Robert Andolina

The Excluded ‘Indigenous’? The Implications of Multi-Ethnic Policies for Water Reform in Bolivia

Recent legislative changes throughout Latin America have produced a swathe of new laws that include multicultural agendas (Stavenhagen 1996). These laws cover a range of areas, including good governance, constitutional reform, decentralisation and resource management. The main objective of multi-ethnic policies is usually to achieve social inclusivity. However, as Lopez’s (1993) study of the evolution of the terms ‘pluri-cultural’, ‘multi-ethnic’ and ‘pluri-national’ in Ecuador during the indigenous uprisings of 1990 and 1992 illustrates, specific terminology emerges as the result of strategic representations made by different groups about particular events and debates. This chapter examines how such processes of representation are becoming important in the context of specific development projects and indicates how the representation of people as ‘indigenous’ or not indigenous — regardless of the validity of these labels — shapes the outcome of the application of new laws.

The Sovereign and its Shadow: Constituent Assembly and Indigenous Movement in Ecuador

A crucial development in current Latin American politics is the growing involvement of indigenous movements in democracies grappling with the challenges of regime consolidation. This article examines how Ecuadors indigenous movement consecrated new rights and national constitutive principles in the 1997–8 constitutional assembly. It argues that the indigenous movement defined the legitimacy and purpose of the assembly through an ideological struggle with other political actors, in turn shaping the context and content of constitutional reforms in Ecuador. The article concludes that softening the boundary between ‘cultural politics’ and ‘institutional politics’ is necessary in order to understand the impact of social movements in Latin America.

Indigenous Professionalization: Transnational Social Reproduction in the Andes

Indigenous professionalization is occurring throughout Latin America at an increasing pace as new careers open up in social development. Under what is heralded as socially inclusive neoliberalism, a “development with identity” paradigm is producing new university courses focused on indigenous issues. Influenced by discourses of social and human capital and addressing intersections of multiculturalism and development, these courses mobilize and help shape definitions of indigeneity; they also create spaces where donors and indigenous activists contest and debate understandings of development. Operating in a range of institutions, indigenous professionalization courses are led by a small elite group of academics and practitioners who move between programs and countries. Students also move transnationally. We argue that these courses, their classrooms and their curricula are intent on understanding intercultural situations transnationally, galvanizing international funding and support from bilateral and multilateral agencies as well as local and state actors. The social reproduction of indigenous professionalization is therefore transnational, yet grounded. At times, indigenous professionalization is socially reproduced by jumping scale; at other times, it works through established social and spatial hierarchies. This essay examines how indigenous professionalization is socially reproduced as a contested process through which notions of “good” and “culturally appropriate” development are constituted and consolidated.

Reterritorialised Space and Ethnic Political Participation: Indigenous Municipalities in Ecuador

Municipalities with an indigenous mayor or council majority represent the reterritorialising of political units and the remaking of political subjects in Ecuadorian formal politics. These indigenous municipalities represent the successful construction of an indigenous political party, involving active citizen participation. Framed by neo-liberal decentralisation legislation in the 1990s reconfiguring Ecuadors political spaces, the reterritorialisation of politics is bound up with transnational connections that shape the national law on municipalities and the practices of local government. Indigenous municipalities are thereby contextualised in a complex politics of scale, as well as the emergence of new subjects of politics. Our focus is on the processes giving rise to indigenous-led municipalities and the implications of indigenous control of local government. Despite important political gains, we argue that the inclusionary impulse of decentralisation legislation and social movement politics is limited by persistent racial and gendered political cultures.