tourism” in charge of the Argentine government (see Sect. 4.1), the touristification process received a new boost from the 1990s’ national governments, this time through the installation of “tourist brands” as a form of promotion of certain localities. The role of the Ministry of Tourism has been essential in the construction of the tourist imagery installing a diversity of touristic products abroad, influenced by private interests (Decasper and Servalli 2016). Transnational tourism has formulated Southern Andean Patagonia as an exotic landscape and ES of consumer value for bourgeois leisure. The definition of tourist brands integrates the local economy to the global market, orienting consumption trends and exchange value and focusing on market demand (Dimitriu 2002) which links it to the modern social imaginary identified by Buckles (2018).

The consequences of the pursuit of the modern social imaginary in Patagonia tourism varied among different social groups. The progressive improvement of transport, hosting, and other facilities and services allowed for a growing access of direct beneficiaries (tourists) to this region’s attractions while enabling the flow of indirect benefits to tourist service providers (e.g., employers and employees in transport, hotel and gastronomy sectors, as well as other indirect beneficiaries).

On the other side, access to tourism benefits has had some negative influences on the environment and the social groups that depend on it. Private investments normally imply different mechanisms of exclusion to formerly public goods, and the tourism sector is no exception. Thus, private investments in tourism within Patagonia have threatened the access of local social groups to common goods and services provided by ecosystems or have led to the loss of such access. For example, one of the problems that are recurrently associated with the tourist appreciation of the region consists of the blocking of public access to the coasts of rivers and lakes or other natural areas of renowned beauty. Specifically, the free passage is limited, leaving these lands to the exclusive use of elites or those who are able to pay for its use (Abarzua and Di Nicolo 2018). Since free movement along these coasts is supported by the Argentinean and Chilean laws, these de facto blockades are a source of frequent conflicts.

In the following paragraphs, transformation and resistance forces emerging along different touristification processes illustrate the coexistence and relative influence of modern and postmodern imaginaries.

Residential projects or mismatches between values, expectations and behaviors

Mega-residential projects aimed at promoting elite tourism have triggered resistance reactions to the consequent clearing of large tracts of native forests for large buildings and the localized loss of the wild Patagonian seal. Such is the experience in El Bolsón (Llosa 2019) where a ski village is to be constructed near the small ski resort in Cerro Perito Moreno. This urbanization includes a protected area which has been declared Biosphere Reserve by UNESCO and, as Llosa (2019) puts it, confronts two imaginaries, one in which these developments are seen as necessary to boost the economy through tourism (modern social imaginary), whereas others perceive it as an environmental threat which puts at risk a different way of living which is more in tune with nature and relies on sustainability (postmodern social imaginary).

A similar case is that of Villa La Angostura, a town surrounded by a national park in the Neuquén province, whose distinctive hallmark is its small size, with leisure cabins scattered across a matrix of native forests. This touristic destination offers a unique investment opportunity against the economic fluctuations of the country as its land value has been constantly increasing over the decades in spite of the cycles of economic recession (Gluch 2019). Since the mid-1980s, the population has increased at a constant pace due to a series of migratory waves from the country’s urban centers, in search of a better lifestyle in contact with nature as well as new labor opportunities (TRECC 2007). A private initiative to build an urbanization project adjacent to the ski slopes in Cerro Bayo was confronted by NGOs and other environmental interest groups until the project was cancelled (Svampa and Viale 2014; Gluch 2019). This has resulted in a diversity of opposing actors, which has configured a heterogeneous society with contradictory interests. The town’s main stakeholders are confronted today by the tensions of opposing development models, one that threatens natural resources and the future of tourism as an economic activity that relies on them by accepting or promoting town growth and development and another that resists such transformations, aiming to protect nature assets and the “mountain village” hallmark. Both parties are standing on different theoretical imaginaries. One, represented by the environmental associations, emphasizes the idea of sustainability as its main objective, trying to preserve the system in its present state and protect the touristic image of the town, which it intends to promote. The other group, consisting of the professional associations together with the local government, claims that change is inevitable and is more confident in the buffer effect of the proximity of the national park for securing the pursuit of tourism as an economic activity (Gluch 2019). Because of the way in which power is distributed among the stakeholders, those who can directly intervene in the regulation and management of the locality’s natural resources are only a few, and the decisions made in terms of governance affect all beneficiaries. The implementation of these policies (e.g., granting of exceptions to those who do not follow them) is contested by the stakeholders nucleated within the environmental interest groups, who see a great risk in these actions as they do not share the development imaginary that lies at the bottom of these decisions (Gluch 2019).

Similar conflicting views around territorial development permeate the political and economic decisions taken in Aluminé, in the Neuquén province, where the Puel community has been dispossessed of their ancestral land, now highly valued by its beauty and touristic potential, and displaced into less fertile lands (Rodriguez 2015). Other examples of real estate speculation increasing land values occurred in coastal cities, such as Puerto Madryn, where local economy was inclined toward the tourist and service sector, resulting in disparities in terms of land access, creating social and ethnic urban segregation (Kaminker 2015).

In the case of Chile, we can see a similar situation, e.g., the region of Aysén, which until the 1980s was not part of the neoliberal project but was reconfigured in the 1990s as a “life reserve.” Nature became globally valued as a business niche that ended up attracting corporate investments (Núñez et al. 2018). This has resulted in the construction of elite oriented fishing lodges, boutique hotels, and many private natural reserves. An example of these new interests, mentioned by Núñez et al. (2018), is the project “Patagonian land, Premium lands in the southern end of South America,” which belongs to a binational company dedicated to health and tourism. The process of elite or high-income touristification has led to the privatization of large extensions of previously public areas. A particular aspect in Chile is the link between private conservation and touristification of nature, with large areas such as Pumalín, Tantauco, and Karukinka oriented toward nature-based tourism for higher-income level visitors.

Touristification and consumerism

Modern tourism in Patagonia or anywhere in the world responds to psychosocial factors which are common to modern (and postmodern) consumerism behavior (Korstanje and Seraphin 2017). Focusing on the consumer as an agent, it is worth asking what individual and contextual factors shape our intentions and decisions to use the free time to join the torrent of mass tourism, compared to enrolling in more authentic experiences, distanced from corporatized tourism and closest to, for example, volunteering tourism for social and/or environmental purposes. From the available knowledge, it is difficult to disentangle the influence of imageries promoted from institutions, from those driven by shared preferences and even to dimension to what extent these mechanisms reinforce each other. Perhaps, autonomous modifications of consumer behavior are not sufficient as forces of resistance against the touristification process, or as transforming forces, where this process has been installed; perhaps the future that is coming demands new institutions compatible with more sustainable tourism (Higgins-Desbiolles 2010).

Synthesis of touristification versus independent trajectories

Analyzed cases suggest that development of tourism in the Argentine side of Patagonia has been largely dictated by the views and discourses of powerful stakeholders who hold political and economic capital under the modern social imaginary. Private investments displace lower-income families to less-valued areas and advance over natural assets (e.g., resources and viewsheds). This posture has meant that other social imaginaries, held by local environmental interest groups or indigenous communities, have been relegated. As a common result, touristic destinations act as powerful attractors to the establishment of amenity migrants, promoting fast population growth, bolstering construction, and increasing land value and speculation. Such trajectories have been previously described in Argentina for Villa La Angostura (Merlos and Otero 2013; Paez and Otero 2014; Gluch 2019), San Martín de los Andes, Aluminé and Villa Pehuenia-Moquehue in Neuquén province (Impemba 2008; Svampa and Viale 2014; Valverde et al. 2015; Abarzua and Di Nicolo 2018), for San Carlos de Bariloche (Landriscini et al. 2019; Rodriguez 2019) and El Bolsón in Rio Negro province (Llosa 2016, 2019), and for Lago Puelo and El Hoyo of Epuyén in Chubut province (Crespo 2017).

4.4 Damming of Rivers for Hydroelectric Use

The first hydroelectricity plant in Chile and second in South America was built in 1897, but the expansion of hydropower as a source of transformation of the territory began after the postwar period and the Cold War (1940s to early 1980s). That momentum of the hydroelectric sector in Chile was aligned with the modern imaginary linked to the manipulation, control, and industrialization of nature, typical of modernity and functional to the sense of nation. Thus, the hydroelectric plants became “the temples of modernity” in the western imaginary of the 1960s (Purcell 2018).

This modern imaginary consolidated within a neoliberal institutional framework (1973–1990) that included reforms in both the water and electricity sectors (Prieto and Bauer 2012; Susskind et al. 2014) aiming to a larger participation of the market as the hegemonic approach toward natural resources governance (Prieto and Bauer 2012).

The generation of hydroelectricity in Chilean Patagonia forms part of the mining-energy-development trilogy, which reflects the interconnectivity between extreme northern regions where copper mining is mainly located, with the energy potential of the southern region. These constitute some of the keys ordering the territory and the new role of Patagonia within a country where development necessarily implies an increase in energy demand (Rodríguez et al. 2015). The expansion of hydropower as a modernizing imaginary is reinforced by the “green growth” discourse as a new version of the modernization ideas that promoted dams during the 1960s. In the green economy, hydropower plays a key role in both climate change mitigation (e.g., low carbon electricity source and as an enabler for other renewable energy sources) and climate adaptation and in a green energy transition (Hommes 2019; Schapper et al. 2020).

In Patagonia, a territory that until recently was considered the last frontier of capitalism (Mendoza et al. 2017), hydropower expansion has led to the confrontation between the imaginaries represented by different actors and different discourses; the most emblematic example is HydroAysén (companies Enel Chile and Colbún). In this context, the Patagonia Sin Represas (PWD) movement, Chile’s largest environmental campaign, which enabled organizations and activists to find the common ground needed to collaborate (Schaeffer 2017), was raised through narratives on history, the environment, geography, and culture, and that served as the basis for rebuilding Patagonia-Aysén territory (Núñez et al. 2017). These elements, combined with a new political and social context in the country, help understand the halt of HidroAysén, one of the PDW movement’s most important achievements (Schaeffer 2017).

 The most powerful actors, including national and international environmental organizations, environmental entrepreneurs, anti-dam organizations and other local organizations, established in Aysén what Núñez et al. (2017) called an “ecopower”. As a social force, this “ecopower”, aimed at promoting consensus on the central role of Patagonia’s natural capital for Chile’s development, through legal reforms and institutions, the dissemination of an alternative society/nature relationship, the designation of areas for environmental conservation, and the alternative use of resources (Núñez et al. 2017). This ecopower re-imagined Patagonia as a “blessed land” and as an “extension of the hand of God”, as a “reserve of natural and existential life, as a refuge from the aggressiveness and exhaustion of modernity and extractivist accumulation model” (Rodríguez et al. 2015: Urrutia et al. 2019).

In the case of Argentina; the hydroelectric projects are carried out by the state and private companies in the last three decades of the twentieth century, which produced the resettlement or forced relocation of many local populations that resided near them, e.g., El Chocón-Cerros Colorados, Alicurá, Piedra del Águila, and Pichi Picún Leufú over Limay and Neuquén rivers. These ventures, imbued with ideas of development and progress, aimed to control floods, increase irrigation areas and improve the national provision of electricity at preferential prices through renewable sources of energy. Mapuche communities, such as the Painemil in Cerros Colorados, those who lived in Pilquiniyeu del Limay in Rio Negro or the Ancatruz in the Neuquén province, were forced to leave behind their settlements. Small-scale producers experienced the same situation in the areas adjacent to the Colorado river, or even whole towns, such as Pichi Picún Leufú. Several of these relocations occurred under the government of the military dictatorship of 1966–1973, while others took place during the 1980’s. However, in some cases as private ranches, like Alicurá, they were compensated for the loss of their lands (Radovich and Balazote 2005).

Compensations, however, presented disparities in terms of who was benefited and how, depending on who were recognized as landowners by the state or mere occupants of fiscal land. The Mapuche community who lived in Pilquiniyeu del Limay was given a greater extension of land and of superior quality to the ones which had to be sacrificed, by expropriating the “María Sofia” Ranch which was annexed to the reserve. While others, such as the rural population in Pichi Picún Leufú or the small-scale breeders around El Chocón, received meagre payments. Some rural settlers were forced to migrate toward precarious urban areas. Indigenous communities recognized by the state, like Pilcaniyeu del Limay, were successful in presenting collective land claims as a form of resistance. Others, however, as in Casa de Piedra, found resistance and collective protests repressed by threatening community leaders (Radovich and Balazote 2005). Strategic political and economic interests were imposed in terms of regional development, generating stress, loss of community ties, and a sense of belonging toward the land.

Similar situations occurred recently in Santa Cruz province, with the Kirchner-Cepernic dams, formerly known as Cóndor Cliff-La Barrancosa. The undertaking was awarded in August 2013 to the consortium formed by Electroingeniería S.A., China Gezhouba Group Company Ltd., and Hidrocuyo S.A., which has since been questioned by private lawyer associations, social movements, environmental organizations, and indigenous peoples due to the absence of an appropriate environmental feasibility study and lack of transparency in the decision process. In addition, the World Bank disqualified the Gezhouba Group in 2015 due to misconduct in three bank-financed projects in China related to water conservation, earthquake recovery, and flood management (Acevedo 2017; Mora 2018). In spite of strong popular opposition, the Argentine national and local government decided to pursue the endeavor and signed an agreement with the Chinese government. After the national elections of 2015, the Association of Environmental Lawyers of Patagonia filed a new appeal to the Supreme Court, which finally unanimously ordered the suspension of the project. As Mora (2018) and Mora-Motta (2018) suggest these social resistances show different perceptions and valuations around nature which collide with dominant discourses and imaginaries while evidencing inequalities in terms of the distribution of environmental degradation as well as the exclusion of society at large from the natural resource governance and land use.

During the 1990s, Latin-American indigenous groups gained international visibility, and new laws were passed opening discussions around these inclusion and exclusion practices. The defense of human rights, particularly those of marginal groups, gained importance in political debate (Kropff 2005; Carpinetti 2006). In Argentina, this process involved questioning the social imaginary through which the idea of nation had been built, in a land considered as devoid of indigenous communities, which had become extinct (Carpinetti 2006). This did not necessarily imply the disappearance of a derogatory hegemonic discourse, which denied these peoples of their rights and history, invisibilizing them in order to legitimize the prevalence of development over local interests (Kropff 2005). This allowed the state to enforce megaprojects over powerless popular sectors, small producers, and impoverished Mapuche populations (Radovich and Balazote 2000).

5 Discussion and Recommendations

The role of social imaginaries on nature’s governance is an emerging topic with still few examples (Hommes et al. 2016; Gluch 2019; Archibald et al. 2020). In agreement with these studies, the cases revised in this chapter have allowed to highlight the role of NSI on the use and transformation of natural capital. NSI can be recognized as main factors underlying controversies regarding nature governance, whether influencing the shared perception of nature contributions to well-being, the shared expectations about behaviors (governance institutions), or the final decisions affecting natural capital. The relative importance of different mechanisms by which NSI influence SES trajectories (Fig. 19.2) may be inferred from the compiled information (Table 19.1).

Table 19.1 Influence mechanisms of nature-society imaginaries (NSI) on socio-ecological systems (SES); some examples as illustrated by the analyzed controversies around governance of Patagonian SES
Full size table

The NSI promotes social cohesion in the face of the dispersion of interests through mechanisms that provide feedback and regulate the objectives and decisions of society in relation to nature, including “slow” variables such as values, beliefs, and norms that underlie practices. Our studied cases also illustrate that NSI can promote transformation mainly through mechanisms capable of eroding resistance against competing NSI, e.g., in Sect. 4.2, NSI with different roles were described in relation to industrial forestry. While recent attempts to expand the forestry industry in Tierra del Fuego (during the post-dictatorship periods in Argentina and Chile) were regulated by the free expression of values and beliefs shared by the local population, during the dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet, Pinus spp. and Eucalyptus spp. plantations replaced large tracts of the native forest of Chile almost without restrictions, affecting landscapes and ES provision.

Our revision of study cases revealed that expressions of the postmodern imaginary are as diverse as complex, sometimes taking the form of resistance to forest transformation, which can lead to other forms of transformation such as touristification or green grabbing. Often, public policies that obey to opposing imaginaries are self-justifying in their positive consequences on the general well-being. Socio-environmental sustainability has already permeated the different discourses and does not exert a clear dividing line between the imaginaries, e.g., Trillium case suggests that governance of forests in the Tierra del Fuego is not merely based on scientific or technical knowledge nor on public perceptions or individual preferences. While more scientifically and economically than perceptually based decisions are claimed from one side, or more attention to economic opportunity costs are claimed from other sides, these arguments were overridden by the prevalence of environmentalists’ NSI, clearly more prone to the application of precautionary principle.

While all the components of the components of the imaginaries’ machinery are necessary for explaining NSI influence on socio-ecological systems, the relevance of shared behaviors is self-evident. Modern tourism in Patagonia or anywhere in the world responds to psychosocial factors which are common to modern (and postmodern) consumerism behavior (Korstanje and Seraphin 2017). Focusing on the consumer as an agent, it is worth asking what individual and contextual factors shape our intentions and decisions to use the free time to join the torrent of mass tourism, compared to enrolling in more authentic experiences, distanced from corporatized tourism and closest to, for example, volunteering tourism for social and/or environmental purposes. From the available knowledge, it is difficult to disentangle the influence of imageries promoted from institutions, from those driven by shared preferences, and even to dimension to what extent these mechanisms reinforce each other. Perhaps, autonomous modifications of consumer behavior are not sufficient as forces of resistance against the touristification process, or as transforming forces, where this process has been installed; perhaps the future that is coming demands new institutions compatible with more sustainable tourism (Higgins-Desbiolles 2010).

As we said before, the particular case of the indigenous NSI cannot be separated from their more comprehensive worldview nor from their continued claim for their territory rights. Despite the adversity of the higher-ranking institutions for these claims, the success of the Mapuche NSI is directly reflected in the behaviors of resistance legitimized and promoted by their organizations and partly guaranteed by new institutions. Constitutional reforms in Argentina and Chile that recognize the ethnic and cultural preexistence of indigenous peoples have allowed Mapuche communities to legally confront provincial and national governments (Radovich 2013; Crespo and Tozzini 2013) with variable success. These groups have also engaged in the building of networks with other social actors. Such is the case of forums where indigenous and rural communities have converged with neighboring groups in Lago Puelo, Cholila, Epuyén, and El Hoyo, to prevent the building of a hydroelectric dam on Lake Lezama (Crespo and Tozzini 2013). This constitutes, as a member of a Mapuche community verbalized, “an alliance of the weak” (Gluch 2019), whereby common threats create the potential for joint action between groups that had previously ignored each other or seen themselves as antagonists, over the defense of the environment in the light of the recognition of the rights of marginalized groups.

The recognition of NSI as factors that affect the trajectory of SES opens to new research questions. For example, what kind of SES trajectories can be promoted by NSI changes? What is the importance of the type of governance and power distribution among social actors over the interplay between different NSI? How compatible is a governance based on both scientific knowledge and local and indigenous knowledge forms plus different social imaginaries? Is the free expression and interaction between these imaginaries capable of promoting more sustainable trajectories? Is it true that the more science and less social imaginaries, the better public decisions in terms of fairness and sustainability? In the face of increasing environmental impairment and social conflict, should imaginaries be changed? As stated by Stephenson Jr (2011), “imaginaries may be changed, but only if those espousing them are given reason to bring them to consciousness, reflect afresh on their foundations, and embrace an alternate conception.”

While these questions are beyond the scope of this chapter, the cases reviewed offer a preliminary perspective on the tremendous challenge involved in any attempt to answer them through generalizations. The influence of NSI on governance is apparently idiosyncratic, but certainly, it cannot be neglected, and socio-ecological sustainability requires plenty of attention to how desirable imaginaries can be promoted. Although we could not answer to which imaginaries should be promoted, the important fact is that “social imaginaries can be changed by theories that penetrate and transform the social imaginary, and when this happens, people take up, improvise, or are inducted into new practices” (Taylor 2005). For example, in these times of the COVID-19 pandemic, when a very high percentage of economic activity and jobs which depend on tourism now rely on external economic help or are disappearing, social vulnerability of highly touristified destinations is evident. Therefore, is touristification or should it be the only imagined option of development? Probably it is time to explore alternative imaginaries which are, eventually, much closer to the attributes of the postmodern social imaginary, where a central role is assigned to the local economy and the needs of the local communities, where tourism is seen as a complementary income and focuses on an economy that develops at a slower pace and a different scale, more respectful for nature assets, allowing for a more sustainable development (e.g., Dimitriu 2002; Higgins-Desbiolles 2010).

In sum, the NSI that can be identified in Patagonia are not essentially different from those observed in the rest of the world. The dynamic character of these imaginaries is not exclusive to this region either. Conflicts previously reserved for small negotiating tables, and often silenced by the force of power, today permeate wider circles of society. The rise of new forms of communication and social networks is already playing a role in the evolution of NSI imaginaries that exceed local interactions and represent new forms of tele-coupling between societies and ecosystems separated in space and time.