Developmentalism without a developmental state: Fragmented capacities and green hydrogen in Chile

How do states with limited economic resources pursue ambitious green industrial transitions when their outcomes remain uncertain? This article examines this question through Chile's green hydrogen strategy in Patagonia, where ministries, regional governments, state-owned enterprises, and CORFO must coordinate within a predominantly neoliberal political economy. Drawing on 27 sequential qualitative interviews with state actors and lay participants, alongside documentary analysis, we show that the transition is assembled through uneven capacities rather than a unified developmental apparatus. First, regional actors build a green development project by translating global decarbonization into a locally grounded agenda and assembling the infrastructure, skills, partnerships, and other enabling conditions required for private investment, despite constrained fiscal resources and legislative authority. Second, the “hyper-sectoral” organization of the Chilean state makes coordination a central developmental task: strategic, regulatory, fiscal, and administrative capacities sit in different organizations, while regional governments use relational, discursive, and performative power to mobilize actors they cannot command. Third, development is also a matter of governing expectations. Official promises encourage residents to invest in education and occupations linked to anticipated jobs, even as uncertainty persists over whether projects will materialize and who will benefit. Taken together, these findings show that state capacity is not a fixed national attribute but is distributed unevenly across organizations and territorial scales. They move beyond the neoliberal-developmental state binary by showing how fragmented states coordinate green industrial projects even when their material outcomes remain uncertain.