Suma qamaña (buen vivir) and neoextratctivism in Bolivia

Territorio Indígena y Parque Nacional Isiboro Sécure, Bolivia

The case study of the conflict in the National Park and Indigenous Territory Isiboro Sécure (TIPNIS) in lowland Bolivia examined the contradictions between the indigenous and environmentalist rhetoric of Evo Morales’ government and its neoextractivist national politics. Drawing on a postcolonial framework, I analysed the 2011 mobilisation of Indigenous peoples opposing the construction of a highway through their territory, a conflict that unfolded at national and international scales and exposed tensions within Bolivia’s internal and foreign policy. The research foregrounded a clash between two opposing conceptions of socioeconomic organisation: one sustaining extractive capitalism, and the other grounded in the Indigenous ontology of buen vivir, which proposes decolonial practices and understands human–nature relations as cyclical, cooperative, and non-hierarchical, valuing harmonious coexistence over extractive development.