The governmentality of governance and governability in indigenous communities in Chile

In the last few decades, the social sciences as well as international organizations and national governments have introduced the concepts Governability and Governance in an attempt to better capture the complexity of State-Society relations and improve public policy, respectively. As these terms have increasingly become part of our vocabulary, they have also increasingly structured our perspectives and defined public policies. The present paper uses the governmentality framework to analyze the use of these two concepts in the “conduction” of indigenous demands in Chile for autonomy and sovereignty in the last 20 years. We argue that, for this particular case, the two terms have emerged as complementary strategies: the State uses repressive force to protect private property and maintain “governability” in indigenous territories, while it also offers greater “cultural awareness” and “participation” through new governance-type arrangements. Using discourse analysis of official documents and interviews with Mapuche leaders, we analyze the influence that these two terms have had in controlling the demands while also obstructing resolution of the conflict.