Three Decades of Energy Efficiency in Chile: Institutional Path Dependence and the Systemic Limits of Decoupling

Energy efficiency (EE) is widely promoted as a climate-mitigation strategy, yet improvements in energy intensity emerge from interactions among institutions, technologies, economic structures, and environmental conditions and cannot be attributed to efficiency policies alone. This study examines the evolution of EE governance in Chile between 1992 and 2022, treating national energy intensity as an emergent property of a path-dependent sociotechnical system. A two-component mixed-methods approach combines a historical-institutional reconstruction of governance with a parsimonious econometric analysis of short-run changes in energy intensity, integrated through a causal loop diagram. The historical analysis shows EE governance evolving through path dependence, critical junctures, layering, and policy feedback, strengthening state coordination without transforming the underlying market-oriented regime. Across four specifications, only carbon intensity is robustly associated with short-run changes in energy intensity; structural, extractive, and sociotechnical variables show no robust association. A comparison of the two strands reveals an asymmetry: the institutional trajectory coincided with aggregate change in the carbon–energy dimension, while no comparable short-run signature was detected along the direct demand-side routes examined. These findings reframe energy intensity as a system-level property and indicate that efficiency policies should be complemented by demand-side governance, structural change, and sufficiency to support sustainability transitions.