The article aims to highlight the importance of configuring what Chilean and Latin American institutions build as socio-environmental risks. Through a review of the semantics and narratives of risk, we reveal that the constructs that these ins-titutions formulate through their stories and actions in different contexts play a key role. This role is relevant because the institutions configure an interpretive framework capable of giving meaning, ra-tionality and coherence to their stories to govern and communicate socio-environmental risks. Therefore, this interpretive framework should be in tune with citizenship.