Sistema Regional de Información
en línea para Revistas Científicas de América Latina,
el Caribe, España y Portugal

The successful transition to democracy during the last decades in Latin America, has been accompanied by deep economic reforms, transformation and creation of significant political institutions. Nevertheless, governability has not left behind some of the old mechanisms inherited from the colony. A Neopopulism has settled in the continent having seriously obstructed the democratic process in blossoming. The intermediation of the populist mechanisms in the framework of the proposed changes, with the only exception of Chile, constitutes a generalized practice. In this country, the agreement between elites has been privileged, excluding the populist negotiation; and the obtained political consensus explains its gains. This case contrasts with the situation in the rest of the continent, where the fragility of governability in most of the new democracies, has made authoritarian alternatives reborn.

In this article are presented the results that emerged from incorporating lessons of Awareness through Movement (ATM) -as a pedagogical strategy- to recognize and act on behalf of our internal and external environment, conducted with an inter-professional women group. The group is formed and then investigates itself, under the approach of Participatory Investigation-Action, and seeks to better understand the processes of environmental education in the fields of health and environment.

Today we have a global conscience which places humankind with a responsability towards life on earth as an ethical demand and as a condition for the possibility for all future life. Utility and ethics must meet in this challenge. Globalization is a different process, of a more practical nature: globalization of messages, numbers, transportation, with the subsequent global disponibility, digitaly instantaneous and at a minimum rate of time when it comes to physical transportation. This allows global markets, social division of labour nets, all plannified by private multinational burocracies and global production enterprises. Within this reality, to face global threats is certainly a political problem, but one that cannot succeed without developping a culture which can allow and motivate responsability. Universities are the key institutions for the formulation and promotion of this responsability culture in connection with a culture of hope.

The article discusses the concepts of gender and sustainability, and then sees how they are perceived by the indigenous movement, and checks if in its appropriation it has or not gone beyond the theory. Then addresses the relationship between poverty and environmental degradation, challenging the indictment posed to natives of the environmental crisis in the world, and the consequent demand from rich countries to poor countries so that from this premise they should be the ones to solve the problem, while rich countries keep on destroying the ecosystem on the pretext of economic growth or even over its own concept of sustainable development.

From radical feminism to ecofeminism, the domain of women and exploitation of nature appear as a result of the formation of hierarchical social structures, since patriarchy and gerontocracy. In this context, the author argues that ecofeminism has tried to open a debate on the place of gender difference in the processes of social hierarchy organized around phallocentrism.

This essay proposses a discussion on the concept of civil society, in order to restate it from a point of view which privileges the normative moment of theoretical construction, from an epistemological rather than a theoretical function, in articulation with an active citizenship and with strategies of local governance which privileges the belonging of the citizens to a certain political community. In the realm of globalization today’s processes local development require to give complexity to the relationship of different actors who participate in these processes, beyond the state-market relationship. For that purpose we work over a normative concept of civil society and its relationship with active society, which we then problematize by including strategies of citizenship participation including strategies for citizen participation in local governance. We end with a few notes on the role of participative investigation in the referred relationship we formerly proposed, all in the frame of an horizon where another democracy is possible.

This article provides an overview of the possibilities, but also of the difficulty of inter- and transdisciplinary collaboration. Principal characteristics of sustainability are complexity and interdependence, therefore the task of implementing in this domain is complex and varied. For resolving sustainable development problems, simple descriptions of cause-action mechanisms are not sufficient. There is a need for proceedings that satisfy the complexity, that give sustainability a common use, and that furthermore do not run the risk of being oversimplified. In the first section of the article, inter- and transdisciplinarity are presented at first as adequate principles with which it is possible to elaborate general solutions for complex problems. To solve comprehensively the complex problems of sustainability, different (scientific) methods have been developed over the past years that are being applied in research and teaching. In this case, it is about approaches that do not belong to a particular scientific discipline, but that cross them. With the goal of obtaining data for solving complex problems in practice, section two presents common inter- and transdisciplinary approaches and applications. The last section presents a summary of the different methods mentioned.

This paper tackles some of the social changes that affect the hope of the fulfilment of promises inscribed in the social imaginary about education, and it’s link with the 2006 students demonstrations in Chile during 2006. These promises, nowadays unaccomplished for most of the people, are part of  what, in this article is considered a myth about education,  which was condensed, in Chile, in a social discourse based in the meritocratic principle, which does not have, nowadays, the vitality it used to have. The paradox observed between the importance given by society to education (shown in the considerable increase of public investment), good results in most of the most important variables and the people’s increasing dissatisfaction with the quality of education, is explained in this paper starting from the consideration of education as a ritual practice that has lost it sense that gave origin and support, in a present society of fast and deep changes.

The central thesis in this article says that the disciplinary “confinement centers” described by Foucault: “jail, hospital, factory, school, family, are going trough a generalized crisis”. We are living the decline of the “disciplinary society”, which was “the succesor of the sovereign societies”, whose ends and functions were completely different. These emerged on the XVII y XVIII centuries, until the half part of the XXth., and were the main sinterest of Foucault’s investigations. The current society is denominated as “control society”, control which is exercized fluedly on open spaces, in a deterritorialized manner, through the psycho-pharmaceutics, television adiction, marketing, private debt and consume, among other modalities. What is essential to them are the fluctuating and interchangeable figures as those who represent value of one currency expressed on another, the perpetuum surfing which substitutes slow and strategic-like sports such as boxing. The factories are replaced by the enterprises, which are ductileand changeable formations, the simple machines for computarized systems of producton and control. The in-dividuality is substituted by external “dividualities”, informatizade and informatizables,  who travel in a virtual space.

¿Which is the state of hydric resources in Chile? The following text gives us an exhaustive analysis of the situation of water in Chile, bringig up elements of standing laws and the use of such laws by privates, mainly on the mining sector, the hydroelectrical industry and the export-oriented agoindustry. The creation of a water market based on solely mercantilistic criteria, constitutes one of the most important consequences of such transformation in the last thirty years. The demand of the comunity brought forth during the nineties, in regards to a better control over the use of the hydric resources, is in the core of cititzen’s reivindication, which demands more and better answers from political power.