by Pablo & Lorenza Reyes
Introduction: Used futures internalized as epistemology
Latin America’s contemporary history reveals itself not only through material interventions—from the Monroe Doctrine’s territorial declarations, through Cold War counterinsurgency operations, structural adjustment programs of the 1980s-90s, to today’s lithium megaprojects across the Andean salt flats—but through the interpretative frameworks that render certain futures thinkable while actively excluding others as irrational, unfeasible, or merely “cultural.” These frameworks operate as “used futures” (Inayatullah, 2008), delimiting possibility horizons before analysis even begins.
Chile’s Salar de Atacama—ground zero for global lithium extraction supplying 30% of world demand—crystallizes this dynamic. The Chilean Economic Development Agency (CORFO) coordinates export megaprojects with the Sociedad Química y Minera de Chile (SQM) and Albemarle while Lickan Antay communities defend aquifers central to millennia of territorial reciprocity. Conventional stakeholder analysis frames this as power negotiation: high-influence state agencies vs profit-driven corporates vs rights-bearing communities.
Sustained observation reveals deeper complexity. CORFO faces simultaneous export revenue imperatives from green transition demands and legitimacy erosion from indigenous mobilization. Corporate divisions balance quarterly production deadlines against evaporating social license as aquifers drop 2+ meters annually. Lickan Antay authorities navigate technical negotiations required for legal standing alongside ceremonial reassertion of ancestral water governance where aquifers constitute living kin relations, not extractable commodities.
These dynamics reveal behaviors contradictory through rational-actor lenses but coherent as contextually configured responses. The same CORFO division permitting lithium expansion blocks indigenous consultation mechanisms the following month. Corporate sustainability officers champion “water stewardship” while operations drill contested aquifers. Community leaders sign hydrographic agreements while mobilizing mallku, an Andean ancestral authority through which territory and water are enacted as living relations rather than resources during droughts. Identities persist; enacted responses shift dramatically across relational contexts.
This paper argues conventional foresight methodologies—scenario planning workshops, stakeholder power-interest matrices, STEEPV variable projection, three-horizon frameworks—reproduce colonial epistemologies through inherited analytic units. The rationalist actor (context-separable, utility-driven) structures not just gunboat diplomacy but Latin American consulting practice today. Institutional routines, MBA curricula imported from US business schools, McKinsey templates normalize Cartesian separations, linear temporality, representational adequacy over relationality (Varela et al., 1991).
When living systems get parsed through stable-entity assumptions, extractivist coordination amplifies while situated relationalities remain invisible. Predictability prevails; multi-generational reciprocity organized around relational forms of coordination such as ayllus, mingas, tequio gets marginalized as “cultural friction.” Foresight deployed across lithium governance or organizational transformation carries identical presuppositions—futures as external scenarios to navigate, not relational achievements to cultivate.
This reveals a deeper layer that often remains unexamined in foresight practice. Used futures do not only operate as narratives about development, sovereignty, or progress. They also sediment into the very tools through which systems are read. Stakeholder maps, scenario matrices, and strategic foresight frameworks do not stand outside these epistemologies. They enact them.
Foresight methodologies can function as carriers of epistemic continuity, reinforcing the same separations they seek to challenge and narrowing what can be sensed, valued, and acted upon within the system.
What falls outside these frameworks becomes unintelligible. Relational ontologies, multi-generational temporalities, and reciprocal forms of coordination appear as noise rather than as constitutive system dynamics.
Recent work in the Journal of Futures Studies has made a related move in the field of water futures. Cruz (2024) contrasts modernist scientific framings and Indigenous worldviews to show how rivers can be understood not only as hydrological systems or manageable resources, but as living, relational, spiritual, and culturally situated entities. This distinction is central to the argument developed here: in lithium governance, aquifers are not merely environmental variables within extractive planning, but relational conditions through which territory, reciprocity, and future viability are enacted.
Addressing this requires more than expanding existing tools. It requires shifting the unit of observation itself, from entities to relations, from representation to enactment, and from projected futures to lived configurations in motion.
The Escuela de Santiago: Epistemological rupture from Latin American soil
Francisco Varela and Humberto Maturana’s enactive framework emerged from Chile’s Escuela de Santiago confronting regional realities where positivist planning failed situated dynamics. Pinochet technocrats deploying World Bank models reenacted subject-object separations Maturana identified as dominative at root—epistemological violence preceding physical violence (Maturana & Varela, 1980).
Enactive insight cuts deeper: planning tools enact futures they claim merely to anticipate. Salar de Atacama through dual lenses reveals this. Conventional foresight identifies uncertainties (prices, regulation, mobilization). Enactive reading maps operative attractors (Reyes, 2024):
State-corporate convergence stabilizing extractivism
Territorial reciprocity blocked from systemic influence
Market temporalities incompatible with multi-generational stewardship
Futures stabilize through enacted relational histories, not Delphi projections. Cognition becomes embodied action bringing forth coherent worlds through sensorimotor coupling. No neutral observer; knower-known mutually specify through autopoietic closure—systems maintaining organization through structural coupling, adapting without losing identity.
Stability emerges as achievement. “Organizational structure” traces repeated enactments sedimented across technocratic generations. Foresight transforms from projective cartography toward cultivating relational bifurcations—tensional moments that might flip toward coordination or collapse into blockage.
This epistemological shift also repositions the question of power. In rationalist traditions, power tends to be associated with control over resources, decision-making authority, or structural position. From an enactive perspective, power operates through the stabilization of certain ways of perceiving and responding. What becomes dominant is not only a set of decisions, but a mode of world-making that renders some forms of action coherent and others unintelligible.
In Latin American contexts, this has profound implications. Coloniality persists not only through external imposition, but through the reproduction of perceptual grammars that define what counts as valid knowledge, legitimate action, and viable futures. Technocratic planning, development indicators, and extractive coordination mechanisms do not merely organize activity; they shape what can be sensed as real within institutional practice.
The Santiago School’s contribution can be understood as a disruption of this perceptual closure. By situating cognition within embodied action, it reopens the possibility of engaging with forms of knowing that are relational, situated, and historically grounded. This does not imply replacing one epistemology with another, but recognizing that all knowledge practices enact specific worlds, and that these enactments carry political consequences.
Within this frame, foresight cannot be treated as a neutral technique applied to external systems. It becomes a situated practice that participates in the constitution of those systems. The question shifts from how to better represent the future to how different modes of anticipation enact different futures in the present.
Enactively-Situated positions: The new unit of analysis
Stakeholder analysis rests on stable actors carrying interests. This fractures against Latin American complexity. CORFO coordinates exports while blocking consultation. Corporate sustainability teams champion stewardship while operations drill contested aquifers. Lickan Antay signs monitoring agreements while reactivating ancestral mallku. Enactments shift across contexts (Weick, 1995).
Enactively-situated positions integrate three coupled dimensions:
Situation: Lived conditions sensorially apprehended
Necessity: Response-worthiness structurally coupled
Action: Concrete enactment deployed
Salar de Atacama positions:
Stakeholder matrices miss state-corporate convergence enacting extractivism and state-community blockage constraining pluriversality.
This displacement of the unit of analysis carries implications that extend beyond methodological refinement. It alters how the system itself becomes intelligible. When actors are treated as primary units, the system appears as a composition of entities interacting across a shared environment. When enactively-situated positions are foregrounded, the system appears instead as a field of relational enactments, where what exists is inseparable from how it is brought forth in action.
This distinction matters because it redefines what counts as intervention. Under actor-centered frameworks, change is typically approached through alignment mechanisms: negotiating interests, redistributing influence, or clarifying roles. These approaches assume that coherence can be achieved by stabilizing relationships between predefined entities. Within an enactive frame, coherence emerges through the quality of relational configurations themselves. What shifts is not only who interacts, but how interaction becomes possible in the first place.
Intervening at this level involves modifying the conditions under which positions emerge. Temporal horizons, information flows, and spaces of encounter become critical levers. These are not secondary adjustments but structural conditions shaping what can be perceived, what becomes necessary, and how action unfolds. By altering these conditions, the system does not simply reorganize its actors; it reconfigures the patterns through which it enacts its own continuity.
This allows for a more precise engagement with dynamics that remain opaque under actor-based analysis. Apparent contradictions become legible as shifts between enacted configurations. Resistance appears as coherence within a given situational coupling rather than as misalignment. What emerges is a capacity to identify where the system is reproducing dominant patterns and where alternative configurations might begin to take hold.
Relational Tensions: Recasting Drivers
Drivers conventionally trace backward to internal motivations—”what the actor wants” or “core interests driving behavior.” Enactive practice relocates tension relationally. It emerges where situation-necessity-action coupling grinds against situational grain. No stable motivational essence precedes action; tension configures through living relational histories.
Atacama illustrates vividly. Corporate position executes short-term production imperatives capably until water conflicts surface latent unsustainability threatening long-term license. State regulators coordinate export futures effectively until indigenous resistance fractures bureaucratic legitimacy. These drivers do not motivate from inside stable entities. They intensify through enacted histories—decisions sedimented into organizational sensorium across decades, becoming preferred pathways even against mounting situational evidence (Reyes, 2024).
Intervention logic transforms radically. Conventional practice negotiates declared interests through facilitated workshops: “align stakeholders around shared vision.” Enactive practice modifies coupling conditions themselves: redesign temporal horizons beyond quarterly reporting cycles, reconfigure information flows from corporate dashboards toward shared hydrographic sensoria, create prolonged encounters where blocked positions might sensorially apprehend each other differently. Futures shift through relational re-patterning rather than power-interest bargaining.
What becomes visible at this point is that tensions are not only present conditions but condensed histories. Each enacted tension carries within it a trajectory of past decisions, institutional sedimentations, and repeated responses that have stabilized certain ways of acting while excluding others. In this sense, tensions are not momentary frictions but historical compressions that continue to shape the system’s present.
This temporal depth is critical for foresight. Futures are not external possibilities waiting to be selected; they are already inscribed in how these tensions are configured and reproduced. Each tension contains a directional pull, orienting the system toward certain continuities while constraining others. What appears as a current operational difficulty may, in fact, be the expression of a long-standing attractor reaching its limits.
Reading tensions in this way allows foresight to move beyond projection toward anticipation grounded in lived dynamics. Instead of asking what might happen under different external conditions, the question shifts toward what is already being made possible or impossible through current configurations. The future ceases to be an abstract horizon and becomes a property of the system’s ongoing enactment.
Intervention, then, is not oriented toward resolving tension, but toward transforming its configuration. Some tensions, when reconfigured, can open new pathways of coordination that were previously unavailable. Others, if left unexamined, will continue to reproduce trajectories that appear inevitable only because their underlying conditions remain unchanged.
Adaptive coupling patterns: Reading systemic capacity
Isolated positions explain local enactments; systemic capacity emerges through relational coupling quality. Enactive analysis reveals five recurrent coordination patterns across Latin American governance processes:
- Convergent coupling: Positions mutually reinforce shared trajectories (state-corporate coordination on lithium economics produces powerful extractivist momentum)
- Compatible coupling: Operational coexistence without significant friction (agencies handling parallel mandates without interference)
- Tensional coupling: Requires continuous work yet generates adaptation capacity (corporate-community water monitoring dialogues under pressure)
- Blocking coupling: Systematically inhibits joint action (state-community sovereignty standoffs where reciprocity cannot be sensed)
- Chaotic coupling: Generates systemic unpredictability, overwhelming coordination capacity (multi-scalar interventions creating response overflow)
Synergy names the system’s achieved capacity to channel even tensional dynamics toward coordinated response. Entropy names degradation where blocking/chaotic patterns predominate, dissipating collective capacity. Salar de Atacama governance reveals state-corporate convergence generating extractivist synergy while state-community blocking systematically dissipates sovereignty capacity across the system.
Cultural attractors: Stabilization basins in living systems
Cultural attractors exceed individual psychology, operating as basin-like dynamics that stabilize perceptual-action sequences across entire systems (Reyes, 2024). Latin American organizations inherit these through colonial grammars: bureaucratic rationality sedimented across generations of technocratic practice, developmental linearity structuring planning horizons, stakeholder instrumentalism framing relationality as resource management.
Atacama governance pits two primary attractors in collision. The developmentalist attractor coordinates powerfully through state-corporate convergent coupling, enacting futures organized around green capitalism and national revenue targets. The reciprocal attractor persists through Lickan Antay enactments of territorial stewardship yet remains systematically blocked from systemic influence. Transformation requires not declaring new values but shifting coupling conditions where dominant attractors currently prevail.
Enactive foresight relocates anticipation within these living basins. Conventional scenarios project variables forward: “If lithium prices rise 20%, indigenous mobilization constrains supply chains.” Enactive foresight maps already operative attractors: “State-corporate convergence stabilizes extractivism regardless of price volatility; community-state blocking constrains reciprocity regardless of mobilization intensity. Which coupling shifts first?”
Relational bifurcations emerge where tensional couplings contain flip potential. Corporate-community tensional zones around shared water monitoring might evolve toward coordination if temporal horizons extend beyond quarterly reporting cycles toward multi-year hydrographic sensoria. State-community blocking might transform through sustained encounters making aquifer depletion realities sensorially undeniable to bureaucratic sensoriums.
Inner politics: Where colonial grammars meet territory
This practice engages the symposium call’s inner politics—those subjective, identity-mediated, collectively sedimented dimensions through which external domination becomes normalized, resisted, or transformed. Enactive positions reveal inner politics not as abstract identities but living tensions in action: colonial developmental grammars (progress, sovereignty, modernity) competing with territory-rooted relational worldings (reciprocity, kinship, multi-generational time) within concretely enacted relational dynamics.
Foresight transforms from external scenario projection toward intervention at contact zones where pluriversal futures remain structurally possible. The practitioner moves from scenario-oracle toward gardener of relational bifurcations, cultivating capacities where blocked attractors might gain systemic voice through modified coupling conditions.
Salar de Atacama governance: Enactive futures mapping
Enactively-Situated positions: Salar de Atacama governance
| Position | Situation | Necessity | Action | Emergent Relational Tension |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| State-regulator (CORFO) | Global lithium demand intersects with national fiscal pressure | Sovereign control over resources under global dependency | Contract centralization and accelerated permitting | Bureaucratic legitimacy vs territorial reciprocity |
| Corporate extractor (SQM/Albemarle) | Supply chain pressure and lithium price volatility | Maintain production quotas while securing social license | Contract compliance combined with selective CSR initiatives | Short-term financial performance vs long-term ecological balance |
| Lickan Antay community | Water extraction impacts ancestral lifeways | Sustain reciprocal relationship with territory | Legal action and reactivation of ceremonial authority | Ancestral governance logics vs developmental frameworks |
| Relationship | Type | Description |
|---|---|---|
| State – Corporate | Convergent | Shared economic orientation reinforces extractive trajectory |
| State – Community | Blocking | Institutional logic fails to engage with territorial relational dynamics |
| Corporate – Community | Tensional | Friction between contractual logic and cosmovision creates latent divergence |
Enacted futures: Extractivist trajectories stabilize through state-corporate convergence regardless of price signals; pluriversal coordination constrains through persistent state-community blocking. Strategic intervention targets coupling redesign: temporal buffers extending beyond quarterly cycles, shared hydrographic sensoria making aquifer realities undeniable, sustained encounter spaces where reciprocal necessity becomes sensorially apprehensible.
Conclusion: Foresight as pluriversal relational practice
Foresight from Latin American contexts demands epistemological homecoming to the Escuela de Santiago—not as imported philosophy but as decolonial instrument forged through regional struggle. Maturana and Varela deliver operational rupture with rationalist inheritances structuring domination from 19th-century Monroe declarations to 21st-century lithium frontiers.
Reading through enactively-situated positions, relationally emergent tensions, adaptive coupling patterns, and cultural attractor basins reveals futures already enacting amid living dynamics across Salar de Atacama governance. Extractivist futures gain systemic strength through state-corporate convergence; pluriversal futures remain constrained through state-community blocking.
Pluriversal futures emerge through coordination pattern shifts where blocked attractors gain systemic voice—not through rhetorical declarations competing with extractivism, but through modified relational conditions where reciprocal necessities become sensorially apprehensible across previously isolated positions.
Southern practitioners carry singular responsibility: abandon mechanical translation of Global North tools into Latin American contexts. Instead wield the Escuela de Santiago’s enactive lineage as instrument for mapping used futures internalized as institutional sensorium across generations of technocratic practice. Enact those pluriversales already taking embryonic form through skillful relational reconfiguration.
The framework invites empirical testing: Does mapping enactivo-situated positions reveal intervention leverage invisible to stakeholder analysis? Do targeted coupling shifts generate pluriversal coordination where blocking patterns prevailed? Does cultural attractor analysis identify bifurcation opportunities conventional scenario work misses? The Escuela de Santiago awaits not academic commemoration but concrete deployment against colonial futures structuring our institutional present.
Pluriversal futures do not emerge through coexistence of narratives alone, but through reconfiguration of relational conditions that allow those narratives to become enacted realities. What is at stake is not representation, but viability. A future becomes real when the system acquires the capacity to sustain the coordination patterns it requires.
From this perspective, foresight operates at the level of enabling conditions. It intervenes in how systems perceive, define necessity, and coordinate action across difference. The work is less about expanding imaginable futures and more about transforming configurations that determine which futures can take hold.
This reframes pluriversality from an epistemic claim into a practical challenge. It requires creating conditions under which different worldings can coexist without being subsumed under dominant attractors, and recognizing that not all configurations are equally viable.
The question that remains is not which future should be chosen, but which relational configurations are being enacted today, and how they might be transformed to allow other futures to emerge.
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Maturana, H. R., & Varela, F. J. (1980). Autopoiesis and cognition: The realization of the living. D. Reidel Publishing.
Reyes, P. (2024). El futuro siempre presente. EsaCosa Editores.
Reyes, P., & González, C. (2025). Los futuros que nos habitan. Activo Editorial.
Varela, F. J., Thompson, E., & Rosch, E. (1991). The embodied mind: Cognitive science and human experience. MIT Press.
Cruz, S. (2024). Flowing through time: An epistemological and ontological examination of river futures within urban landscapes. Journal of Futures Studies, 29(2), 17–34. https://doi.org/10.6531/JFS.202412_29(2).0002
Disclosure of AI use (for JFS guidelines)
AI tools were used in accordance with Journal of Futures Studies guidelines. ChatGPT (OpenAI) and Perplexity AI assisted with structural expansion, language refinement, table formatting for the Salar de Atacama case, and APA 7 alignment. Prompts included maintaining academic coherence, strengthening links between enactive epistemology and foresight, and focusing on lithium governance and cultural attractors (Reyes, 2024). All conceptual framing, analysis, and case content originate from the authors’ original whitepaper v1.0 and domain expertise. AI contributions were limited to editorial and formatting support.
