“Resource Nationalism and Environmental Changes”

Bolivia is the first Plurinational State in the world, in which the State, constitutionally, assures the coexistence of different nations in a common area. The creation of this new Bolivian State addresses processes of mass mobilisation which structure the history of this country, and which after the neoliberal reforms of the end of the eighties and in the nineties, reached the tipping point of questioning the traditional policies. The election of the first indigenous president in 2005 replied to said process of questioning and set different challenges for this national society and at the same time for the global society. From this perspective the objective of this article is to reflect on the complexity of the tensions among which emerged from resource nationalism, decentralisation, as well as communitarian politics related to the Bolivian case. This work is structured in three parts. The first introductory part, presents the dynamic creation of the Plurinational State of Bolivia. The central part of the text is the second one, which analyses various elements: 1) the country’s resource nationalism studied from the Latin-American and world context, characterising the tensions surrounding the institutionalisation of social movements and their grassroots struggles; 2) the regulation of the multilateral administration of the natural resources and the economic distribution of its profits, specifically in the case of the non-renewable, which were strategic in the preceding ten years; 3) the impacts of the resource prosperity on the state commitments of advancing in the construction of the new constitutional order refounded in 2009; and 4) the simultaneous challenges of the government Bolivian in the redistribution of wealth, poverty and inequality reduction, similarly in the advances in the climate change agenda. To close this second part, cases of decentralisation and of TIPNIS Park are briefly presented as examples of structural divisions between the State and the sectors of Bolivian society which tension is observed such as resolving the transition of extractivism on a large scale towards innovative means of sustainability. Finally, the last part of this chapter describes an environmental perspective which shows a contrast between capitalist production and the Buen vivir (well-being) models developed by the local Bolivian community, a fundamental contrast to understand the future of the Latin-American region. This contrast shows the fractures in the current urban capitalist modus vivendi and illustrates some communitarian practices, as alternative options to the global crisis.