Green Expectations: Politics of the Environment in Pink Tide Bolivia

What does it mean to be a good steward of the environment? How and why does “the environment” become significant broadly as a moral and political object, in a context of new leftist governance in Latin America? How do people seek to organize and act politically around environmental issues, amidst frayed and tenuous alliances? What specific – and often contradictory – trajectories might ideas about environmental stewardship take for a number of different actors, against a backdrop of stalling out hopes and ever-more-bitter conflict between environmentalists and state actors with whom they had previously been allied? In 2005, Evo Morales was elected president of Bolivia, part of a cohort of leftist governments ascendant in Latin America between the mid-1990s and early 2000s collectively known as the Pink Tide. Morales’s victory was widely viewed as a victory for Bolivia’s social movements, including environmental movements, which had mobilized substantially in the years prior to his election and represented a crucial backbone of support. By the early 2010s however, much like other governments of the Pink Tide cohort, the Morales government had become mired in substantial ongoing environmental conflicts and criticism of its environmental record – especially its record of extractivism. The Morales government ultimately fell to a coup following contested elections in 2019, events that are widely viewed as marking the end of the Pink Tide’s political arc. In this dissertation, I present an ethnographic investigation of environmental politics in Bolivia in the era of the later Morales presidency. The research presented in this dissertation consists of 37 months of ethnographic fieldwork carried out between 2014 and 2020 in Cochabamba, Bolivia, during which I immersed myself in environmentalist networks at multiple core sites. The study I present is a multi-perspectival investigation of meaning making around environmental issues at a core inflection point in Bolivian politics, and in the region more broadly.

Author dc:creator

• Caitlyn Knecht Dye (24399998)

• Anthropology
• Cultural

Statement dc:rights

• In Copyright
• Open Access after 2028-05-01

DOI dc:identifier

https://doi.org/10.25417/uic.32995049.v1

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:figshare.com:article/32995049