Roads to development: The Bolivian state's appropriation of indigenous knowledge as Buen Vivir

• In Event: Human Rights, Development and the Politics of Knowledge Production

Abstract

In 2009, under the leadership of indigenous president Evo Morales, Bolivia promulgated a new constitution that incorporated indigenous concepts such as “Buen Vivir”. However, such concepts, when inscribed in state legal regimes and deployed in political rhetoric all too often lose the meanings that indigenous people invested in them and become tools of governments advancing their own agendas. Focusing on the dispute over the plan to build a superhighway through the TIPNIS National Reserve, this paper examines how the discourse around Buen Vivir, and its deployment in support of the highway, constitute appropriation and manipulation by the MAS government. I suggest that the government has mobilized Buen Vivir as an alternative to classical development based on “traditional” indigenous knowledges to legitimate what is in fact conventional development. The TIPNIS conflict highlights the contradictions between the implementation of Buen Vivir as policy and the tenets of Buen Vivir as conceived by indigenous communities, such as plurinationality, decolonization, and the rights of nature with an emphasis on human intercultural and interspecies equity (Gudynas 2011a,b). The government’s repression of the indigenous communities protesting the highway violates the intercultural rights of the TIPNIS communities to self-determination. The highway itself would violate the rights of nature through the probable contamination of the TIPNIS as a national park. The case has potential lessons for analysts about unreflexively embracing indigenous knowledge as an alternative to hegemonic western modernity, as alternative knowledges so often lose their ontological difference when they enter the realm of public and political discourse.

Author

• James Beveridge