Energy Transition and Environmental Impact Assessment: When New Projects Collide with Indigenous Worldviews of Nature in South America

The environmental impact assessment in indigenous territories raises the issue of the lexematic distance between indigenous discourses and those of authorities and companies in the context of energy transition projects. Based on years of field research in the Southern Cone of America and employing an analysis based on typological reconstruction, this paper argues that indigenous worldviews stand as alterity against the referential frameworks of environmental impact assessments. The paradigmatic clash around the new projects assessment given the rights to Indigenous participation and consultation, explains numerous environmental conflicts on the ground. They can also severely delay energy transition processes due to the incommensurability of perspectives. Beyond the anthropological theories of the ontological turn that describe these differences, this paper proposes a political economy approach introducing the concept of symbolic value, which can comprehend these indigenous worldviews and facilitate a dialogue with the exchange value and use value of the territories. The symbolic value concept is coherent with ecological perspectives and it is capable of being operationalized in environmental assessment processes.