Chile’s permitting reform will target monuments council, maritime concessions

Chile’s ongoing push to reduce project permitting times will later include efforts to overhaul the country’s monuments council and its maritime concessions system, while the government is advancing separate bills to speed up sectoral permitting and environmental assessments. 

“This requires changes that go beyond our bills,” economy minister Nicolás Grau said during a permitting seminar hosted by public studies center CEP, saying that the efforts to reform maritime concessions and the monuments council are part of the fiscal pact promoted last year to boost the domestic economy.

Maritime concessions are cited as one of the main bottlenecks for water desalination plants and other projects on Chile's coast, while the slowness of the monuments council in assessing archeological finds at construction sites have sometime halted infrastructure works for years. 

With regard to the sectoral permitting bill promoted by the ministry of economy, which was generally approved by the chamber of deputies’ economics committee and is now being studied in detail, the minister said that President Gabriel Boric and the heads of both chambers of congress have pledged to pass that proposal and the environmental assessment reform before the 2025 budget bill is submitted, which would be on September 30. 

“There is no silver bullet. This has to be a combination of factors to help us to reduce [permitting] times while retaining regulation quality,” Grau added, saying that incentives cannot solve everything. 

Among other aspects, the sectoral permitting bill would create a new agency to supervise 380 permitting processes to ensure legal deadlines are met, as well as promoting coordination between public agencies, issuing reports and statistics, and giving instructions and recommendations.

It would also establish a 'threshold' system in which certain projects would be allowed to skip some permitting processes depending on their size. 

For example, projects with a low threshold would only need to make a formal statement instead of seeking a specific permit.

Grau said that this could reduce approval times for mining projects by around 40%, or 32% in the case of hospitals. 

During the same event, Ricardo Mewes, head of the country’s trade and production confederation (CPC) said that he had a positive view of the bill, but that there was still room for it to be more ambitious. 

“We've talked with the economy ministry about this bill for a long time. They've listened to several of the concerns we've raised, so I believe that the conditions are there to advance,” he told BNamericas after the seminar, noting that previous attempts to reduce permit approval times in the last decade failed to prosper due to a lack of political backing. 

However, a lot more people are now aware that these permitting delays are hindering investments, which means that the Boric administration's efforts will likely have more backing, Mewes explained.