The Agrupación Ciudadana de Última Esperanza (ACUE) is a grassroots foundation based in Última Esperanza (Magallanes, Chile) that for the past 10 years has been promoting sustainable social development from an ecofeminist perspective. Its work places self-care and collective care at the center, from which it drives empowerment through critical thinking and access to prior, objective, and comprehensive information that makes visible the rights of women and marginalized groups, advancing toward a decolonial form of development with economic, social, and environmental justice.
From the local to the international level, ACUE has built ties with other movements resisting extractivist megaprojects across the Global South, as a way of breaking out of the “island” that Patagonia often represents and reconnecting with the broader social fabric—recognizing that from our shared vulnerabilities, we can recover genuine cooperation and interdependence.
Country
Chile
Mission
Its mission is to make visible and confront the disaggregated impacts of extractivist megaprojects and so-called “false solutions” to the climate crisis—such as green hydrogen projects—on communities, women, and ecosystems.
Our work in development finance
ACUE works to expose and document how public and private banks (including the European Investment Bank, the World Bank, and the Inter-American Development Bank), together with institutional investors, sustain energy projects that reproduce models of dispossession and inequality. Its work focuses on highlighting the gender-differentiated impacts of development projects and on warning against false solutions which, under the banner of a just energy transition, generate new emissions while deepening damage to biodiversity and planetary balance.
Geographic Focus
Latin America
Constituency/Partners
Human Rights Defenders | LGBTQI+
Sector Focus
Civic Space & Defenders | Climate & Environment | Gender & Equality | Mining & Extractives | Transparency & Access to Information