Contested Impacts in a Climate of Uncertainty: Hydrocarbon Activities and Water Knowledge in Bolivia’s Chaco Area

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Abstract

Knowledge and information about water has been a contested issue in prior consultations in Bolivia. The information about hydrocarbon projects has been prepared by the extraction companies for the respective Environmental Impact Assessments (EIAs) and presented to local populations by representatives from the Ministry of Hydrocarbons and Energy. The distributed information has been criticized by indigenous participants and their advisers as being biased, for minimizing negative impacts and for conceiving complex socio-ecological issues as manageable technicalities. Against this background, especially the Guaraní and Weenhayek communities living in the dry Chaco area have voiced their concerns about the reduction and contamination of their scarce water sources. In a context of diverse external pressures on water, such as the expansion of agribusiness, increased settler immigration and climate change, combined with their lack of access to independent hydrological studies, it has been difficult for the consultation participants to challenge the distributed information about the impacts of hydrocarbon activities.

This paper critically analyzes the contested water knowledge in terms of content and form, which represents the interests and visions of the parties involved in the project (state, communities and corporations), and discusses the principles and underlying assumptions in which the knowledge is framed. We will scrutinize 1) experiential and local knowledge on the effects of extraction on water sources; 2) contestations over “true” knowledge in academic sources; and 3) the treatment of uncertainty that lies in the lack of knowledge about the effects of large scale extraction projects and climate variability on water sources.

Author

• Almut S Schilling-Vacaflor, GIGA German institute of Global and Area Studies