The Socio-Legal Infrastructure of Rural Property: Time, Space and Persons at the Climate Change Crossroads in Chile

This thesis demonstrates that private rural property in Chile constitutes a significant barrier to addressing climate change challenges, particularly regarding adaptation and coordination efforts. Whilst the individual, absolute and exclusive nature imposed by the property regime is predicated on the demand for legal certainty, climate change embodies the very opposite: profound uncertainty. I argue that this tension impedes coordination amongst actors, creating critical scenarios for rural development. Through the lenses of legal geography, legal consciousness, and critical property theory, I develop an empirical legal analysis employing historical-archival research, geographical information systems, and Q methodology to examine how property law materialises through the confluence of time, space, and persons.

My findings reveal rural property's socio-legal infrastructure-an integrated system where temporal narratives, spatial patterns, and subjective consciousness operate through av conflating of legal certainty, juridical security, and land tenure security. The military dictatorship fused these distinct concepts into apparent technical unity, creating a specifically neoliberal configuration that generates self-contradictions the regime cannot resolve. Property's legal certainty functions as a political device that denies the past by erasing agrarian reform objectives, consolidates the present through property's dephysicalisation, and forecloses the future by rejecting distributive possibilities-precisely when climate uncertainty demands collective coordination.

The infrastructure's temporal dimension reveals how property narratives materialised through three periods: entrepreneurial (1950s), socio-communitarian (1964-1973), and technocratic (1980-2023). The entrepreneurial narrative decoupled property's social and productive functions. The socio-communitarian narrative democratically recoupled these functions, emphasising redistribution. The technocratic narrative consolidated the decoupling, depoliticising property as market facilitator. This established path dependencies that constrained collective responses. The spatial dimension manifests through simultaneous concentration and fragmentation-complementary processes stemming from the same ideological coupling that prioritises individual sovereignty over trans-boundary coordination, threatening both food security and export capacity.

Q methodology reveals how these contradictions generate fragmented legal consciousness in the subjective dimension. Four perspectives transcend class boundaries: small farmers defending absolute property more vehemently than entrepreneurs (Factor 1); landless actors mobilising reform memory for transformative futures (Factor 2); technicians and brokers embracing pragmatic adaptation within systemic constraints (Factor 3); and traditional elites alongside medium peasants forging hierarchical alliances that naturalise existing asymmetries (Factor 4). Whilst all acknowledge climate threats, profound fissures emerge regarding concrete implications. The apparent consensus masks irreconcilable positions about property rights' content and boundaries, revealing that the infrastructure produces subjects who defend the very system marginalising them. This impossibility of self-transformation establishes state mediation as empirical imperative.