Counter-Hegemonic Narratives and the Politics of Plurality: Problematising Global Environmental Governance from Latin America through the Case of Bolivia

Abstract

This article seeks to problematise current frameworks of global environmental governance by examining how the neoliberal model continues to rely on the state to suppress plurinational justice. Firstly, it discusses the creation of counter-hegemonic discourses through the emergence of new centres of epistemic production. Secondly, it analyses the ways in which these narratives interact, or fail to interact, with state policies on a local, national and international level through the case study of Evo Morales' Bolivia. The article argues that one of main challenges confronting environmental governance will be to reformulate sovereignty as an epistemic and relational -as well as political and territorial -set of relationships.

Latin American readings of Gramsci and the Bolivian indigenous nationalist state

“…The principles of vivir bien were legally incorporated into the Bolivian Constitution through the adoption of the Law of Mother Earth (2010), later upgraded by the National Legislative Assembly as the Framework Law of Mother Earth and Integral Development to Live Well (Lalander 2017). On an international level Morales employed the language of indigeneity to construct an alternative environmentalism to western dominant environmental discourses, promoting indigenous sustainable practices and traditions to frame its alternative environmental principles (Coletta and Raftopoulos 2018). These discourses of indigeneity, decolonisation and global climate change would later be replaced by the dominate discourse of progressive extractivism (Postero 2017).…”