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research-article2016
LAPXXX10.1177/0094582X16630308Latin American PerspectivesThe Bolivian Climate Justice Movement

The Bolivian Climate Justice Movement

Mobilizing Indigeneity in Climate Change Negotiations
by
Kathryn Hicks and Nicole Fabricant

The Bolivian Platform against Climate Change is a coalition of civil society and social
movement organizations working to address the effects of global warming in Bolivia and
to influence the global community. Many of the organizations use indigenous philosophy
and worldviews to contest normative conceptions of development. A study of the growth
of this movement drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in 2010 reveals a complex relation-
ship between state and nonstate actors that has had a striking impact on the global com-
munity despite the failure of multilateral climate change negotiations.

La Plataforma Boliviana Frente al Cambio Climático es una coalición de organizacio-

nes de la sociedad civil y movimientos sociales trabajando para abordar los efectos del
calentamiento global en Bolivia y para influenciar a la comunidad mundial. Muchas de
las organizaciones utilizan filosofía y cosmovisiones indígenas para impugnar concepcio-
nes normativas de desarrollo. Un estudio del crecimiento de este movimiento basándose en
el trabajo de campo etnográfico en 2010 revela una relación compleja entre actores esta-
tales y no estatales que ha tenido un impacto sorprendente sobre la comunidad global a
pesar del fracaso de las negociaciones multilaterales sobre el cambio climático.

Keywords: Climate change, Indigenous worldviews, Climate justice, Bolivia

Climate change has been one of the most important issues in Bolivia in recent
years. The Amazonian region has suffered from severe floods, while the desert
lowlands have witnessed droughts, both leading to agricultural failure and
displacement (Postero, 2013); in the highlands the two main glaciers that con-
tribute substantially to the local water supply are in retreat, putting two of the
nation’s largest cities at risk of seasonal water scarcity (Hoffmann, 2008). It is
for this reason that social movements and civil society organizations have
developed resource politics into new calls for environmental retribution
and climate justice. Bolivian social movements and indigenous communities
have been organizing for the past 30 years for territorial autonomy, resource

Kathryn Hicks is an associate professor of anthropology at the University of Memphis. Her teach-
ing and research interests include human-environment interactions, social justice, and health dis-
parities in Bolivia and the United States. Nicole Fabricant is an assistant professor in the
Department of Sociology, Anthropology, and Criminal Justice at Towson University and the
author of Mobilizing Bolivia’s Displaced: Indigenous Politics and the Struggle over Land (2012). They
thank Carlos Revilla and members of the Plataforma Boliviana for their assistance with this
research and Taylor Arnold and the LAP reviewers for their helpful feedback on earlier drafts of
this article.

LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES, Issue 209, Vol. 43 No. 4, July 2016, 87–104
DOI: 10.1177/0094582X16630308
© 2016 Latin American Perspectives

87
88   LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES

sovereignty and a more participatory state. Recently some of these movements

have mobilized ideas about vivir bien (living well) or recognizing prosperity in
terms other than levels of consumption in their efforts to influence both the
Bolivian state and the international community with regard to global warming.
Critical to this conversation is the belief of many Bolivians that those who have
benefited the most economically from greenhouse gas emissions should take
responsibility for helping less powerful nations pursue sustainable development.
The anthropologists Edelman and Haugerud (2005) examine the implicit
norms built into models of international development that help facilitate the
exploitation of countries in the Global South by the Global North and discour-
age alternative conceptions of the way to improve the quality of life. Similar
norms are built into global conversations about climate change and sustainable
development, including conversations about who is responsible for taking
action. Okereke (2006) argues that although notions of justice do play some part
in multilateral environmental regimes, the United Nations Framework
Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) is based on a libertarian notion of
justice that values individual liberty and property rights and views state inter-
vention as unjust. This conclusion is supported by UNFCCC agreements in
which the core policies are based on voluntary, often market-oriented mea-
sures, and industrialized nations seem poised to force Global South nations to
bear the brunt of the externalities of their capitalist economies (Okereke, 2006).
A central role for social movement actors from less powerful nations is to prob-
lematize and contest the assumptions underlying international conversations
on climate change and sustainable development in order to push more power-
ful nations to pursue meaningful action.
In this paper, we draw on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in 2010, focused
on the Plataforma Boliviana frente al Cambio Climático (Bolivian Platform
against Climate Change) (henceforth the Platform), a coalition of civil society
and social movement organizations working to address the effects of global
warming in Bolivia and to influence the broader global community. Involved
in the Platform are social movement groups that come out of a history of union-
based organizing and others that are using pre-Columbian values and forms of
social organization to reclaim rights to land and territory (Lucero, 2011).
Although there is considerable variation within the Platform, its overall posi-
tioning is built upon the use of indigenous philosophy and worldviews to con-
test normative conceptions of development and demand climate justice. It has
a complex relationship with the current left-leaning, pro-indigenous-rights
administration of Evo Morales, who draws on this philosophy to challenge
more powerful nations but is constrained by his role as a head of state (Aguirre
and Cooper, 2010). We trace the development of the climate justice movement
in Bolivia, explore its complex relationship with the Morales administration,
and examine its role in global climate change politics. We find a relationship
between state and nonstate actors in Bolivia that is alternately cooperative and
adversarial and that has had a striking impact on the global community despite
the ongoing failure of multilateral climate change negotiations. Finally, we
assess the importance of this movement, in solidarity with other grassroots
organizations, for placing pressure on the international community.
Following in the tradition of political economic anthropologists such as
Eric Wolf (1982) and William Roseberry (1982), who applied the theories and
 Hicks and Fabricant / THE BOLIVIAN CLIMATE JUSTICE MOVEMENT   89

methodologies of historical materialism to the traditional concerns of anthropol-

ogy, we understand organizing for climate justice as a component of broader
macrolevel shifts interacting with microlevel politics and concerns. From the
structural adjustment programs of the 1980s to the privatization of resources in
the 1990s and the election of Evo Morales and calls for resource nationalism,
movement activists in Bolivia have always thought about the relationship between
“culture,” historical inequalities, and contemporary access to land, natural
resources, and alternative ways of life. While some work on social movements has
tended to see activism as based on rational calculation, we explore the complex
ways in which indigenous peoples and activists “mobilize culture” in order to
address historic forms of inequity and perhaps map out more sustainable futures.

Natural Resources, Indigeneity, And

Redefining A State

Starting in the 1980s, the Bolivian government had little choice but to accept
an international agenda of making the state more accountable to private capital
than to its citizenry. Bolivia, deep in debt, initially asked the International
Monetary Fund for loans in order to pull itself out of crisis. The first round of
reforms was packaged as the New Economic Policy, which cut government
spending and imposed rigid monetary policy and succeeded in bringing hyper-
inflation under control. It floated currency against the U.S. dollar, privatized
state-owned industries, opened the country to direct foreign investment, and
ended protectionism (Conaghan, Malloy, and Abugattas, 1990). A second round
of neoliberal reforms came in the 1990s under President Gonzalo Sánchez de
Lozada’s Plan de Todos (Plan for All) and had seven key components that aligned
with this project, including privatization of hydrocarbon, telecommunications,
and other sectors, administrative decentralization and popular participation, and
reforms of the judicial, educational, and pension systems (Kohl, 2003).
These reforms had major implications for speeding environmental transfor-
mation and instituting neoliberal approaches to environmental governance,
both of which contributed to the development of an environmental movement
(McCarthy and Prudham, 2004; Perreault, 2005). The Law of Popular
Participation, a key component of the Plan for All, transferred responsibility for
previous state functions such as infrastructure, health care, and education to
municipalities, effectively buffering the state from accountability (Kohl, 2002;
Kohl and Farthing, 2006). Importantly, however, this was paired with central-
ized resource governance, with regulators more responsible to the private sec-
tor and supranational bodies than to democratic institutions; the Sectoral
Regulation System of 1994 created superintendencies for hydrocarbons, tele-
communications, electricity, transportation, and basic sanitation with essen-
tially no state or public oversight (Perreault, 2006).
The results of this process can best be illustrated with the example of water
(Perreault, 2006). The World Bank and the Inter-American Development Bank
extended loans to Bolivia during the early 1990s to pave the way for the priva-
tization of water. The Sánchez de Lozada administration used these loans to
help create a vice ministry of basic services to oversee this process behind closed
doors. In 1997 and 1999, 30-year water concessions, first for the contiguous cities
90   LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES

of La Paz and El Alto and then for the city of Cochabamba, were sold to multi-
national firms. As Laurie and Crespo (2007) note, these concessions were cele-
brated as models of “pro-poor” water delivery. However, the lack of
accountability to the poor created an enormous backlash from users, leading to
the water wars and eventually ending the concessions in both cities. One of the
justifications for water privatization in the international development commu-
nity was that commodification would promote resource conservation (Goldman,
2007), but, as in the case of the pro-poor language, this consideration was sec-
ondary to a built-in guarantee of corporate profits (Spronk and Crespo, 2008).
Successful broad-based mobilization over water as a human right demonstrated
the power of Bolivian social movements and helped spur a broader movement
aimed at local control of resources.
Resource-based struggles sparked conversations on issues of indigenous
citizenship, national sovereignty, and the rewriting of legal frameworks such
as the constitution (Canessa, 2012; Postero, 2010). It was in this context that a
wealth of academic scholarship emerged after the water wars of 2000, explor-
ing the ways in which the privatization of water sparked new forms of orga-
nizing across identitarian, class, and regional distinctions. As Albro (2005) and
Olivera and Lewis (2004) have noted, water warriors created a discourse cen-
tering on the defense of indigenous usos y costumbres (traditional use and dis-
tribution of water) as a collective cultural right. While many of the protesters
were not indigenous but urban mestizos, usos y costumbres became a power-
ful discourse that cut across race, class, and social sectors in the negotiations
for “collective” water rights. Tom Perreault (2008) notes that this framing and
scaling up to the regional and national levels was facilitated by collaboration
with a complex and dense associational network of nongovernmental organi-
zations (NGOs).
Three and a half years after the water wars, when Sánchez de Lozada
announced his plan to export Bolivia’s gas through Chile by pipeline, a number
of groups in the largely Aymara city of El Alto campaigned against the dispos-
session associated with the extraction and exportation of this resource. The gas
wars of 2003 amplified the ways in which local movements could help frame a
national political agenda to recover control over a resource that was seen as the
country’s patrimony. Demands for nationalization were packaged with other
demands for indigenous rights, greater indigenous representation, and the
rewriting of the constitution (Gustafson and Fabricant, 2011). This kind of orga-
nizing around resource reclamation, recovery, and nationalization propelled the
former coca grower and union leader Evo Morales to the presidency. Morales
was elected on a platform to implement the October Agenda, which included
nationalization of resources and a constitutional convention to recognize indig-
enous rights. His election represented a joining of a local movement politics to a
national change agenda and the turning back of neoliberalism (Perreault, 2006).
Morales and his Movimiento al Socialismo (Movement toward Socialism—
MAS) came to power in 2005 by challenging the neoliberal policies of previous
regimes and promising to protect majority indigenous control of resources.
This anti-neoliberal agenda was paired with a promise to “decolonize” the
Bolivian state, to overcome the structures and practices of racism against its
majority indigenous population, and to implement a new vision of sustainable
 Hicks and Fabricant / THE BOLIVIAN CLIMATE JUSTICE MOVEMENT   91

development based on an indigenous worldview called vivir bien (living well)

(Fabricant and Postero, n.d.). In part, Morales’s victory was about the new alli-
ances between highlanders and lowlanders known as the Unity Pact. However,
in recent years this alliance has dissolved in the face of various environmental
threats and proposals by Morales for large-scale development. One critical tip-
ping point has been the controversy over the Isiboro Sécure National Park and
Indigenous Territory, involving a plan to build a massive highway through
indigenous lands and territories with Brazilian development dollars. Many
indigenous peoples in the region were initially not necessarily opposed to this
form of development, but resistance surfaced in response to Morales’s failure
to consult with the local communities—a requirement that had been written
into the new constitution.1 The Consejo Nacional de Ayllus y Markas del
Qullasuyu (National Council of Ayllus and Markas of the Qullasuyu—
CONAMAQ) and the Confederación de Pueblos Indígenas de Bolivia (Bolivian
Confederation of Indigenous Peoples—CIDOB), which focus on indigenous
rights and land titles in the lowlands, aligned interests in response to this kind
of development project and in resistance to the Morales administration.
While the administration has worked to create a functional ministry of the
environment, it has not challenged regional development projects such as the
Initiative for the Integration of Regional Infrastructure in South America, a
program to build ports and transportation routes negotiated by the neoliberal
regime in 2000 and dominated by Brazil that is a major concern for environ-
mental groups (Farthing, 2009). Further, it has violated constitutional statutes
on protecting basic resources and consulting local indigenous communities
about development projects (Bebbington, 2009). This is not an illustration of a
lack of commitment to the underlying principles of environmental justice;
rather, the fact that Andean nations are following the same economic path
regardless of political orientation illustrates their limited power in a global
capitalist system (Bebbington, 2009).
As a number of scholars have noted, Morales’s victory was based as much
on resource nationalism—the continued extraction of resources like minerals
and hydrocarbons but to the benefit of national popular sectors—as on protec-
tion (Bebbington, 2009; Kohl and Farthing, 2012; Merino, 2011). His overarch-
ing project of “progressive extractivism”—using natural resource revenue such
as that from oil and gas for redistributive programming—has led to substantial
material benefits for the majority indigenous and poor in Bolivia (Fabricant and
Postero, n.d.). For instance, the United Nations Economic Commission for
Latin America and the Caribbean shows that poverty decreased from 2005 to
2011, from 63.9 percent to 42.4 percent, inequality (as measured by the Gini
coefficient) was reduced by more than 3 percent, and unemployment fell from
6 percent to 5.5 percent. This is quite remarkable, and in part this is why Morales
won again in 2014 with 63 percent of the vote.

Climate Change In Bolivia

As Canessa (2012: 16–17) notes, “the language of political indigeneity has

been used by various groups as a critique of neoliberal globalization, but it has
92   LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES

also been used to argue for a new relationship with the state”—and, we would
add, with the natural environment. Many social movement actors have negoti-
ated a path of continued support for the Morales administration alongside
active and public pressure to influence state policies. Now, some of the same
social movements, particularly organizations like the Bartolina Sisa (the rural
peasant movement focused on land rights), the CIDOB, the Confederación
Sindical Única de Trabajadores Campesinos de Bolivia (Sole Union
Confederation of Rural Workers of Bolivia—CSUTCB), which is the largest
peasant union in Bolivia, and the Coordinadora de Pueblos Étnicos de Santa
Cruz (Santa Cruz Coordinating Committee of Ethnic Communities—CPESC),
involved in these earlier struggles have turned their attention to issues of cli-
mate justice. The CONAMAQ, for example, advocated for a constituent assem-
bly that would expand the citizenship rights of indigenous people, including
protection of territorial resources, participated in the mobilizations of the early
2000s (Lucero, 2011), and now argues for a relationship with nature based on
indigenous worldviews.
Bolivia, along with other nations of the Global South, has contributed negli-
gibly to greenhouse gas emissions (Grubb, 1995) but is beginning to experience
their effects, particularly in indigenous communities. The impacts of climate
change will be complex, given the country’s ecological diversity, and will
undoubtedly pose major challenges for this resource-poor nation. The Bolivian
government estimates that recent extreme weather related to climate change
has cost the nation hundreds of millions of dollars each year in loss of infra-
structure and crops and that the associated ecological decline is a major cause
of rural-to-urban migration (PNCC Boliviana, 2007). The El Niño Southern
Oscillation, which tends to cause drought in highland and flooding in lowland
regions, may be increasing in frequency and intensity, and this limits recovery
time and reduces adaptive capacity (World Bank, 2010). Projections for the
period of 2006 to 2050 under a range of different assumptions include an over-
all rise in temperature in each region by an average of 2.3°C, less precipitation
in dry seasons, and more precipitation in wet seasons (World Bank, 2010).
Among the diverse likely consequences of climate change for human health is
the spread of illnesses like malaria and dengue to regions where they were
previously absent (PNCC Boliviana, 2007).
One of the primary reasons for growing concern in Bolivia is that high-
altitude regions (the world’s “water towers”) and islands are among the
areas most sensitive to climate change (Akin, 2012). Over the past several
decades, highland regions of Bolivia have begun to experience more
extreme diurnal and seasonal temperature fluctuations, likely related to
reduced cloud cover (Andersen and Verner, 2009). This means that increased
temperatures during the daytime and summer months are mirrored by a
greater frequency of colder nights and winter days. Hotter daytime tem-
peratures, more direct sunlight, and reduced precipitation all contribute to
the melting of Bolivia’s glaciers, many of which are expected to disappear
within the next several decades (Hoffmann, 2008; Vuille et al., 2008). This
has implications for water scarcity in settlements in the highlands, includ-
ing rural agricultural communities and several major cities, but also for the
rest of the nation.
 Hicks and Fabricant / THE BOLIVIAN CLIMATE JUSTICE MOVEMENT   93

Lowland regions have experienced consistent increases in temperature and

precipitation since the mid-twentieth century (Andersen and Verner, 2009;
IPCC, 2007). Agriculture in the Chaco region has been negatively affected by
the decreased frequency of frosts, shorter and more intense rains, and longer
and more severe periods of drought (UNDP Bolivia, 2011). Northern and east-
ern regions and particularly the departments of Beni and Santa Cruz have
experienced dramatic flooding in recent years, involving considerable damage
to homes and crops and a number of deaths each year (UNDP Bolivia, 2011).
Whole communities have been uprooted and displaced (Postero, 2013). A par-
ticularly severe drought in 2010 resulted in significant deforestation across the
Amazon basin, with an epicenter in north-central Bolivia, raising the possibility
of profound and devastating ecological shifts (Lewis et al., 2011).
The direct experience of rural communities with visible ecological change
and a history of successful social movement actions have contributed to the
formation of a movement focused on climate justice, mobilizing indigenous
cultural frames to put pressure both on the state and on the international com-
munity.

The Platform Against Climate Change

The environmental movement in Bolivia involves a strategic alliance between

indigenous communities and middle-class leftist intellectuals (Farthing, 2009),
and the interests of the two groups are often different. Indigenous climate
organizing, in particular, is fundamentally transnational, based on the shared
history of oppression and dispossession across states (Powless, 2012). Similarly,
movement activists are united by their shared distrust of modern nation-states
based on experiences of colonialism and neocolonialism and have long worked
both to gain equal status with states in multilateral negotiations and to chal-
lenge states’ tendency to act in ways that marginalize human rights (Powless,
2012). Finally, this community has openly challenged Eurocentric values in
favor of nonmaterialist relationships with nature (Powless, 2012). Indigenous
peoples gained recognition as a constituency in 2001, but the first multilateral
negotiation to recognize any of their claims took place only in 2006. These char-
acteristics are evident in the efforts of the Platform against Climate Change.
The Platform, founded in 2009, receives funding from international NGOs
focused on rural development such as Oxfam and Christian Aid and is made
up primarily of national NGOs headquartered in the capital city of La Paz and
rural social movement groups. Representatives of both national and interna-
tional NGOs argued in our interviews that the objectives and strategies of the
Platform were driven by these social movement organizations. Accordingly,
much of the discussion was framed in terms of indigenous culture and rights
and an emphasis on the effects of climate change in rural communities. This
alliance between international NGOs and indigenous political organizations is
not new but emerged in recent years through an interactive process of mutual
legitimation. For example, Lucero (2011) argues that organizations like Oxfam
America helped create a “regime of indigeneity” and authenticate a return to
indigenous social forms as an alternative to union-based political organization.
94   LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES

Conversely, Bolivian organizations made strategic use of transnational

resources to pursue demands across a range of scales from local to global
(Lucero, 2011).
Several of the NGO-supported strategies for dealing with climate change
that emerged from this coalition involve investigating and renewing prehis-
toric strategies for dealing with problems for agriculture such as flooding and
drought. For example, Oxfam International has hired a team of researchers and
engineers to teach poor farmers in the Beni Region how to build camellones, the
raised earth platforms surrounded by canals that pre-Columbian societies used
to protect seeds and crops and facilitate irrigation. In the highlands, Oxfam has
supported ayllu projects and alternatives to large-scale agricultural depen-
dency and promoted food sovereignty. A representative of Oxfam described
these projects as having been successful because “these indigenous communi-
ties have deep connections to land, territory, and space” (interview, La Paz,
June 10, 2010). NGO representatives recognize that the work of the social move-
ment groups in the Platform is more overtly political.
Members of the Platform work on both the local and global consequences
of climate change. In communications to the international community, they
have emphasized the link between colonialism and environmental destruction
and the need for countries in the Global North to take responsibility for their
historical role by implementing steep cuts in greenhouse gas emissions. They
propose an international climate change agreement involving emissions cuts
by 45 percent of 1990 levels by 2020 and 95 percent by 2050, the free flow of
information and technology between nations for adaptation and mitigation,
and the financing of adaptation in developing countries by wealthy nations at
6 percent of their gross national product. Finally, they highlight the value of
indigenous knowledge for the global community and the importance of
respect for indigenous rights (Bolivian Climate Change Platform, 2011). While
such discourses have been quite effective in challenging normative concep-
tions of human-environment interactions, their effect internationally has thus
far been largely symbolic.
The Platform is a signatory to a number of statements by coalitions of grass-
roots and social movement organizations across the globe contesting approaches
to environmental problems rooted in capitalism and models of perpetual eco-
nomic growth driving international climate change efforts. These include, for
example, an open letter rejecting the UN-driven Global Alliance on Climate-
Smart Agriculture as a means of propping up agribusiness and advocating
instead an approach centered on “agroecology, food sovereignty, and support
for small-scale producers” (Climate-Smart Agriculture Concerns, 2014).
Member organizations of the Platform speak in terms of protection of indige-
nous rights and sovereignty over resources, respect for the rights of Pachamama
or Mother Earth, and vivir bien. In preparation for the UN climate change
meetings in 2014, the CONAMAQ released a statement critical of the human
rights records of both the UN and the Bolivian state and arguing for alliances
with other grassroots organizations to demand transparency and meaningful
action on climate change (CONAMAQ, 2014).
In part, the Platform was a response to the challenges that emerged from the
UN climate change negotiations, and the positions taken by Evo Morales in
 Hicks and Fabricant / THE BOLIVIAN CLIMATE JUSTICE MOVEMENT   95

international contexts directly reflect its concerns and cultural framing. The
most disappointing climate change conference, perhaps, was that of
Copenhagen in 2009, when Bolivia first became a key player. Some observers
characterized Evo Morales and Rafael Correa, the left-leaning president of
Ecuador, as “Marxists from the mountains” and attributed some of the failure
of these negotiations to their vocal demands (Stevenson, 2011). When we spoke
to Teresa Hose, the primary coordinator for the Platform, in July of 2010, she
noted that some of these discourses emerged from movement organizing and
that the Platform was an important component of the negotiating team. The
anticapitalist and indigenist language of the Platform was evident in Morales’s
communications. In a much-reported speech at the UN conference, he linked
exorbitant U.S. spending on “wars on terror” to the minimal preparations for
climate change (Democracy Now, 2009):

I was looking at some figures. The U.S.—how much does the U.S. spend to
export terrorism to Afghanistan, to export terrorism to Iraq, and to export mil-
itary bases to South America? They don’t only spend millions but billions and
trillions. . . . Trillions of dollars are going to the wars. On the other hand, to save
humanity and the planet, they only want to direct $10 billion.

The Copenhagen Accord, drafted by the United States, China, India, Brazil,
and South Africa, recognized climate change as one of the greatest current chal-
lenges and stipulated that action should be taken to keep any temperature
increases below 2°C, but it did not contain any legally binding mitigation com-
mitments from industrialized nations. In response, Morales and members of
the Platform convened a World People’s Conference on Climate Change and
the Rights of Mother Earth, in which 30,000 activists, labor organizers, and
NGO representatives came together in Tiquipaya, Cochabamba, to propose an
alternative legal framework. The planning for the climate summit began a few
months before the event, with 17 working groups authorized to explore a vari-
ety of topics ranging from climate debt to food sovereignty.
Morales has emphasized that the poor and indigenous are at greater risk and
the globe should call upon their wisdom and leadership. Yet Bolivia as a
resource-dependent country continues to rely upon extractive industries and
the degradation of the environment as a strategy for redistributive governmen-
tal programming and national economic development (Weinberg, 2010). The
conference exposed some internal tensions and contradictions within the MAS
government and the Platform and between the two. An unauthorized group
called Mesa 18 encapsulated some of these tensions. Rafael Quispe, a represen-
tative of the CONAMAQ, argued for the expulsion of all extractive industries
from Bolivia because this model of development entails environmental degra-
dation, disruption, and displacement for indigenous peoples. He asserted that
Bolivia needed a new development model based upon the ayllus (an Andean
political and territorial unit based on kinship groups and communally held
lands) and local self-sufficiency, what indigenous peoples have called “Andean
worldviews.”
Platform members contributed substantially to the writing and passage of
the People’s Agreement, which outlined ways in which the Global South could
hold the Global North responsible for emissions reductions and preventive
96   LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES

measures to protect the rights of Mother Earth. The document is a severe cri-
tique of the capitalist model of development (People’s Agreement of
Cochabamba, 2010):

The capitalist system has imposed on us a logic of competition, progress, and

limitless growth. This regime of production and consumption seeks profit
without limits, separating human beings from nature and imposing a logic of
domination upon nature, transforming everything into commodities: water,
earth, the human genome, ancestral cultures, biodiversity, justice, ethics, the
rights of peoples, and life itself.

To stand up against this model, the document proposes refashioning econo-

mies, forms of governance, and even natural resource “protections” through a
universalizing of this idea of vivir bien:

We propose to the peoples of the world the recovery, revalorization, and

strengthening of the knowledge, wisdom, and ancestral practices of indige-
nous peoples, which are affirmed in the thought and practices of “living well,”
recognizing Mother Earth as a living being with which we have an indivisible,
interdependent, complementary, and spiritual relationship. To face climate
change, we must recognize Mother Earth as the source of life and forge a new
system based on the principles of harmony and balance among all and with all
things; complementarity, solidarity, and equality; collective well-being and the
satisfaction of the basic necessities of all; people in harmony with nature; rec-
ognition of human beings for what they are, not what they own; elimination of
all forms of colonialism, imperialism, and interventionism; peace among the
peoples and with Mother Earth.

In the context of this history of social movement organizing, it is no coinci-

dence that indigeneity is being put to work in the new resource battles centering
on climate change. Climate justice activists mobilize the idea of sumak kawsay,
suma qamaña, the Quechua phrase for living well. Arturo Escobar (2010: 65),
exploring the socioeconomic, political, and cultural transformations taking place
in South America over the past 10 years, argues that we can think about this as
an alternative form of modernization coming out of indigenous communities—
what he calls “a post-liberal, post-developmentalist, post-capitalist form of
development.” However, Sarah Radcliffe (2011: 248) warns of the dangers of
interpreting Ecuadorian sumak kawsay as post-neoliberalism. She asserts that
grammars of “neoliberal governmentality are hard to shift, regardless of trans-
formations in rhetoric” such as that associated with the Ecuadorian constitution.
The Ecuadorian government, like that in Bolivia, remains in practice a colonial
state and continues to interpret and prioritize certain constitutional principles
over others in ways that serve to reproduce particular hierarchies.

The Scaling Up Of Living Well And Indigenous

Worldviews

Some of these movement discourses, initially grounded in local community

and territorial life, have now migrated into national and international arenas to
inform climate change negotiations. In the aftermath of the Cochabamba
Summit, Morales, at a press conference at UN headquarters, advocated the
 Hicks and Fabricant / THE BOLIVIAN CLIMATE JUSTICE MOVEMENT   97

adoption of the People’s Agreement as a means of “decolonizing atmospheric

space,” 80 percent of which has been used by rich nation-states (UN, 2010). Also
present was Tom Goldtooth, executive director of the Indigenous Environmental
Network, who added that indigenous people are suffering human rights abuses
from market-based climate change solutions such as carbon trading and offsets
and are concerned about a world that privatizes air and water and commodi-
fies Mother Earth. He labeled the Copenhagen “deal” a “Copenhagen steal”
because it did not recognize the rights of indigenous peoples.
At the Doha Climate Convention in December of 2012, many of these dis-
courses once again influenced international negotiations, particularly when
José Antonio Zamora Gutiérrez (2012), Bolivian minister of the environment
and water, argued that “the climate is not for sale” and referred to the with-
drawal of developed countries from the Kyoto Protocol as an attack on Mother
Earth and on life. He went on to say that “developing countries are making
greater efforts to reduce emissions and paying the price of a climate crisis that
every day leaves droughts, floods, hurricanes, typhoons, etc.” He warned of
the effects on indigenous peoples of turning forests into “carbon markets” and
pointed to living well as a solution: “In Bolivia we have the vision of living well
as a new approach for civilization and cultural alternative to capitalism, and in
this context we focus our efforts to create a balance and harmony between soci-
ety and nature.”
The Rio+20 conference, which took place in Brazil in June 2012, 20 years after
the landmark 1992 Earth Summit, brought together world leaders and thou-
sands of participants from the private sector, NGOs, and others to shape policy.
The official discussion focused on building a green economy to achieve sustain-
able development and lift people out of poverty and improving international
coordination for sustainable development. From this perspective, the solution
to the current ecological crisis is in large part tied to green economics, the idea
that economic policies should build environmental costs into the price of prod-
ucts and services. The Platform took a critical stance on the green economy,
once again using indigenous worldviews and the People’s Agreement to chal-
lenge market-based approaches to sustainable development: “Putting a price
on nature is not a solution and will only benefit big capital” (Bolivian Climate
Change Platform, 2012).
Here indigeneity moved from anticapitalist discourse to ways of thinking
about alternative local and collective management and use of forests, water,
and lands. These universalized discourses of living well may turn indigenous
peoples into stewards of the environment (Conklin and Graham, 1995), a theme
echoed by several members of the Platform. Despite anthropology’s best efforts
to complicate our analyses of indigeneity—to illustrate the ways in which
indigenous peoples were historically assimilated into market-based economies
and continue to reap the benefits of capitalism—discourses of “the ecological
Indian” serve a strategic political purpose in problematizing normative models
of development.
The Platform offers some important lessons for working on issues of climate
change, but it also benefits from the historical success of social movements in
Bolivia. First, it has worked both in collaboration and in tension with the
Bolivian state to establish its negotiating position. Morales’s former role as the
98   LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES

head of a coca-growers’ union and current position as leader of the MAS means
that he has been active in resource-based social movement mobilizations and
understands their inner logic. Although the realities of his position as head of
state often put him at odds with their objectives (Aguirre and Cooper, 2010), his
administration maintains its sometimes precarious alliance with indigenist,
Marxist, and other popular movements (Kohl and Farthing, 2012). This alliance
provides a unique opportunity for activists to be a part of national policy mak-
ing and have influence in the international arena. Morales’s administration has
taken activist calls, primarily those of indigenous communities, for climate jus-
tice beyond Bolivia’s borders (Stevenson, 2011). At the same time, the Platform
maintains active pressure on him and exerts influence on local and national
issues.
Second, the Platform has made strategic global alliances and uses indigene-
ity as a frame to problematize the neoliberal agenda and Eurocentric values
underlying multilateral negotiations by advocating a view of nature as a set of
interconnected processes rather than a collection of resources (De Angelis,
2011). Its message has gained broad recognition and support among leftist
intellectual and popular movements as an effective alternative to global capi-
talism and a means of holding nations in the Global North accountable (De
Angelis, 2011; Gudynas, 2011; Klein, 2010). These alliances recognize that efforts
must be aimed at the nations with the highest greenhouse gas emissions. An
important success for both the Morales administration and the Platform was
the UN General Assembly’s recognition of April 22 as International Mother
Earth Day. The Platform, in collaboration with activists from Southeast Asia,
South Africa, and the Middle East, continues to advocate the adoption of a
Universal Declaration of the Rights of Mother Earth.

Building An International Movement

The intent of the climate justice march on September 21, 2014, in which more
than 400,000 people marched through the streets of downtown New York in
what has been called the largest environmental protest in history, was to pres-
sure President Obama and the international community to reach a binding
agreement on carbon dioxide emissions, particularly with a view to the rene-
gotiation of the Kyoto Protocol in 2015. Indigenous people from around the
globe were at the front of the long line of protesters. When Amy Goodman of
Democracy Now (2014b) interviewed several indigenous organizers, one activ-
ist responded:

We’re here to march for the next seven generations and to take a stand against
Big Oil companies that are coming through our territories and trying to take
our ancestral lands and destroy them. We’re here because it’s going to take all
of us—all of us—not just the indigenous people, but everyone in the whole
world, to come together to save our water.

This demonstration was perhaps the most spectacular attempt by grassroots

organizations to contest the terms of the global debate on climate action—more
than 1,100 organizations endorsed the march. These groups, including 350.org,
 Hicks and Fabricant / THE BOLIVIAN CLIMATE JUSTICE MOVEMENT   99

Avaaz, the Sierra Club, the Climate Justice Alliance, and the Service Employees’
International Union, came together and took to the streets. The Platform was
not only present at the demonstration but had taken part in some of the orga-
nizing work. This is perhaps one of the clearest recent instances of localized
movement building’s taking the global stage, dramatizing the problem through
music, dance, chanting, and grabbing the attention of the mass media. The goal,
activists said, was to mobilize as many people as possible and create a global
climate movement from the bottom up, a social movement that would fight the
long battle to curb global warming. The challenge in the wake of such a massive
demonstration will be to sustain and build a movement with the power and
reach to alter climate negotiations, particularly as movement activists face
threats from nonrenewable-fossil-fuel giants working in collaboration with
government officials.

Confronting The Challenges Of Reaching

A Binding Agreement

Multilateral negotiations to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and limit a rise

in global temperature to at most 2°C have largely failed. The Kyoto Protocol,
negotiated in 1997, still serves as the basis for current action on mitigation. This
agreement involves the commitment of 37 industrialized nations to reduce
their greenhouse gas emissions relative to 1990 levels. A major focus of recent
talks has been to establish a second commitment period to fill the gap between
the current regime and a 2020 regime to be negotiated by 2015 and to involve
caps for all nations. One major challenge to the effectiveness of the Kyoto
Protocol is that, while it was signed by President Bill Clinton, the U.S. commit-
ment to it was never ratified by Congress. The United States, the single greatest
historical contributor to greenhouse gas emissions, appears unlikely to play a
meaningful role in any potential agreement in the near term (Kulovesi, 2012).
It is worth noting President’s Obama’s historic Climate Action Plan, including
reduction of emissions from power plants, new efficiency standards for appli-
ances and federal buildings, and other measures that fall within his authority.
Also of historic importance is the November 2014 agreement between the
United States and China calling for a 26–28 percent reduction from 2005 green-
house gas emissions in the United States by 2025 and a cap on Chinese emis-
sions in 2003.
Leaders and civil society in the Global South continue to face enormous bar-
riers in influencing multilateral climate change negotiations. The relative
importance of the UN and other international governing bodies dealing with
the environment and those focused on economic relations and international
development goes a long way toward illustrating the hurdles involved in pri-
oritizing climate change. While current climate change agreements recognize
differentiated responsibility and, in theory, mechanisms for addressing the
effects in less powerful nations, the concept of climate justice is inconsistent
with neoliberal governing philosophy and practices.
Some of the most intense resistance has come, unsurprisingly, from the
United States, the nation with the most power to limit multilateral agreements
100   LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES

(Kulovesi, 2012). This position is facilitated by the efforts of some powerful

corporate leaders to shift public opinion on the validity of climate science
(Hellberg et al., 2012). The most influential of these are the fossil-fuel billion-
aires David and Charles Koch, who have mobilized their vast personal wealth
to influence U.S. public opinion. Their strategies have included lobbying
Congress to vote in favor of fossil fuels and increased subsidies and to promote
climate-change denial. Naomi Klein (2011) has noted the effectiveness of these
and similar campaigns in reducing belief in and concern for climate change in
the United States. This means that, although there are important social move-
ment actors in the United States advocating for immediate action (for example,
mobilizations against TransCanada’s Keystone XL pipeline to carry tar sands
through the United States [(Democracy Now, 2013]), there is limited electoral
pressure on members of Congress, and corporate profits continue to rise. Of
equal importance is likely the fact that residents of the Global North continue
to benefit disproportionately from greenhouse gas emissions.
The anthropologist William Roseberry (1982) argued that a fundamental
basis for social inequality is inequality of access to the means of cultural pro-
duction—that individuals with more wealth and power have more power to
shape cultural norms in ways that reinforce their interests. This reality is illus-
trated by the power of wealthy industrialists to help generate uncertainty
regarding the likely effects of climate change and by the implicit assumptions
associated with multilateral climate change negotiations. Representatives of
the Platform, in collaboration with NGOs, the Bolivian state, and a broader
indigenous rights movement, have negotiated a number of ongoing tensions
and contradictions to organize around climate justice. Their primary strategy
has been an effort to shape implicit international norms of nature as a set of
resources, relying on normative constructions of indigenous and human rights
and less familiar notions of the rights of Mother Earth, and they have been
very successful in conveying this message to an international audience. Others
have recognized the potential of indigenous philosophical tenets such as liv-
ing well and the rights of Mother Earth to serve as a unifying vision for climate
activists around the globe because it avoids the productivism of classical
socialism (De Angelis, 2011) and the potential market-driven approach of lib-
eral environmentalists. Whether they can be translated into new forms of gov-
ernance is an open question. Members of the Platform recognize the critical
importance of building a transnational environmental justice movement based
on an alternative vision of human-environment relationships (Bolivian
Climate Change Platform, 2011). Sustained and transnational popular mobili-
zation is likely the only way of persuading the most powerful actors in the
climate change negotiations to agree to binding and significant greenhouse
gas emission reductions.

Conclusion

We have focused on the collection of grassroots organizations and NGOs

known as the Platform that is reframing issues of sustainable development in
terms of indigenous worldviews and contesting climate injustice. We have
 Hicks and Fabricant / THE BOLIVIAN CLIMATE JUSTICE MOVEMENT   101

highlighted their use of pre-Columbian values, indigenous philosophy, and

worldviews such as living well to reduce our carbon footprints and reinvent
the way we relate to the natural environment. This model is an important alter-
native to the normative neoliberal model of development and a meaningful
framework around which to organize and demand action. However, when it is
scaled up to inform national and international policy making, it may lose its
localized and grounded meanings. This is illustrated by ongoing tensions
between members of the Platform and the administration of Evo Morales. The
Platform and other movements face enormous challenges. As the Lima climate
change conference opened, the gap between social justice and indigenous activ-
ists and the international community was illustrated by their sheer physical
distance from the site of negotiations (Democracy Now, 2014a). However, the
activists’ presence in Lima, along with actions such as the climate march in
New York, illustrated the potential of grassroots movements to maintain pres-
sure on climate change negotiators. The challenge will be sustaining such a
movement beyond the streets to continue the organizing work of pursuing an
alternative socioeconomic order.

Note

1. In December 2011 both the CIDOB and the CONAMAQ formally withdrew from the Unity
Pact. Senior members of the CIDOB criticized the pact for deviating from its purpose of pressing
for indigenous rights in the constitution.

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