Political settlements, natural resources extraction and inclusion in Bolivia

Abstract

This paper examines the relationship between Bolivia’s political settlement and its governance of minerals and hydrocarbons. As a poor country with a relatively weak central state, Bolivia’s natural resources have served as a ‘mechanism of trade’ mobilised by competing interest groups to build coalitions in support of their particular projects and to secure the acquiescence of those who might contest these. Natural resources are used to create political pacts and negotiate political settlements in which a dominant actor attempts to win over those resistant to a particular vision of development and/or governance. These pacts and settlements are revisited constantly. Despite short periods of settlement, the more general pattern has been one of instability, reflecting the relatively short-lived capacity of one or another actor for strategic collective action. Ideas about, and modes of, natural resource governance have been central to periods of instability and stability alike, and to significant periods of rupture in Bolivian politics. The period since 2006 has witnessed a stable settlement revolving around an alliance between Movement to Socialism (MAS), national social movements and two iconic, dominant leaders. This settlement is also sustained through bargains with parts of the traditional economic elite and those subnational actors able to extract concessions from the main parties to the settlement. Particular interpretations of prior forms of natural resource governance have also produced ideas about historical dependency and exploitation that are themselves constitutive of the settlement that the MAS has built (ideas that also circulated in earlier periods of resource nationalism). This output is part of the Effective States and Inclusive Development Research Centre programme