Tom Perreault

State Restructuring and the Scale Politics of Rural Water Governance in Bolivia

Recent attempts to grant private concessions to water in Bolivia raise questions regarding the effects of the states neoliberal restructuring on environmental governance. Like other Latin American states, Bolivia has enacted sweeping neoliberal reforms during the past two decades, including privatization of public sector industries, reduction of state services, and administrative decentralization. These reforms have been accompanied by constitutional reforms that recognized certain resource and political rights on the part of Bolivias indigenous and campesino peoples. This paper examines the reregulation and rescaling of rural water management in Bolivia, and associated processes of mobilization on the part of peasant irrigators aimed at countering state reforms. Although traditional resource rights of peasant irrigators are strengthened by cultural aspects of constitutional reforms, rural livelihoods are undermined by economic liberalization. The paper examines the implications and contradictions of neoliberal reforms for rural water management in highland Bolivia. These processes are illustrated through a brief analysis of current organizational efforts on the part of peasant irrigators.

Changing places: transnational networks, ethnic politics, and community development in the Ecuadorian Amazon

Abstract This paper examines political organizing among indigenous groups in the Ecuadorian Amazon, with a focus on the multi-scale networks of development, environmental, and cultural rights organizations with which many Amazonian indigenous communities are involved. In recent years, Latin American indigenous peoples’ political and cultural organizations have played a central role in mediating processes of resource access, rural development, and political participation. Diverse, transnational networks link community-based indigenous organizations to regional- and national-level ethnic rights organizations, state agencies, national and international NGOs, and multi-lateral development agencies. The formation and functioning of these networks have been central to contemporary forms of indigenous political mobilization in Latin America, and have had a profound influence on local places, regional identities, and national politics. This paper examines these processes in the context of the state transition from corporatist to neoliberal regime over the past 30 years. Through an institutional ethnography of an indigenous community association, I illustrate the ways that transnational networks have allowed indigenous groups to ‘scale up’ their political voice, while simultaneously consolidating the local communities that serve as spatial and institutional bases of both political power and cultural reproduction. This paper highlights the ways that transnational advocacy networks link scales of organization and political action, with implications for the strengthening of Ecuadorian democracy and civil society.

Developing Identities: Indigenous Mobilization, Rural Livelihoods, and Resource Access in Ecuadorian Amazonia

In the 30 years since Ecuador’s agrarian reform, indigenous organizations have had a major impact on the country’s institutional, political and natural landscapes. Originally formed largely in accordance with state-prescribed models, and with considerable guidance from external institutions, these organizations have worked to defend existing land claims; access institutional, financial and natural resources; and make civil rights claims against the state. Regional and national indigenous organizations have mobilized discourses of cultural identity in strategic ways in order to achieve these goals. This paper examines the scalar linkages between the processes of economic and social transformation in the Ecuadorian Amazon and the ways in which indigenous organizations have responded to these changes since the country’s agrarian reform. I argue that the material and discursive mobilization of identity has been central to the aims of accessing resources and claiming political rights. Through a comparative case study of a regional indigenous federation and one of its constituent base communities, I highlight the differences between organizational histories, capacities and aims. Most studies of indigenous movements in the Amazon Basin have considered only regional or national organizations, often giving a false impression of homogeneity within such movements. I contend that detailed analysis of the relations between regional secondary-level indigenous federations and local base communities, as well as the micro-level processes of production and resource mobilization at the community and household scales, is crucial in understanding indigenous organizing processes in Ecuador today.

SOCIAL CAPITAL, DEVELOPMENT, AND INDIGENOUS POLITICS IN ECUADORIAN AMAZONIA*

This article examines the formation of social capital—defined as the norms of trust and reciprocity integral to social relations—and the ways in which it may help rural peoples organizations gain access to rights and resources. The formation of social capital must be viewed within the context of the symbolic systems, or cultural capital, that imbues social relations with meaning. The concept of social capital provides a valuable conceptual framework for analyzing the multiscale processes of environmental management, rural development, and resource conflicts with which many rural social movements are involved. The role played by social capital is illustrated through a detailed case study of an indigenous political and cultural organization in the Ecuadorian Amazon. The organizational history of a lowland Quichua federation and the successes and problems it has had in managing development projects and achieving political objectives provide insight into the importance of social capital in the development of the region.

Making Space Community Organization, Agrarian Change, and the Politics of Scale in the Ecuadorian Amazon

At the western edge of the Ecuadorian Amazon, 20 kilometers north of the town of Tena, is the centro matriz, or administrative center, of Mondayacu, a Quichua community of about 1,200 people. Here stand a few dozen houses, most made of rough-hewn boards and tin roofs, though many have been constructed at least in part with split bamboo siding and have roofs of thatch. A handful of stores sell basic foodstuffs, soda, liquor, notebooks, pens and pencils. Women wash their laundry, their children, and themselves in roadside pools fed by water diverted from a distant stream, and children play soccer and basketball next to the community meeting house. Though most homes within 100 meters of the highway are wired for electricity, there are no telephones here, no running water, no sewerage. On a hill overlooking the center are Mondayacus elementary and bilingual intercultural secondary schools. The concentration of houses and other buildings along the highway represents the first line of defense against the incursions of colonists from the highlands or coast and the first stage in the long process of obtaining legal title to the communitys land claims. Away from the road, clearings in the forest for

What kind of governance for what kind of equity? Towards a theorization of justice in water governance

This article critically reviews literatures related to the core concepts of this special issue: water and hydrosocial relations; water governance and spatial scale; and equity, justice and rights. It argues that only by viewing water and society as simultaneously social and natural can we address both ecological governance and environmental justice. It argues that the institutional arrangements we employ for governing water must address issues of democratization, human welfare and ecological conditions. The article illustrates these arguments with reference to the social and environmental effects of mining activity and associated water contamination on the Bolivian Altiplano.

Reworking the spaces of indigeneity: The Bolivian ayllu and lowland autonomy movements compared

This paper examines the political uses of indigenous identity and how understandings of indigeneity are changing in contemporary Bolivia. In particular we address two interrelated questions: first, in what ways are understandings of indigeneity and the ‘indigenous’ changing in Bolivia, and to what effect? And, second, how does indigeneity inform conceptualizations of territory and the nation? We examine two ethnoterritorial projects and the organizations that represent them, in two different regions of Bolivia: the ayllu movement, as represented by the National Council of Ayllus and Markas of Qullasuyu and the Andean Oral History Workshop, and the lowland autonomy movement, as represented by the Camba Nation and the pro-Santa Cruz Committee. We argue that both the ayllu movement and the lowland autonomy movement are ethnoterritorial projects which mobilize essentialized understandings of indigenous identity in order to legitimate historical claims to territorial and political rights.

Consent, coercion and cooperativismo: Mining cooperatives and resource regimes in Bolivia

This paper examines ways in which regional political, economic, and cultural hegemonies maintain “resource regimes” by exploring the emergence of mining cooperatives as central actors in Bolivia’s extractive economy. Like much of Latin America, Bolivia is experiencing a boom in resource extraction. Unlike other Latin American countries, in which the surge in mining activity is driven almost entirely by private, mostly transnational capital, relatively small-scale mining cooperatives play a major role in Bolivia’s mining economy. We draw on the Gramscian concepts of hegemony and the integral state to explore the historical and contemporary relationship between mining cooperatives and unfolding patterns of mineral, water, and territorial governance, particularly in Oruro and Potosí departments. We argue that the regional hegemony of the mining economy has been constructed and maintained by the close historical relationship between mining cooperatives and the Bolivian state. Since the 1930s, the state has supported the formation of mining cooperatives as a means of bolstering the mining economy and stemming political unrest; in recent decades, however, cooperatives have become more actively involved in the maintenance of mining’s regional hegemony.

Extracting Justice: Natural Gas, Indigenous Mobilization, and the Bolivian State

This chapter examines the relationship between natural gas development, state restructuring, and political mobilization among indigenous peoples in Bolivia. Oil and natural gas have long been important sources of income for the Bolivian state. Indeed, defence of oil fields in the country’s eastern lowlands has retrospectively become the central justification for the disastrous Chaco War of the 1930s (Klein 1992), and was more recently invoked by Aymara protestors during the 2003 struggle over plans to export natural gas. Though long overshadowed politically and economically by the importance of oil, natural gas has recently emerged both as Bolivia’s major source of export revenue and as a focal point of political conflict involving social movements, transnational hydrocarbons firms, regional governments, and the central state. Hydrocarbon governance — that is, the decision-making authority, the relative accountability of government agencies and private actors, and the rents private firms pay to the Bolivian state for the oil and gas they extract — was restructured in the mid-1990s as one component of broader neoliberal reforms. Ongoing protest against these reforms erupted in October 2003 in the form of the ‘gas war’, which led to the deaths of over 70 protesters and the resignation of President Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada. A year and a half later, more protests forced the resignation of Sanchez de Lozada’s successor, Carlos Mesa, and the establishment of a caretaker government.

Assessing the Limits of Neoliberal Environmental Governance in Bolivia

In January 2006, newly elected Bolivian president Evo Morales created a Ministry of Water, and appointed as its head Abel Mamani. Mamani, the head of a well-organized activist network in the city of El Alto, who had in 2005 led massive protests against the French-owned firm that held the concession for water services in El Alto and La Paz Boosters of Bolivia’s privatization efforts were left to consider what could only be interpreted as one more setback for neoliberalism in the Andes. Indeed, Morales’ election may be read in part as a rejection of neoliberal policies on the part of a Bolivian populace weary of two decades of economic austerity and the erosion of already meager state services. During two distinct periods (mid-1980s, and mid-1990s), Bolivian governments implemented relatively orthodox neoliberal reforms, which met with uneven success, and in some instances have failed quite spectacularly. Neoliberal state restructuring ushered in an era of windfall profits for transnational capital, matched by declining job security, income, and social welfare benefits for workers. Reductions in state social spending and the privatization of resources and industries reduced inflation (no small achievement, to be sure), but at enormous social cost, as inequality and poverty have risen in line with reform (Huber and Solt 2004). In recent years, neoliberal policies have been met with popular outrage and street protests that have, much to the d ismay of Bolivian e lites and international lenders, reversed many of the reforms instituted during the past twenty years.