Participation, planning and natural resources in Bolivia: from fiction to practice?

NEBE/Cocoon working paper 1

Tags: Latin America , Bolivia , Civil Society Building
Additional tags: National Development Plan , Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper , Participation , Natural resources

In this paper, we focus on participation in the main planning documents produced in Bolivia in the first decade of the 2000s: the Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper (PRSP) and the National Development Plan (PND). We analyze how these planning instruments have been able to capture popular participation through diverse mechanisms and how these practices fit in the current mainstream participation discourse. For more knowledge programme publications on participation in development click here. In this paper, special attention is paid to natural resources because of the predominant role they have in the Bolivian economy and because of their substantial contribution to the state budget.

The Bolivian experience shows an apparent paradox: while the process  leading to the PRSP followed participatory guidelines and the PND did  not, the resulting PRSP failed to include the most pressing demands of  social movements, while the PND succeeded in including them.

This case shows how the articulation of political processes escapes  simplistic characterizations and the application of ‘out of the  textbook’ participation might result in highly exclusionary outcomes. It  also shows that the voice of social movements can take unexpected paths  and have a profound influence on political events that go well beyond  the possibility of standardized participatory processes.