The world's largest deposits of lithium lie in brines found underneath salt flats in the desert between Chile, Argentina and Bolivia. Globally, lithium may reduce fossil fuel use by making batteries for cars and renewable energy storage more affordable. This article analyzes ongoing debates about lithium in these three countries to identify what hopes, fears and expectations different stakeholders are bringing to debates about lithium. My approach builds on the idea of resource imaginaries, particularly the concept of sociotechnical imaginaries that highlights the importance of science and technology to projections of desirable futures. I analyze the tensions, visions and metaphors used by different stakeholders, including activists, the media, and state and industry officials, to imagine and thus legitimate lithium extraction. This study finds three co-existing positions in these debates: lithium as a commodity, as a strategic resource or as the subject of a sociotechnical imaginary. Chile, Argentina and Bolivia are converging on the last of these, best described as a reimagining of the relationship between mining and development in which lithium, through innovation and industry, will redefine the relationship between Latin American economies and global markets. This imaginary projects a binary between raw and industrial materials and deterministically assumes that science and technology will transform the former into the latter. Disagreements and challenges notwithstanding, the article argues that this imaginary is evidence of a crisis of confidence in development that is creating space for a more dynamic debate about the social value of mining and the proper role of the state in development. This convergence will have also implications for how sustainable, equitable and reliable lithium production will be.

In 2010 Chilean legislators replaced a small environmental coordinating agency with an Environment Ministry, an autonomous Environmental Impact Assessment Agency, an enforcement agency, and specialized tribunals. Though ambitious, the reform failed to meet the stated objective of depoliticizing environmental decision-making. Instead, the reforms strengthened the authority of the central state, justified on the premise that decisions would now be based on 'technical criteria', meaning rules rather than politics. Comparing the creation (1990-1994) and reform (2009-2010) of Chile's environmental institutions, it is demonstrated that a defining feature of Chilean political culture involves treating rules as if these were independent of the state. Chilean lawmakers use rules as science is used elsewhere: as an 'objective' voice separate from politics, that helps legitimate decisions. Appeals to the rules were used to increase the central state's authority and exclude local representatives, concerned communities, and scientists from environmental decision-making.

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Worldwide, governments use environmental impact assessments (EIAs) to manage the environmental impacts of industrial activity. EIAs contain baselines that describe the specific environment where the project would go, and impact evaluations that identify ways to eliminate, reduce, or compensate the environmental harms the project would have. Although EIA baselines promised to democratize and improve decision-making, in practice, many affected communities, environmental activists, and scholars of EIAs find that baselines often obscure certain ecological impacts. Drawing on science and technology studies and environmental history, I reflect on why this happens and propose that it results from the ways in which EIA baselines reproduce modernist views of economic growth and progress. I analyze EIA baselines as a “memory practice” which meet the needs of the present by projecting a timeless, static past to be preserved. This naturalization of modernism can be challenged through two correctives: to compare projects rather than natures in EIA baselines, and to document existing and potential forms of “rubble” resulting from industrial activity. I illustrate these arguments with the case of glaciers and efforts to protect them from the impacts of the Pascua Lama gold mine located in the high-altitude Andes.

The recently completed National Citizens' Technology Forum (NCTF) was the first nationwide consensus conference in the US. This paper argues that the exercise serves as a proof-of-concept for this mode of public participation in the governance of emerging technologies. The NCTF demonstrated the feasibility of conducting such exercises across three time zones, and illustrated the compatibility of the consensus conference process with American political norms in practice. It provides additional evidence that, given a structured, constructive environment for deliberation, and access to information and expertise, lay citizens can and do produce policy-relevant recommendations in highly technical arenas. Finally, the experience indicates opportunities for future improvements in integrating input from the public, stakeholders, and experts into the policy-making process.