Ecological legal fictions: land subdivisions, property, and conservation in Southern Chile

This article examines how derecho real de conservación (DRC)—a legal mechanism created in 2016 in Chile—has been repurposed in rural subdivisions in the country's south. Originally designed to promote environmental protection by allowing landowners to impose restrictions on their own property, the DRC has increasingly been used in large-scale private developments to legitimize forms of use that would otherwise be prohibited by planning law. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in the Región de Los Lagos in southern Chile, we analyse how these so-called conservation parcels operate as ‘ecological legal fictions’. This means showing how DRCs act as juridical constructs that simulate protection while effectively enabling real estate growth in areas of high environmental value. We argue that, far from signalling a postneoliberal turn in environmental governance, these practices reproduce the logic of commodified nature, bypassing public regulation and reinforcing private control over territory. A better suited conservation mechanism, as proposed here, is a multisystemic approach to rural planning that considers the ecological, legal and cultural layers at stake.