Autonomy and Then What? The Dilemmas of Resource Governance In Bolivia’s First Autonomous Indigenous Municipality

• In Event: Indigenous Environmental Governance: Struggles and Strategies for Safeguarding the Future

Abstract

Bolivia’s revolutionary 2009 Constitution declared the country to be plurinational and the primary goal of the newly formed state to decolonize the country and society. One of the most innovative aspects of the constitution, and the laws that followed, was the establishment of a new form of indigenous self-governance called the AIOC, Autonomía Indígena Originaria Campesina, or Autonomy for Indigenous, Original, and Peasant Peoples. The meaning of this new status is just now being worked out as indigenous communities fulfill the many bureaucratic hoops to convert their municipalities into AIOCs. The first community to do so was Charagua, a majority Guaraní municipality in the country’s Chaco region, also the site of the majority of Bolivia’s hydrocarbon reserves. This paper examines the fundamental dilemma of indigenous self-governance in Bolivia: while indigenous people now have a constitutional right to self-government, the central state continues to own the subsoil rights to all non-renewable resources, like oil and gas, and can exploit these resources without the permission of local communities. Examining the progress of Bolivia’s first AIOC, I ask: what does “indigenous resource governance” mean now that indigenous people have control of the municipal government? Does this political power affect indigenous people’s abilities to negotiate the forms of economic development and the resulting environmental impacts on their lands? Has it changed the fundamental question of “development for whom?”

Author

• Nancy G Postero, University of California/San Diego