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This paper sets out to critically examine the New Institutional Framework for Environmental Governance (NIFEG) adopted in Chile through new legislation in 2010. Though nominally progressive in both social and environmental terms, the heavy reliance on bureaucratization as the key means for improving the legitimacy and effectiveness of environmental governance paradoxically appears to result in the reinforcement of the network of dominant interests in this policy domain. As a result, this leads to the canalization of socio-environmental conflicts through public mobilization and judicialization, that is: to the bypassing of political representative institutions. By framing Chile as a laboratory of ecological modernization in a semiperipheral, extractivist context, and through the theoretical and methodological lens of dramaturgical analysis, this paper looks at discursive processes shaping environmental governance as a result of staged performances. It seeks to explore how the interplay of diverse elements – ranging from material enablers and restrictions to processes of psychological and cultural identification between actors and their audiences – result in the reinforcement of path-dependencies in the way of framing sustainable development within traditional power structures. This results in an “oligarchization” of environmental governance which ultimately translates into further deteriorating environmental trends and raises fundamental questions about the limits of environmental governance alongside the discursive lines of ecological modernization.