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Abstract

In this paper, I extend the analytical framework of infrastructural citizenship with political ecology and reorientate analysis to rural geographies, extractive infrastructure and indigenous territorial movements. Drawing from recent fieldwork in Bolivia, I argue that an extended conceptual framework of ‘infrastructural ecological citizenship’ better acknowledges the multiple, changing and contested ways that people and rural places co-exist and how these relationships are being reworked as infrastructure and citizenship are co-constituted. I use this framework to analyse a conflict over road building in an indigenous territory and national park in lowland Bolivia – the Isiboro Sécure Indigenous Territory and National Park (Territorio Indígena y Parque Nacional Isiboro Sécure; TIPNIS), revealing how the road building project weakened the pre-existing political and material infrastructures that underpinned modes of indigenous territorial citizenship within Bolivia’s Plurinational State, as well as foregrounding how transnational extractive capital has shaped negotiations of territorial place-based citizenship in the TIPNIS. In doing so, I contribute to debates on infrastructural citizenship, resource extraction and sustainable development, revealing the ongoing potency of place-based claims on land and related claims for territorial citizenship.

Keywords

Sustainability development infrastructure political ecology indigeneity citizenship

In 2011, the Bolivian government began building a new road from Villa Tunari to San Ignacio de Moxos to connect key regions of the country, secure market access for remote areas and access unexplored pools of natural gas. Funded by the Brazilian National Bank of Economic and Social Development (BNDES), contracted to Brazilian engineering and infrastructure conglomerate OAS and linked to the Initiative for the Integration of the Regional Infrastructure of South America (IIRSA) (now South American Council for Infrastructure and Planning COSIPLAN), this road fitted within a regional vision for better infrastructure across Latin America. Ambitious plans for new infrastructure are being advocated by bilateral development institutions and transnational capital as part of a global turn to infrastructure-led development (Dodson, 2017). Regional agencies of the United Nations (UN), such as the Natural Resources and Infrastructure Division (NRID) of the UN Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC), promote a “paradigm shift” (Jaimurzina et al., 2016) as necessary to better connect the region and enable the region to achieve sustainable development goals (see also Jaimurza and Sánchez, 2017). Although ‘infrastructure’ refers to both hard infrastructures (communications, energy, roads, sanitation, ports) and soft (culture, education, health, leisure), financing is currently being funnelled into transport infrastructure – seen in investments by Overseas Development Assistance, Chinse trade/aid agreements, public-private partnerships and nation states. In Bolivia, the Morales administration (2005–2019) prioritised road building and the country ranks in the top six of Latin American countries investing into economic infrastructure – primarily transport infrastructure and primarily roads (Jaimurzina et al., 2016).

The 2011 road, however, was routed through one of Bolivia’s first national parks, which forms a part of the Vilcabamba-Amboró Corridor and is one of the most biodiverse regions in the country (USAID, 2008: 6). Since 1990, the park has been formally recognised as the territory of Tsimané, Yuracaré, and Mojeño-Trinitario communities, following the 1990 lowland indigenous March for Territory and Dignity. It has since been managed as a double-category park, the Isiboro Secure Indigenous Territory and National Park (Territorio Indígena y Parque Nacional Isiboro Secure; TIPNIS). For those promoting the road, the narrative of development has been central, with the road being used to promise better citizenship, better education, better healthcare and better livelihoods. For those who have opposed the road (initially as part of a 1000 person, 150 mile march to the seat of government), the road building project threatened their indigenous territorial rights, their right to collectively determine the future of their territory, the ways their lives are imbricated with place and they ways they value and protect nature. TIPNIS protesters wanted development (McNeish, 2013) but forms of development that suited their territory – challenging an overly simplified development versus conservation binary (Hope 2016, 2020a).

The TIPNIS conflict is much cited as seminal for understanding Bolivia’s recent (and complex) politics of both pluri-nationalism and post-neoliberalism, introduced more fully below (see Grugel and Riggirozzi, 2012; Mamani, 2011; Yates and Bakker, 2014). It has been analysed in detail as illustrative of indigenous development agendas (McNeish, 2013), in critique of the Morales’ administrations claims to socialism (Webber), as a result historical land politics in lowland Bolivia (Fabricant and Postero, 2015), for how indigenous environmentalism has been disciplined by an extractive imperative (Hope, 2016), as insightful for understanding Bolivia’s decolonial territorial politics (Laing, 2012, 2020), for entanglements with global development agendas (Hope, 2020a, 2020b) and as informed by the diverse and shifting political organisations within the territory (Hirsch, 2019). In this paper, I focus on the road itself.

Within social science, an infrastructural turn has brought changes to contemporary conceptualisations of infrastructure. These go beyond physical materiality to examine infrastructures as a manifestation of social and technological processes (Larkin, 2013; Lemanski, 2019: 3; Von Schnitzler, 2008). Urban geographers, for example, research unequal access to infrastructure in cities and examine negotiations of infrastructure as negotiations of space, rights and citizenship (Amin, 2014; Graham and Marvin 2002; Graham and McFarlane 2014). Lemanski (2019, 2020a, 2020b) has developed the analytical framework of ‘infrastructural citizenship’ to foreground how everyday engagements with infrastructure are implicated in everyday acts of citizenship. This framework enables a closer examination of how dynamics of infrastructure, used primarily as a lens to understand urban life, connects to debates about citizenship and socio-political life (Lemanski 2019, 2020a, 2020b). The ‘infrastructural citizenship’ framework explicitly connects these debates and subsequently “highlights the links between the material and political nature of state-society relations” (Lemanski 2019: 1). In this paper, I re-orientate the concept of infrastructural citizenship towards rural spaces, resource geographies and indigenous territories. In extending infrastructural citizenship with political ecology, I examine road infrastructure as an entry point to understanding the material and political dynamics of state-society-nature relationships. Specifically, how claims for territorial citizenship both challenge and are weakened by an extractive state.

I argue that an extended conceptual framework of ‘infrastructural ecological citizenship’ reframes our analysis to better include human/non-human relations and the ways that different modes of infrastructural citizenship enact, support and undermine different ways that people live- with and -in a place. This extended conceptual framework offers insight into, first, how place-based forms of citizenship (here studied in claims for territorial citizenship) and people’s ability to protect and maintain these are changed by large-scale infrastructure projects and, second, how mega-infrastructure projects promote forms of national citizenship that are entangled with the extractive project. I both elaborate and utilise this extended framework in an analysis of the conflict over roadbuilding in the TIPNIS, finding that that the material-political geographies that underpin practices of indigeneity, conservation and pluri-nationalism are being significantly changed by the dispute over the road, in ways that undermine and marginalise claims and practices of territorial citizenship. This is first relevant to debates about infrastructural citizenship, outlining how political ecology can extend the reach of the concept. Second, this extended framework demonstrates the utility of working with and across sub-disciplines. In this paper, working with analytical frameworks from urban geography has enabled insight into the ways infrastructure, extractivism and citizenship converge, whilst political ecology complicates treatments of rural geographies that oversimplify the multiple and historical claims that people make on land and natures. Third, this analysis contributes to debates on extractivism in Latin America, by demonstrating how the region’s extractive imperative operates through infrastructure. Fourth, and finally, it is relevant to debates on sustainable development by contributing an understanding of the perhaps unintended consequences that deepened partnerships between global development, global finance and the private sector mean for wider trajectories of sustainability.

This paper is structured as follows; first, I set out how I combine infrastructural citizenship with political ecology and identify the questions and trajectories that emerge from this extended lens. Second, I introduce citizenship in Bolivia, framed by key tensions between discourses and practices of indigenous territorial citizenship and resource nationalism. Third, I introduce the TIPNIS conflict and my methods. Fourth, I turn to my empirical analysis to both elaborate and employ the infrastructural ecological citizenship framework, structured as Ecological Citizenship; Infrastructure + Ecological Citizenship; and Infrastructural Ecological Citizenship as Beyond the State. Fifth, my conclusion.

Infrastructural citizenship and political ecology

‘Infrastructural citizenship’ is an analytical framework that foregrounds ‘how citizens’ everyday access to, and use of, public infrastructure in the city affect, and are affected by, their citizenship identity and practice’ (Lemanski, 2019, 2020a: 5). This focuses attention on how ‘citizenship acts and practices are embodied in public infrastructure (and vice versa)’ (Lemanski, 2020a: 5). Infrastructural citizenship recognizes how citizenship is claimed and demonstrated, for example by the self-construction of infrastructure, or clearly identifies a lack of infrastructure as demonstrative of a lack of citizenship rights. Marginalized individuals and groups, for example, are identified as “those with limited access to material goods and public infrastructure” (Lemanski 2020b: 10). To date, the framework has been used to understand how various urban infrastructures (for example, public housing, electricity, water and sanitation) effect, create and constitute particular experiences of, and claims for, citizenship (see Lemanski, 2019, 2020a, 2020b; Pesa, 2019; Silver and McFarlane, 2019; Wafer, 2019). In a related example, Amin has analysed how infrastructure reworks struggles for recognition in Brazilian informal settlements and argues for the importance of examining the social life and sociality of urban infrastructure (Amin, 2014). For Amin, infrastructure in Brazil acts as a political intermediary that shapes the rights to the city of those living in poverty, as well as directly influences their capacity to claim those rights. A city’s infrastructure (roads, services and utilities) is subsequently understood as implicated in ‘the making of urban functionality, sociality and identity’ (Amin 2014: 137). In this paper, I analyse the TIPNIS road as a political intermediary that lessens the claims that TIPNIS leaders can make for place-based development, nature, and politics, in the face of consensus between agendas for sustainable development and extractive-led growth (see Hope, 2020b).

Globally, the G-20 predict that current rates of investment in new infrastructure will amount to $78.8trillion by 2040 (Global Infrastructure Hub, 2019). In Latin America, commitments to infrastructure are also escalating (Bebbington et al., 2020). The Initiative for the Integration of Regional Infrastructure of South America (IIRSA) is now remodelled as COSIPLAN and continues ambitious plans for transport infrastructure to connect 10 Development and Integration Axes across the region. In addition, there is a rising number of south–south trade agreements being made with China (Chauvet et al., 2020; Gonzalez-Vicente R, 2012), Oversea Development Assistance (UN, 2018: 5, 11) and other Public-Private financing schemes (ECLAC, 2019; ECLAC, 2018: 28). New highways, waterways, railways, ports, dams, power stations, infrastructure supporting extractive industry and urban infrastructure for expanding cities are anticipated for the region, including in the Amazon basin (Bebbington et al., 2020). To date, the building of new roads in Latin America has been researched from a number of different perspectives. For development policy makers, like the World Bank and UN, the focus has been on the economic costs of an infrastructural gap (Easterly and Serven, 2003; Jaimurzina et al., 2016; Lardé, 2016). From this perspective, a lack of transport infrastructure is identified as a key barrier to economic growth. The work of anthropologists Harvey and Knox has examined the enchantments of road infrastructure and its affective force, as technologies that are understood to mean progress and development, despite numerous examples where they have failed to deliver (Harvey and Knox, 2012). They question why roads remain so well supported, despite often failing on their promises. Recent efforts to improve transport infrastructure have been identified as part of Latin America’s new commodity consensus (Svampa, 2015), driven by the new frontiers of resource extraction across the region. Significant investments into new roads across the region, for example those backed by COSIPLAN, state leaders and Chinese partnerships, are being studied for the socio-political effects they are having on the Amazon (Jenkins et al., 2008; Van Dijck, 2013), for their relationships to neoliberalism (Kanai, 2016; Riggirozzi and Tussie, 2012) and for what they tell us about the changing power and geopolitics of China (Gonzalez-Vincente, 2012; Jenkins, 2012; Jenkins et al., 2012; Moran et al., 2012; Myers, 2018). One recent study has investigated the environmental costs of the new roads and railways required for resource extraction across the Amazon, finding it significant (and detrimental) for forest degradation and demonstrating the wider environmental costs of extractivism (Bebbington et al., 2018). In follow-up, Bebbington et al. have set out a new governance agenda for mega-infrastructure, to better account for the socio-environmental costs of mega-infrastructure projects and to ‘enhance the likelihood that infrastructure investment in tropical environments recognizes socio-ecological realities and enhances the resilience of socio-ecological systems’ (Bebbington et al., 2020: 21832). In this paper, I also offer an environmental critique, examining how plans for a new highway weaken claims for territorial citizenship, with implications for local socio-natures and wider trajectories of sustainability.

Lemanski’s (2019: 590) work on infrastructural citizenship explicitly frames analysis of infrastructure as necessitating an analysis of citizenship, as a route to better understand socio-political life and the making of socio-material worlds. Going beyond a formal category of membership into a nation, citizenship is here understood as a ‘flexible and contingent form of political subjectification that emerges through iterative (and constitutive) performances between the state and its subjects’ (Ong 1996 in Anand 2017: 9). Following Anand, whilst formal citizenship promises equality, ‘the distribution of substantive civil, political, socio-economic, and cultural rights among citizens has long been unequal’ (Holston and Appadurai 1996 in Anand, 2017: 9). Citizenship is thus unequal, negotiated, claimed and enacted, for example when voting or in demands for sanitation, education and health infrastructure (as explored in the literatures introduced above). For Lemanski, understanding citizenship as ‘a long-term relationship not a one-off protest” (2020b: 591) reveals the significance of understanding how everyday citizenship is negotiated within public infrastructure systems and how citizens imagine and claim their relationship to the state (ibid.). I engage with debates on indigenous citizenship in Latin America (Cusicanqui, 2012; Hale, 2002; Radcliffe, 2015), which spans various decolonial agendas (Mignolo and Walsh, 2018) and bids for plurality and ontological multiplicity (de la Cadena and Blaser, 2018; Escobar, 2020). In Bolivia, indigenous social movements, political organisations and politicians have long demanded more substantive forms of indigenous citizenship. During the term of President Evo Morales (2005–2019), significant (though contested) changes were enacted in state legislation. Most prominently, in 2009 Bolivia became a Plurinational State, in recognition of the multiple indigenous groups and governments in the country. The Morales administration also set out a commitment to enhanced forms of indigenous territorial autonomy and began a new political process to better recognise indigenous governments and territorial governance. In 2009, a new Constitution was enacted that committed to Vivir Bien as the guiding principle of the state– an indigenous-led philosophy of ‘living well, not better’ that stands in critique of hegemonic, stadial theories of development. In practice, and as more fully introduced below, these gains have been much complicated by an intensifying extractive regime. In Latin American rural geographies, the relationship between infrastructure, rights and political capacity is differently inflected to urban geographies, complicated by concerns for how new infrastructure will transform landscapes, natures, wildlife and territorial rights. New transport infrastructure, as examined in this paper, changes existing ways of managing, using and accessing land, potentially disrupting both human and non-human inhabitants. In this context, the extended framework of ‘infrastructural ecological citizenship’ reveals the changing ways that citizenship relates to place and the non-human, as new mega-infrastructures are built and as academic attention increasingly shifts to urban life and processes of urbanisation.

Political ecology informs this extended framework, in foregrounding how natures are made, treated and managed through culture, history and politics (Escobar, 2018). As an interdisciplinary approach, political ecology evades simple definition (Neumann, 2014) and has become a broad and dynamic field that ‘continues to explore new spaces, scales and themes’ (Perreault et al., 2015: 7). Multiple strands of work analyse political ecologies of resources and resource extraction (elaborated below), conservation (Arsel and Büscher, 2012; Brockington and Duffy, 2010; Brockington et al., 2012; Büscher and Fletcher 2015; Neumann, 2015), cities (Heynen et al., 2006; Loftus, 2012) and more, attending to the multi-scalar dynamics of power that are critical for the production, maintenance or hegemony of particular natures.

Political ecology links people to place, for example by revealing how colonial histories of land use and land change have produced particular practices, logics and landscapes (see Adams and Mulligan, 2003) or by analysing how identity politics is implicated in the production, management and treatment of nature, for example through the policy frameworks that connect indigenous groups to territory (Anthias, 2018; Hope, 2017; Li et al., 2010) or by gendered dynamics (see Harcourt and Escobar, 2005; Mollett and Faria, 2013). In this paper, political ecology extends the utility and reach of infrastructural citizenship by connecting claims for citizenship to claims for natures – crucial in instances where new roads and large-scale infrastructure are extended into conservation areas and indigenous territories. To an examination of infrastructural citizenship in Latin America, political ecology adds a way to question how natures are being reworked and (re)produced as infrastructure and citizenship are co-constituted. From this point in the paper, I use the term ‘infrastructural ecological citizenship’ to refer to this extended lens, to examine how infrastructure, citizenship and nature inter-relate.

Development infrastructure in Latin America: sustainable development, natural resources and roads

Agenda 2030, incorporating the 2015 United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), incorporates a response to climate change into global development targets, comprised of 17 goals, 169 targets and 230 indicators (UN, 2015). This shift offers a timely response to calls to greatly reduce the human environmental footprint, found in debates about climate change (IPCC, 2015), biodiversity loss (Apostopolopoulou and Adams, 2015; Rockström et al., 2009) and, more recently, the Anthropocene (Bonneuil and Fressoz, 2016; Crutzen, 2006). A core rationale for both the wider agenda and goals, however, is to promote growth-led development and it relies on deepened partnerships with the private sector, supporting a central analytic of economic growth over poverty reduction (Mawdsley, 2018). This is reflected in the goals themselves, which include Goal 8 for ‘Decent Work and Economic Growth’ and Goal 9 for ‘Industry, Innovation and Infrastructure’ (UN, 2015). It is also reflected in calls for private finance to fund the goals and new partnerships between the private sector and development institutions, which help to ‘normalize a radical shift in development finance’ (Mawdsley, 2018: 191). Private sector representatives are being invited to ‘drive and shape’ global development governance and policy by the United Nations, other multilaterals, and national development agencies (Mawdsley, 2015, 2018). The UN Development Program ‘Mining Atlas: Mapping Mining to the SDGs’, for example, writes that ‘it is our shared belief that the mining industry has an unprecedented opportunity to mobilize significant human, physical, technological and financial resources to advance the SDGs’ (UNDP, 2016).

Since the 2000s in Latin America, state-led development has been underpinned by a regional resource boom and the extraction of natural resource wealth (see Bebbington, 2009). This has been exploited by governments on both the right and left, including in Bolivia (Bebbington, 2009; Veltmeyer and Petras, 2014). Since 2015, agendas for sustainable development have been agreed across the region. However, these remain entangled with the region’s resource wealth, as a key source of economic growth (Hope, 2020a, 2020b). ECLAC and NRID have done ‘extensive work … to lay the foundations for this paradigm shift in both the national plans and regional physical integration initiatives’ (Jaimurzina et al., 2016). This has involved, for example, national workshops for training, discussing and implementing policies for sustainable development, ‘particularly in the areas of infrastructure, logistics and mobility’ (Jaimurzina et al., 2016). ECLAC undertakes research and offers technical assistance, training courses, governmental meetings and technical workshops. Here, infrastructure is promoted as both directly and indirectly relevant to the SDGs (Lardé, 2016). Within the UN Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC), the NRID understands and promotes sustainable development as entangled with drives to secure better infrastructure. Improved infrastructure is seen as ‘fundamental if the production apparatus and the economic system are to operate efficiently’, as well as necessary for improving quality of life through greater access to social and public services and people’s better integration into society in different ways, to increase social capital and reduce poverty (Lardé, 2016: 3). Various, interconnected infrastructures (for example, for transport, energy and sanitation) are designed to secure ‘the structural changes needed to achieve sustainable and inclusive development in Latin America and the Caribbean’ (Jaimurzina et al., 2016: 1). Economic infrastructure is the first step in this, with transport infrastructure a foundational component.

The need for better transport infrastructure across Latin America has been promoted since 2000 through IIRSA (now COSIPLAN), a project led by 12 Latin American states and funded by the Inter-American Development Bank, Development Bank of Latin America and Fonplata, which wants to close Latin America’s ‘infrastructure gap’. IIRSA divided the sub-continent into 10 integration and development hubs and sets out a new transport system within and across these corridors. Primarily, these enable access to natural resources and their export to market. IIRSA and NRID worked together to address the data gaps for understanding infrastructure across the region. Specifically, ECLAC has been supported by the Development Bank of Latin America (CAF) (since 2012) and the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) (since 2014), to compile an infrastructure database for every country in the region (Lardé, 2016). In most countries in the region, the largest investments in infrastructure have been in transport infrastructure, despite NRID noting that a lack of sustainability criteria is particularly evident in decisions on economic infrastructure (Jaimurzina et al., 2016; Lardé, 2016: 8, 11). Chile, Colombia, Nicaragua, Panama, Peru and the Plurinational State of Bolivia are investing the most state resources in transport infrastructure (Lardé, 2016: 8). In Bolivia, state plans are connected to regional initiatives that promote roads as a first step in building the wider infrastructure needed for Latin America to secure inclusive and sustainable development. National Development Plans are thus entangled with both regional and global development frameworks and initiatives.

Bolivian Citizenship: indigeneity, territory and resource nationalism

In the early 2000s, Bolivia was looked to as one of the most radical and progressive countries in Latin America’s so-called Pink Tide (Goodale and Postero, 2013; Kohl and Farthing, 2006), following successes in overthrowing neoliberal reforms (namely, the attempted privitisation of water in Cochabamba in 2000) and demands to re-nationalise natural resources, primarily natural gas, and redistribute profits. In 2005, indigenous President Evo Morales was elected on the back of significant social movement mobilisations (see Harten, 2013; Kohl and Farthing, 2006). He promised a government by social movement and enacted the 2005 Unity Pact, a mechanism to formally bring indigenous social movement organisations into government (this fell apart after the TIPNIS conflict). In the 2009 Constitution, the country was formally re-named a Plurinational State, recognising the multiple nations, histories, knowledges and cosmologies within Bolivia and constituting a process for ‘territorial resignification and demographic occupation of state territory by multiple social movements’ (Mamani, 2011: 32). Since the fall of Evo Morales in 2019, Bolivia’s politics have been turbulent and marked by a return to state violence, state racism, civil unrest and claims of US interference. At the time of writing, Morales’ party, the MAS, had just been re-elected.

During the Morales administration, a political process to strengthen indigenous territorial autonomy was introduced (in 2009), extending existing debates about indigenous territorial rights and citizenship (Gustafson, 2002; Radcliffe, 2012). A Ministry for Autonomy was set up to extend the territorial rights ceded in the 1990s and to oversee applications for enhanced forms of autonomy. Claims for territory are much studied in Latin America, as significantly different to Westphalian understandings of territory as the nation-state and instead defined broadly as ‘the appropriation of space in pursuit of political projects’ (Halvorsen, 2019: 1). In Bolivia, indigenous territories have been understood as an ethno-environmental fix (Anthias and Radcliffe, 2015) and as hybrid spaces that have co-constituted indigeneity with conservation (Hope, 2017). Dynamics of territorial autonomy in Bolivia, however, have increasingly been understood in relation to intensifying commitments to the extraction of natural gas, as the subsoil has remained under the tight grip of the state (Bebbington and Bury, 2013). Where territories overlap with the country’s biggest reserves, hydrocarbon extraction has been studies for how it leads to forms of hydrocarbon citizenship – where citizenship claims are intertwined with the political economy of hydrocarbon extraction (Anthias, 2018). In the TIPNIS, claims for territory have been understood as shifting within the changing political conditions of Latin America’s extractive imperative and by the tensions created between resource nationalism and indigenous self-determination (Laing, 2020).

These recent political shifts in Bolivia have also been studied for what they mean for the changing power and meaning of indigeneity. The election of an indigenous President, for example, has been significant for how indigeneity has been articulated, claimed and mobilised across the country. For Postero (2017), in her analysis of an indigenous state, indigeneity has been transformed in Bolivia from site of emancipatory politics to site of liberal nation-state building. For Canessa (2014), indigeneity has been used by Morales in nation building, for example through the promotion of pan-indigenous celebrations and traditions. He argues that as indigeneity has become mobilised in this nation building project, we need to adjust our conceptualisation of indigeneity. As an identity no longer marginal to a powerful, settler state, Canessa (2014) argues that we now need to acknowledge both majority and minority indigeneities – to better acknowledge the shifting experiences, claims and inequalities of indigeneity. Within the new state project of the MAS, indigenous cosmovisions and knowledges were mainstreamed, primarily by the 2009 constitution. This identifies Vivir Bien as the guiding principle of the state. Drafted by contemporary indigenous scholars in critique of hegemonic logics and practices of development, Vivir Bien (Buen Vivir and sumak kawsay in Ecuador) has been developed from indigenous cosmovisions, socio-natures and ontologies in response to post-development debates and calls for alternatives to development. Vivir Bien decentres economic growth as marker of progress, instead promoting living well within your community and in harmonious relationships with the non-human (Gudynas, 2011; Walsh, 2010, 2011). From an environmental perspective, Vivir Bien compliments other ways that indigenous environmentalism was articulated by Morales during his first term. The then President was vocal (for example, at the UN COP21 in Paris) in promoting indigenous environmentalism in critique of capitalism. In 2010, Morales hosted the World People's Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth, inviting indigenous groups from around the world to propose routes out of climate change. In 2011, after campaigning from indigenous social movement organisations, Bolivia enacted the Law of the Rights of Mother Earth. This assigned rights to nature, as an alternative to marketized conservation mechanisms.

Such initiatives, however, have been contested and undermined by intensifying commitments to the extraction of Bolivia’s natural resources, particularly natural gas. The 2011 Law of Mother Earth, for example, was enacted with a clause that removes rights for nature below the subsoil, thus remaining available for extraction (Bebbington and Bury, 2013). The 2010 World People’s Conference was hampered by protests by Mesa 18, an intervention from Bolivian social movements to raise awareness of the contradictions being caused by resource extraction within Bolivia. The implementation and uptake of Vivir Bien has been similarly contentious and varied in both Bolivian and Ecuador, with significant differences in how it has been operationalized by states and understood by indigenous communities (Radcliffe, 2015; Gudynas, 2016). In Bolivia, Vivir Bien, has been aligned to roads, industrialisation and extractivism by the central government and has come to be seen as the language of those advocating neo-extractive development, over the agendas of local territories and movements (Andreucci and Radhuber, 2017; Hope, 2020a, 2020b). In Bolivia (as across much of Latin America) progressive agendas (including for the redistribution of land and power) have been challenged and limited by intensifying and unprecedented commitments to the extraction of natural resources. For Arsel et al. (2016: 1), this evidences an extractive imperative, meaning ‘the totality of a set of political economic relationships over nature and natural resources that shape state‐society interactions’. Identifying an extractive imperative in Bolivia frames an examination of how citizenship, specifically the plural forms of territorial indigenous citizenship demanded by social movements, relates to place/territory, the state, and global extractive networks and markets. An analysis of infrastructural ecological citizenship reveals one way that the transformative potential of Vivir Bien has been limited and disciplined by the extractive project, as well as another dynamic of the extractive imperative.

Extractivism is here defined as a ‘pattern of accumulation based on the overexploitation of generally nonrenewable natural resources, as well as the expansion of capital’s frontiers toward territories previously considered nonproductive’ (Svampa, 2015: 66). This recognises underlying ways of valuing and treating the environment (in terms of its wholesale exploitation), as well as foregrounding consensus around the large-scale export of raw materials, such as hydrocarbons (gas and petroleum), metals and minerals (copper, gold, silver, tin, bauxite, zinc, etc.), agricultural products (corn, soy, and wheat), and biofuels (Svampa, 2015). Whilst Latin America has long been mined for its natural resource wealth, in the early 2000s global demand for the region’s metals, oils and natural gas intensified – evidenced by rising global investments in the region (Bebbington, 2009). The subsequent ‘super cycle’ of growth in mineral and gas production was ‘historically unprecedented in terms of its magnitude and velocity’ (Bebbington and Bury, 2013: 38). For Svampa, Latin America has switched from ‘the Washington Consensus with its focus on finance to the Commodities Consensus based on the large-scale export of primary products’ (Svampa, 2015: 117). This consensus has been identified as constituting ‘a new economic and political order’ sustained by a surge in global demand for raw materials (Svampa, 2015: 117).

Commitments to resource extraction have already been understood in relation to citizenship. Koch and Perreault, for example, define resource nationalism as ‘a political discourse, applied to political and economic thinking about how a state and its population should manage and distribute profits derived from natural resources’ (Koch and Perreault, 2019: 611–612), as well as a way of constructing the imagined community of the nation (Anderson, 1991 in Koch and Perreault, 2019: 611–612). A core rationale of resource nationalism is that it is the nation that should benefit from resources and not private entities or transnational capital (Koch and Perreault, 2019). As nation states assert economic and political control over natural resources, they invoke a discourse of the ‘nation’ and ‘create geographies where the imaginaries of resources intersect with notions of rights, identity and citizenship’ (Childs, 2016: 540). In Bolivia, discourses of nationalism have come to underpin expanding extractive frontiers and stifle dissent, as well as shaping the frames of social movement responses (Pellegrini, 2016). Resource nationalism, however, does not always involve a state-centric understanding of resource governance (Bakker and Bridge, 2008). In Bolivia, for example, it is also a discourse of particular (and powerful) Andean social movements (Kohl and Farthing, 2012). Here, an analysis of infrastructural ecological citizenship in the TIPNIS conflict offers an understanding of how negotiations of territorial indigenous citizenship encounter resource nationalism.

Extractive-led development is promoted as bringing significant rises in GDP, distributed through new social welfare mechanisms that are lowering rates of extreme poverty and inequality. Between 2006 and 2015, extreme poverty was reduced by more than 20% (from 38% to 16.8%), while moderate poverty fell by 21%. Taken together, this meant improvements for some 1.4 million Bolivians (ONU Bolivia, 2018: 9). This was reliant, however, on a neoextractive development model and expanding extractive frontiers (mainly into lowland regions). In 2015, the Bolivian government set out commitments to becoming the ‘energy heart’ of Latin America, with plans for fracking, hydropower (see Atkins and Hope, 2021) and solar farms. This has required significant investments in transport infrastructure, to access and export resources. From 2006 to 2019, for example, the Morales administration has built 39,546km of duel carriageways across Bolivia, with 45,424km under construction and 20,105km in the planning stages (ABC, 2018). The government also invests in improving, extending and widening existing roads. For Pellegrini, the neoextractivist development model (reclaiming and exploiting the country’s natural resource wealth for the benefit of the Bolivian people) builds on older ideas about development and extraction in Bolivia, evidenced by a 1956 Pablo Solón mural that hangs in the offices of the state-owned hydrocarbon company, Yacimientos Petrolíferos Fiscales Bolivianos (YPFB). The mural depicts and unites themes of resource extraction, development and citizenship, with the painting used as a way to ‘re- interpret history, educate the population and direct secular hopes’ (Pellegrini, 2018). In this way, the mural demonstrates that themes of extraction and development have long been used to shape the imaginary of the nation, at least by certain central governments (Pellegrini, 2018). What the mural does not depict, however, are the particularities of how extraction is done, financed and extended, nor how state-run resource extraction fits to a wider (and changing) political economy. What has changed for Bolivia, and what is new about contemporary commitments to infrastructure, are the legacies of global neoliberal restructuring, contemporary dynamics of infrastructure investment and the accumulative and worsening effects of fossil fuel extraction and resource depletion – on reserves, environments, economies and new extractive frontiers. In this paper, the realisation of these themes (and their impacts on people-planet relations) is explored through an examination of how contemporary and exceptional investments in mega-infrastructure are reshaping citizen-led political ecologies.

Road building in the TIPNIS, Bolivia

The territory and case study referred to in this paper is the Territorio Indígena y Parque Nacional Isiboro Sécure; Isiboro Sécure Indigenous Territory and National Park (TIPNIS). The TIPNIS spans 1.2 million hectares of tropical forest and two Amazonian tributary rivers – the Rio Sécure and the Rio Isiboro. It was one of Bolivia’s first national parks, recognised as the historical territory of Tsimané, Yuracaré, and Mojeño-Trinitario indigenous communities only after the 1990 lowland Indigenous March for Territory and Dignity. Since the 1990s, it has been co-managed by SERNAP (the National Park Service: El Servicio Nacional de Áreas Protegidas) the state ministry for conservation, and by rotational indigenous leaders who represent the 64 communities within the territory. The majority of communities reside in small settlements along the riverbanks to the North-east of the park and belong to two governing authorities, the TIPNIS Subcentral and the smaller, Secure Subcentral, which is subordinate to the first. The southern point of the territory crosses departmental borders into the Department of Cochabamba. It has more recently become home to Quechua and Aymara communities, who have been migrating into the park to grow coca since the 1970s (Saavedra, 2011; Webber, 2012). This section of the park is named Polygon 7 and has a separate governing authority, The Indigenous Council of the South (CONISUR). SERNAP also manages this part of the park and monitors its border.

In 2011, the government started building a road through the TIPNIS – planned to run past two large hydrocarbon pools (with hydrocarbons concessions already granted to a quarter of the territory). This was the first major road in the TIPNIS, though there is a small access road into Polygon 7 (that proceeded coca growers). The majority of the park and territory, however, is accessed by boat or plane. According to legislation ratified in 1991 (before the election of Morales), TIPNIS communities should have been consulted before road building began, under ILO 169 which stipulates Right to Free, Prior and Informed Consent. They were not. In 2011, TIPNIS leaders met and decided to reject the road. They led a month-long march to La Paz to demand that the road be stopped and territory protected. The conflict gained national and international attention, as it contradicted much of Morales’ early rhetoric and revealed in the public domain, for the first time, some of the inconsistencies and pressure points of the Morales administration. In January 2012, march leaders met with the government, who agreed to stop the road and protect the park. Celebrated as a victory, the marchers returned home (Bautista et al., 2012). Since this victory, however, a number of U-turns have prolonged the conflict and muddied its effects. Although the road is yet to be completed, the conflict over the road (and explicit negotiations of infrastructure within this) has been significant in narrowing debates and practices of territorial autonomy, Vivir Bien and nature.

This paper is based on a qualitative research design (Denzin and Lincoln, 2005; Longhurst, 2010), and the knowledge and networks gained from nine months of fieldwork in Bolivia between 2011 and 2012, three months of further fieldwork in 2017, and one month of fieldwork in 2019. In total, 96 interviews were conducted, with TIPNIs leaders, other indigenous movements, development organisations (both national and global) and state representatives. In 2012, I travelled within the TIPNIS for two weeks, as one of only two foreign researchers, to attend a meeting of the territory. This visit to the TIPNIS, and experience of travelling through it, provided key insights into how territorial politics emerge from, and relate to, the specific geography of the TIPNIS, as well offering a chance to observe the particular socio-nature of the TIPNIS.

Ecological citizenship

The ‘ecological’ element of the infrastructural ecological citizenship framework is introduced in terms of how claims for citizenship enrol place and territory and analysed using political ecology. If we define citizenship, or identify and study it, as something claimed and practiced in everyday life, then in the TIPNIS conflict those opposing the road have claimed citizenship via territory. This complex conflict has followed a long struggle for territorial rights and autonomy (see Hope, 2016; Laing, 2012, 2019), for example many anti-road campaigners marched to secure the first wave of indigenous rights in the 1990 lowland March for Territory and Dignity. Those opposing the road have themselves recognised the links between infrastructure and citizenship, and a core rationale for rejecting the road was that the government had started construction without first seeking the consent of those with territorial rights to the land (a legal requirement set out in ILO 169) (see Bautista et al., 2012). As TIPNIS rights to Free, Prior and Informed Consent was not respected, a number of other lowland indigenous territories (represented by the lowland indigenous umbrella organisation, CIDOB) joined the campaign. They viewed the TIPNIS road as a threat to all indigenous and territorial rights and I was told “First they will come for the TIPNIS, then the others” (Raul).

Citizenship was also claimed via indigenous identity, as inextricably linked to claims for territory. The TIPNIS road was partly opposed because it was seen to primarily benefit the coca growers (cocaleros) in Polygon 7, as well as to enable their advance into the territory. TIPNIS leaders explained their indigenous identity, role in conservation and ways of living (and farming) within the territory as distinctive to the ways land was treated and used by coca growers (Hope, 2016). However, an analysis of TIPNIS mobilisations of indigeneity and conservation, taken together as a socio-environmental strategy set against a dominant extractive agenda, has shown how these discursive categories are shifting in response to a dominant extractive frontier and that those opposing neo-extractivism have less tools to do so (Hope, 2016). Wider legislative and policy frameworks, for example, have been realigned to the extractive project, such as in 2011, when the Morales administration opened up protected areas for mining exploration (see Hope, 2020a, 2020b).

In Geopolitics of the Amazon, Vice-President Linera asserts that the suggestion that the road will enable more coca growers to move into the TIPNIS is one of three ‘colonist fallacies’, created by those opposing the TIPNIS road (2012). He argues that there are currently no coercive measures to prevent people from entering the park but that coca-growing unions voluntarily respect the agreed ‘red line’ bordering Polygon 7 (linea roja). Prior to the dispute over the road, however, a number of conflicts between coca growers and TIPNIS communities were documented in the national press. In June 2006, for example, the national newspaper El Deber reported conflicts caused by migration into the territory (Indigenas denuncian agresiones en el TIPNS). Conflicts between TIPNIS communities and coca-growers was again reported in September 2009 in another national newspaper, El Diario, (Cocaleros atacan a indigenas TIPNIS). SERNAP wardens also identified the challenge of maintaining TIPNIS borders as the reason why their job was dangerous. This is illustrated in the quote below, from an interview with a TIPNIS conservation warden:

‘.In reality, all the national protected areas have problems with illegal settlements and the exploitation of resources. This is our work, to guard the parks …. (our job is) very dangerous, very dangerous because there are narco traffickers and people illegally logging … Sometimes these people are armed …. it is very dangerous for us’ (Alex).

For TIPNIS leaders, a key problem with the road was that it was undermining indigenous territorial rights whilst enabling access for others, as explained below by a TIPNIS leader:

.where they want the road, we know that it will not benefit us, … it will benefit drug traffickers, big businessmen and transnational companies … . we know that it will destroy our territory and will contaminate the environment … and we will continue to be overwhelmed by coca growers … . (Angelo)

Following this, and finally, citizenship was also claimed via the conservation value of the TIPNIS and the conservation policies that have guided how TIPNIS communities live within the park (in terms of farming, resource use and location), as well as how they have experienced indigeneity (see Hope, 2017). TIPNIS leaders have argued that TIPNIS communities play a vital role in protecting the forest and its wildlife – both crucial for global fights against climate change. They speak of the TIPNIS as the ‘lungs of the world’ and, in recent years, have co-ordinated their protest events with global days of action for climate change, for example co-ordinating a 2017 protest march I attended in Santa Cruz with a global day of action against climate change. In 2017, the TIPNIS Presidents travelled to Germany to present their case to the COP climate courts, having already presented their case in 2013 to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights in New York. Those that connect indigeneity to conservation are often treated critically within social science, for example using theories of strategic essentialism (Spivak, 1988) or in line with past critiques that crystalized set definitions of indigenous groups as closer to nature as both immobilising and racist (see Hope, 2017). In the TIPNIS, however, the indigenous identity of its inhabitants has been co-constituted with conservation agendas and it is useful to examine the policy histories and hybridity that links indigeneity to conservation in this context (see Hope 2016, 2017).

Within Bolivia, it is clear that some indigenous groups seek to benefit from extraction and support expanding extractive frontiers (see Anthias 2018; Bebbington and Humphries-Bebbington, 2011; Kohl and Farthing, 2012), as elsewhere too (Perreault and Valdivia, 2010). In this conflict, however, the TIPNIS opposition rejected extractive infrastructure, claimed more site-specific forms of development and advocated for conservation (Hope, 2020a). Those promoting the road have suggested less convincing spaces for nature. The state conservation agency, for example, appeared constrained by their subordination and deference to the central government and was adamant that their work would not change, ‘road or no road’ (Interview 4). At various points, the central government suggested the road would be built as a ‘ecological highway’ and possibly as a bridge over the forest. A focus on infrastructural ecological citizenship reveals how the road project has weakened those who are claiming citizenship via an autonomous indigenous territory (and government) by undermining existing political and transport infrastructures.

These ways that citizenship has been claimed during the TIPNIS conflict have, in part, been given meaning and significance by the infrastructure that links diverse groups, geographies and topologies across Bolivia. The TIPNIS political organisations, themselves represented by CIDOB, represent communities that live in small hamlets, spread out over 1.2 million hectares and between two large rivers. Their political infrastructures are crucial in securing and enacting ecological citizenship in the TIPNIS, by enabling negotiation with the central government and relevant state bodies without requiring that TIPNIS inhabitants leave, change or radically alter their everyday lives within the territory. As already introduced, in 2011 TIPNIS community members left the territory to march for a month from Trinidad (their nearest town) to the seat of government in La Paz. Protest marches have a long history in Bolivia but are made significant by the distance travelled (almost 600 km), the terrain overcome (from 130 metres above sea level to 3,640 m) and the act of linking, connecting and communicating between lowland, indigenous communities and the seat of government. Though incorrect to assume impenetrable borders, these worlds are not well linked by roads, trains, Internet or phone signal and so marches that connect the TIPNIS to the central government are symbolically and politically powerful. The TIPNIS campaign reveals how citizenship was claimed via (and for) territory, which itself depended on the existing infrastructures that underpinned practices of indigeneity, conservation and pluri-nationalism – all changed by the road building project.

Infrastructure + Ecological citizenship

As already introduced, Amin (2015) has analysed infrastructure as a political intermediary that shapes the rights to the city of those living in poverty, as well as directly influencing their capacity to claim those rights. Such an analysis builds on understandings of how citizenship is mediated, for example how citizens are represented to the state ‘through third parties’ most often identified in ‘political parties, non- governmental organisations (NGOs), community-based organisations, social movements, armed non-state actors, networks and individuals’ and examined as operating in a particular historical context of state-society relations (see von Liers and Piper, 2014). In contemporary work on infrastructures, this is extended to consider how hard infrastructures enact a form of mediation between states and citizens. Building on the previous section, and in drawing from political ecology, this helps us question how people and place are ‘multiply constituted, brought into being and become political through different kinds of relations’ (Barry, 2013: 414). I here examine the road infrastructure planned for the TIPNIS as a political intermediary that lessens the ability of TIPNIS communities to claim citizenship via territory.

First, a lack of easily accessible transport infrastructure in the TIPNIS worked to obscure the resistance politics within the territory. For communities in the North East of the territory (where the majority of communities live), travel is primarily by river and boat. When I visited in 2012, we travelled for three days to reach a central meeting area used by TIPNIS communities. As we passed through some of the larger communities in the park, I was shown the remnants of barbed wire that had been stretched across the river to stop government boats from accessing the territory. It was clear that resistance within this part of the park had been strong and was continuing. In the national media, however, the government reported little opposition to the road, apart from a handful of troublemakers. The lack of road infrastructure into the TIPNIS, combined with strict regulations on accessing the territory, made this hard to disprove. As the conflict has continued, restrictions on entering the park have increased. NGOs said in 2018, for example, that it felt near impossible to get into the territory (interviews). The argument here is not that transport infrastructure would necessarily aide the territorial politics of the TIPNIS. However, it does signal the need for methods that enable communities to better monitor and represent territorial politics, such as recent projects in Ecuador where indigenous communities have monitored oil spills with drones (see Mena et al., 2019).

Following protest marches against the road in 2011 and 2012 (and one led by Polygon 7 in support of the road in 2012), the central government undertook a consultation with TIPNIS communities. They ultimately concluded that out of 69 communities within the TIPNIS, 55 wanted the road (Consulta, 2012:14). This consultation was promoted as state compliance with legal commitments to informed consent for indigenous territories (ILO 169), despite being carried out after road building had started. Following the consultation, leaders of the TIPNIS subcentral approached Caritas and the Bolivian Permanent Assembly for Human Rights (APDHB) to request an independent review of the government’s consultation. In 2012, they published their review, which concluded that 25 out of the 35 communities they visited had rejected the government’s consultation and refused to take part. Their report raised serious questions about the methods used in the government consultation (Boliviana, 2013: 211). Crucially, the government consultation processes undermined state commitments to the institutions, political processes and practices that structured how the TIPNIS engaged with the state. The government consultation, for example, ignored collective decision-making practices and decisions. The Caritas review found that the government group arrived via boat unexpectedly to remote communities – those normally represented through leaders and formalised hierarchies. In some instances, they asked children to sign in support of the road (Caritas, 2013). The road building project therefore disregarded and undermined existing territorial political infrastructure.

Second, an important dynamic of the road building project (and of infrastructural ecological citizenship) in the TIPNIS has been to deny the indigenous citizenship of those opposing the road, decreasing their ability to make claims for the territory. Most obviously, dissenting organisations and leaders have been replaced by pro-government versions, already documented elsewhere (see Andreucci and Radhiber, 2017). In the case of the TIPNIS, there are now two CIDOB’s – one that supports the Morales government and the one that opposed the road (now named CIDOB organico). CIDOB offices were seized by the police and given to the pro-Morales organisation. In 2018, I attended a meeting of CIDOB organico. We met in a Doctor’s surgery, an available space that they had been loaned. The government’s politics of (mis)recognition was explained to me by an indigenous leader, quoted below:

When there are dissenting voices, it is an obstacle, it is an impediment, and, when (the government) fail to convince the people, … .what they do is to change the authority, as they did in the TIPNIS. They have changed the authorities many times - until they get someone to agree. It is a very dirty strategy. (Alfonso)

There are two key, fundamental challenges. The first is the infringement of my rights, my human rights, as an indigenous person. The other is the infringement is to our rights to our own authorities and decisions….our rights, our nature, our forests and, in this case, our defence of our lives … if we don’t defend this, it is a death. (Alejandra)

Those campaigning against the road, and for their territorial rights, have been forced to do so without political recognition, with no public support from NGOs (Hope, 2020 b) and, crucially, without funding. TIPNIS leaders understood the current conflict within a long history of indigenous struggle but spoke to me of their shifting status, despite many years of service securing indigenous rights. The road building project, and its weakening of territorial political infrastructure, thus lessened the ability of oppositional leaders to make claims for the territory. The road building project was instead pitched as bringing development and inclusion to the TIPNIS, speaking for the needs of the territory by erasing dissenting voices.

Third, during the TIPNIS conflict, the government made a number of visits to the TIPNIS to formalise and promote national citizenship. In 2012 they undertook a documentation drive within the park, to extend formalised national citizenship status into the TIPNIS. Whilst I was doing fieldwork in 2012, only six months after the large march to La Paz (the eighth march), the government sent boats into the park to document the individuals living in the park. The benefits of connected, national citizenship was promoted via the road building project, through promises of improved development and inclusion (see Hope, 2020a, 2020b). In 2011 Morales visited communities in the south of the park, near Polygon 7, and handed out TV’s and outboard motors. These were given as examples of what they could expect from the road but for those continuing their campaign against the road, they were seen as bribes. These ‘gifts’ helped complicate the unified position of the TIPNIS communities (in opposition to the central government) and the territorial politics of the TIPNIS subsequently became greatly complicated. As the conflict continued, alliances within the TIPNIS weakened and some communities (particularly those nearest Polygon 7) shifted towards favouring dialogue with the government. The citizenship offered via the road, therefore, helped promote national citizenship over territorial citizenship, as a form of citizenship that aligned to the wider extractive project.

The road building project thus acts as a political intermediary that lessens the ability of TIPNIS communities to speak for themselves to claim citizenship via territory. Going further, the ways that existing political infrastructures have been undermined as national citizenship has been promoted suggests the particular difficulties of protecting and campaigning for rural geographies and remote lives. Here, the material and political nature of society-nature relationships are revealed, as they are challenged and undone by the road.

Infrastructural ecological citizenship as beyond the state

Despite the majority of engagements with citizenship focusing on state-society relations (Lemanski, 2020a, 2020b), a focus on infrastructure foregrounds the transnational influences that shape infrastructural ecological citizenship in Bolivia and reveals large scale infrastructural projects as key sites of contact between place-based politics and global extractive capital. Though the MAS administration renationalised the hydrocarbon sector in 2006, they continued to contract to the transnational extractive companies needed for technology, funds and expertise (Fabricant and Gustafson, 2016; Kaup, 2010). Bolivia contracts work, for example, from Brazil’s state-oil giant Petrobras, Spain’s Repsol, British Gas, and France’s Total (Fabricant and Gustafson, 2016). Shell returned to Bolivia in 2015 after eight years of absence. The new transport infrastructure needed for extraction makes these partnerships (and influences) newly visible in an analysis of citizenship. Those campaigning against this infrastructure felt the pressure of these global networks, as shown in the quote below:

… governments are in alliance with large transnational companies,. because it is not an interest only of governments, these large projects are in the interests of transnational companies and done in alliance with national governments, right? We are facing a struggle that is not only against the national government, but also a struggle against macro-economic intentions. (Alberto)

Similar concerns were voiced by civil society organisations, for example international NGOs working in the country, quoted below:

…. unfortunately, I think that beyond the fear we have for (government) reprisals, we also now feel frustration and almost … helplessness in the face of these projects, because we know that it goes beyond the interests of the national government. (NGO3)

TIPNIS leaders also discussed the economic realities of challenging mega development projects and the extreme choices they sometimes made to travel and campaign, as illustrated in the quote below:

No one has money and no one is helping (with this). We only have the strength and heart of each one of us, which keeps us here…and we help each other when we can – to eat, to travel, to return home’. (Alejandra)

In a climate of contentious and divided indigenous politics, it is significant that those challenging extractive infrastructure are doing so with less financial resources. First, they stand in stark contrast to the money and finance being sunk into new infrastructure. Second, it means territorial movements lack the material resources needed to sustain ongoing campaigning. The road building project is being aligned to the wider interests of bilateral development institutions, in terms of their orientating logics for sustainable development, as international NGOs feel less able to stand against national governments (Hope, 2020a, 2020b) – revealing the wider significance of the TIPNIS case. The lessening power of territorial movements to maintain, protect and develop territorial citizenship (and within this, place-based socio-natures) is significant for understanding how territorial citizenship fits within, and can challenge, a wider extractive political economy (see also Anthias, 2018). As the sustainable development agenda is being aligned to growth and extractivism in Latin America (Hope, 2020b), the extended concept of infrastructural ecological citizenship draws on political ecology’s scalar analysis to foreground how offers of national citizenship are reflective of regional agendas for extractive-led growth, whilst place-based definitions and practices of sustainability are being destabilized and undermined – despite their significance for socio-environmental sustainability. The remit of transport infrastructure is to connect places and people but this analysis has revealed how, in doing so, negotiations of society–place relationships are being not only negotiated but marginalised – in ways that weaken the power and dynamism of territorial citizenship.

Conclusion

In this paper, I have argued that combining the analytical framework of infrastructural citizenship (Lemanski, 2019, 2020a, 2020b) with political ecology extends the utility of the framework to better recognise how the relationships between people and place are reworked as infrastructure and citizenship are co-constituted. In long populated rural areas, this foregrounds the multiple, changing and contested ways that people and place co-exist, complicating analysis that explains extractive frontiers as planetary urbanisation. I have proposed an extended framework of ‘infrastructural ecological citizenship’ and here used this in an analysis of the conflict over road building in the TIPNIS, to examine how claims for territorial citizenship were impacted by the road building project. Following Barry (2011), with this extended framework I have questioned how people and place are brought into being through different ways of relating, as shaped by infrastructure. The road building project undermined the political rights of the TIPNIS opposition, at the same time as securing access to the territory for others. The infrastructural ecological citizenship framework, however, revealed how the road building project weakened the existing political and material infrastructures that underpinned modes of indigenous territorial citizenship within Bolivia’s Plurinational State, as national citizenship was mediated and promoted through the new road. The inclusion of political ecology ensured analysis of the multi-scalar politics involved in new mega-infrastructure, revealing how the needs of transnational extractive capital shaped negotiations of territorial place-based citizenship in the TIPNIS.

Taken together, this reveals both that TIPNIS territorial citizenship challenges the trajectories of extractive capital and that the extractive imperative (Arsel et al., 2016) is partly achieved through built infrastructure. The ‘infrastructural ecological citizenship’ framework sharpens our insight into where the global sustainable development agenda is entangled with resource extraction, through new transport infrastructure, and what that means for trajectories of sustainability. In the TIPNIS, these entanglements lessen people’s ability to makes claims for local socio-natures and sustainabilities, at the same time as revealing the ongoing potency of place-based claims on land and related claims for territorial citizenship.

Highlights

Extends the analytical framework of ‘infrastructural citizenship’ with political ecology, to attend to the material and political dynamics of state-society-nature relationships.

Examines how Latin America’s ‘extractive imperative’ operates through infrastructure.

Extends our understanding of the global sustainable development agenda, demonstrating how regional entanglements between sustainable development, resource extraction and transport infrastructure lessen people’s ability to makes claims for territorial citizenship and local socio-natures.

Offers an empirical reading of how plans for new extractive infrastructure have impacted the TIPNIS, Bolivia.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

Many thanks to all those in Bolivia who welcomed me into their busy lives to explain their agendas and experiences. Thanks too to the anonymous reviewers,who improved the paper,and to Dr Eszter Kovacs,University of Cambridge who improved an earlier draft.

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research,authorship,and/or publication of this article.

Funding

This research was funded by an RGS Environment and Sustainabilty Grant and by a Vice-Chancellor’s Fellowship at the University if Bristol.

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Driving development in the Amazon: Extending infrastructural citizenship with political ecology in Bolivia

Abstract

Keywords

Infrastructural citizenship and political ecology

Development infrastructure in Latin America: sustainable development, natural resources and roads

Bolivian Citizenship: indigeneity, territory and resource nationalism

Road building in the TIPNIS, Bolivia

Ecological citizenship

Infrastructure + Ecological citizenship

Infrastructural ecological citizenship as beyond the state

Conclusion

Highlights

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

Declaration of conflicting interests

Funding

References