Social, Ecological, and Technological Transition Approach (SETT): Rethinking Extractive Landscapes and Alternative Futures in Latin America

To understand productive transformations, two main approaches have emerged. First, extractivist dynamics have been widely critiqued by Latin American political ecology due to their inability to achieve the desired social and economic development. Similarly, the incorporation of sustainable measures in industries is often met with skepticism due to the potential expansion of extractive frontiers. Second—closely linked to the first point—European ecological modernization theory, despite its capacity to describe institutional and economic transformations in developed societies, has been questioned when addressing the situation of dependent and peripheral countries.

Our proposal seeks to understand Latin American extractive landscapes not only as evidence of multiple modes of domination but also as assemblages that construct social realities. In this way, we propose a social, ecological, and technological approach that allows us to observe and analyze productive transformations in remote regions. Based on two ongoing research projects on the lithium industry in the Atacama Desert and the potential Green Hydrogen industry in Patagonia, we propose the SETT (Social, Ecological, and Technological Transition) approach as a way of understanding both habitability in extractive economies and the tensions surrounding alternative futures to extractivism in local territories.

This understanding highlights the "coordination" capacity that extractive dynamics achieve to ensure their persistence, while also emphasizing the assemblage of extractive infrastructures with social biographies in vast, non-urban landscapes.

This paper contributes to: i) developing non-binary discussions in contemporary Latin American environmental sociology, ii) linking the social, ecological, and technological dimensions in industrial landscapes criticized by the social sciences, and iii) bringing together disciplines such as sociology, ecology, and engineering from a transdisciplinary perspective.