TY - JOUR
T1 - Environmental governance through "Speaking Like an Indigenous State" and respatializing resources
T2 - Ethical livelihood concepts in Bolivia as versatility or verisimilitude?
AU - Zimmerer, Karl S.
N1 - Funding Information:
This article is devoted to the memory of Ben Kohl, an influential and supportive colleague and renowned urbanist and political analyst whose enormous commitments to Bolivia, its peoples, and progressive moments included a tremendous range of endeavors in social science, intellectual, and scholarly activities. This research benefitted through conversation, comments, and inputs of J. Scott, P. Regalsky, M. Ebersole, T. Hosse, L. Rojas, J. Centellas, M. Bell, D. Retchless, fellow presenters and participants at the N-Q-N sessions of the 2012 AAG meetings in New York City and the indigeneity-and-extractive-economies sessions of the 2013 AAG meetings in Los Angeles, editors of the special issue, three anonymous reviewers, Geoforum Editor-In-Chief Pádraig Carmody, and Bolivian NGO colleagues in CIPCA, CERES, AGRUCO, CENDA, and CESU. Research activities in Bolivia were funded through NSF BC 0240962 (UW-Madison), NSF HSD 0948816 (Penn State), and Pennsylvania State University and the College of Earth and Mineral Sciences.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2013 Elsevier Ltd.
PY - 2015/8/1
Y1 - 2015/8/1
N2 - This research addresses recent environmental governance in Bolivia through its relations to indigeneity and respatializations. It introduces and develops the concept of "speaking like an indigenous state" to examine the Bolivian state's recent use of a pair of indigenous linguistic concepts, Living Well and Earth Mother, representing the identities of citizens and their rights to resources and livelihoods. State relations to indigenous social movements highlight the use of Living Well and Earth Mother concepts through accommodation, resistance, and protaganism. Six active issues of environmental governance are examined: (1) climate change and justice movement; (2) agrarian reform, agrobiodiversity, and food justice; (3) water resources; (4) indigenous territories; (5) Protected Areas; and (6) extractive industries (mining, hydrocarbons). The usages of Living Well and Earth Mother show versatility as they have been mobilized in the respatializing of the politics and social-power dynamics of environmental issues at scales of the state, global and international institutions, and community and local levels. Analysis also reveals deployment of Living Well and Earth Mother that is discursively influential and yet conceptually reduced and unevenly applied, thus suggesting a characteristic of verisimilitude. My analysis determines that respatialization at various levels, including territorial transitions of sub-national regional spaces, are associated with the heightened articulation of environmental governance through indigeneity and "speaking like an indigenous state" amid resource nationalism. Linkages and logics operating within this conjuncture differ from the prevailing interpretation of the Bolivian state's use of Living Well and Earth Mother as solely an unwitting contradiction or instrumentalist camouflage.
AB - This research addresses recent environmental governance in Bolivia through its relations to indigeneity and respatializations. It introduces and develops the concept of "speaking like an indigenous state" to examine the Bolivian state's recent use of a pair of indigenous linguistic concepts, Living Well and Earth Mother, representing the identities of citizens and their rights to resources and livelihoods. State relations to indigenous social movements highlight the use of Living Well and Earth Mother concepts through accommodation, resistance, and protaganism. Six active issues of environmental governance are examined: (1) climate change and justice movement; (2) agrarian reform, agrobiodiversity, and food justice; (3) water resources; (4) indigenous territories; (5) Protected Areas; and (6) extractive industries (mining, hydrocarbons). The usages of Living Well and Earth Mother show versatility as they have been mobilized in the respatializing of the politics and social-power dynamics of environmental issues at scales of the state, global and international institutions, and community and local levels. Analysis also reveals deployment of Living Well and Earth Mother that is discursively influential and yet conceptually reduced and unevenly applied, thus suggesting a characteristic of verisimilitude. My analysis determines that respatialization at various levels, including territorial transitions of sub-national regional spaces, are associated with the heightened articulation of environmental governance through indigeneity and "speaking like an indigenous state" amid resource nationalism. Linkages and logics operating within this conjuncture differ from the prevailing interpretation of the Bolivian state's use of Living Well and Earth Mother as solely an unwitting contradiction or instrumentalist camouflage.
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U2 - 10.1016/j.geoforum.2013.07.004
DO - 10.1016/j.geoforum.2013.07.004
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:84938293197
VL - 64
SP - 314
EP - 324
JO - Geoforum
JF - Geoforum
SN - 0016-7185
ER -