This article explores the challenges of ethnic-based participation and its potential for creating inclusive and effective forms of decision-making for marginalized social groups. Empirically, it examines a recent attempt to establish more participative forms of resource and development governance for indigenous communities in Bolivia through Free Prior and Informed Consent/Consultation (FPIC). Rooted in international human rights law, FPIC aims at achieving more effective bottom-up participation by establishing an obligation to consult -or obtain the consent of -indigenous peoples before large development projects and legal reforms that would affect them can proceed. Interest in FPIC initiatives has been growing for reasons that range from efforts to build more equitable management of natural resources to attempts to introduce more effective local-scale practices of participation and active citizenship. We argue that the idea of prior consultation and FPIC itself are not neutral instruments; they will not automatically lead to better or more democratic governance and a more equal society. The way in which FPIC is currently being implemented and framed in Bolivia is in tension with broader ideas of representation and legitimacy, inclusiveness and management of public and common goods because there is no real clarity as to who is entitled to participation, why they do and whether they are doing so as a corrective to exclusion, a promotion of citizenship or as a mechanism for redistribution. As we show here, FPIC implementation can have unintended consequences and consultation can sometimes embed existing social, cultural and economic tensions. The paper eventually offers some broader reflections on participatory governance and collective rights especially in relation to the tensions between inclusive participation and exclusive rights or -put differently -the challenges for building cultures of participation and inclusion in complex and ethnic diverse democracies.

The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) herald a new phase for international development. This article presents the results of a consultative exercise to collaboratively identify 100 research questions of critical importance for the post‐2015 international development agenda. The final shortlist is grouped into nine thematic areas and was selected by 21 representatives of international and non‐governmental organisations and consultancies, and 14 academics with diverse disciplinary expertise from an initial pool of 704 questions submitted by 110 organisations based in 34 countries. The shortlist includes questions addressing long‐standing problems, new challenges and broader issues related to development policies, practices and institutions. Collectively, these questions are relevant for future development‐related research priorities of governmental and non‐governmental organisations worldwide and could act as focal points for transdisciplinary research collaborations.

orests provide essential livelihoods and environmental services. They harbour a disproportionate amount of the world's biodiversity, regulate key aspects of the global carbon cycle and weather patterns, and contribute directly to national incomes and the local livelihoods of millions of people worldwide. Their role in sustainability transitions is re-emphasized by multiple current international sustainability agendas. Forests can be linked to most-if not all-of the Sustainable Development Goals through contributions to ecosystem services, green economic opportunities, and social and environmental justice agendas 1,2. Forests are also essential to the Paris Climate Agreement, 3 the Aichi Biodiversity Targets and the Post-2020 Global Biodiversity Framework 4,5. Further, the Bonn Challenge aims to bring under restoration 350 Mha of degraded lands globally by 2030, and the New York Declaration on Forests identifies 10 specific global forest goals 6. Forests are a key mechanism for mitigating climate change through forest protection, restoration and afforestation 7,8. This prominent attention to forests, especially in human-dominated tropical and subtropical regions, creates a need for a comprehensive policy-oriented research agenda. Research on forests and livelihoods has typically focused on trying to understand how household-or community-level dynamics, including rights to resources and land-use decisions, affect local livelihoods and forests 9. However, new research on forests demonstrates the importance of links between human and natural systems at regional, inter-continental and global scales 10. For example, demand for commodity crops in Europe, North America and emerging economies is driving environmental degradation in the Amazon, Congo Basin and Indonesian peatlands 11. In turn, smoke from forest and peat fires in Indonesia affects human health in Southeast Asian countries 12. Identifying and understanding large-scale processes linked to forests and livelihoods with disproportionate effects on

Agrarian reforms do not constitute linear processes: rather, they are based on the interconnection between the crystallization of land governance in formal tenure rules and the way societies organize around a set of identities and power mechanisms. This paper focuses on how the misinterpretation of this two-way relationship, in setting up a new normative framework, can generate unintended consequences in terms of conflict. The recent wave of land conflicts in Bolivia shows how changes in the allocation of strategic resources inspired by the so-called 'politics of recognition' triggered processes of political ethnicization and organizational fragmentation, eventually contributing to fuelling new tensions between indigenous groups and peasant unions.

Over the last two decades Latin America has been a laboratory for the implementation o f new models o f state and citizenship. In Bolivia the (neo)liberal multicultural paradigm dominant in the 1990s has recently been replaced by a plurinational paradigm, which implies a deepening o f the decentralization process and the strengthening o f rights for traditionally marginalized social sectors. This paper describes the process of construction o f a plurinational 'imagined community' and, in particular, o f one o f its core narratives: the 'indigenous native peasant'. I argue that the negotiation o f this collective identity and its inclusion as one of the core ideas in the new constitution is the result of a contingent strategy in response to a highly conflictive scenario, which has not been, however, able to trigger a change in the way people identify themselves. Yet in recent years, social movements' identities have been shaped by centrifugal forces. These forces should be understood as the result o f a process o f collective actors' adaptation to institutional and regulatory reforms and contribute to explaining the increase o f new intrasocietal conflicts linked to the redefinition of citizenship and territorial boundaries.