Chile’s ongoing effort to write a new constitution has created an opportunity for the country to create a more democratic, cohesive, and equal society. These core values guided the design behind each section of the proposed Chilean Constitution, from civil rights to government structure. The timing of this new constitution coincided with the decades-long legal movement to restructure power between the federal and regional governments; until then, Chile’s decentralization process had unfolded gradually through patchwork revisions to the current Constitution. [1] If ratified, the recently proposed constitution would have reconfigured the relationship between the federal and regional governments, distributing power locally through newly created political bodies that would have the resources to carry out their constitutional responsibilities. Even though the proposed constitution was rejected by Chileans in the 2022 plebiscite, understanding how its language would have changed power-sharing arrangements throughout the country allows us to visualize innovative legal methods for fostering and protecting local autonomy while still respecting the national political framework.

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