The Food That Will Feed the World: Energy Industrialization and the Politics of Productive Sovereignty in Bolivia

Since the inauguration of Evo Morales in 2006 as the country’s first self-identifying indigenous president at the head of the Movement to Socialism (MAS) party, Bolivia has passed through a trajectory of profound changes that have variously been described as revolutionary, reformist, ethnonationalist, and ideologically hybrid. Nevertheless, what is not in dispute is the fact that over the last twelve years, Bolivia has become a laboratory for radical experimentations in state-building. More recently, the Bolivian government has embarked on an elaborate strategy to industrialize its significant energy resources under an official policy known as the “Patriotic Agenda 2025," which projects Bolivia’s course of development over the midterm. As part of this strategy, the Bolivian government created a new Ministry of Energy in 2017, which includes two vice ministries responsible for different aspects of the industrialization plan. The current research project will focus on processes under the responsibility of the vice ministry charged with “advanced energy technologies," which comprises two industries: lithium and nuclear energy. Project researchers will conduct 19 months of ethnographic research over a period of four years (2019-2023) in order to describe and explicate the planned industrialization of lithium and nuclear energy in Bolivia as a social and political process. In so doing, the research project will be guided by two primary research questions that call for the use of anthropological research: (1) How are Bolivia’s plans for energy industrialization (lithium and nuclear energy) being implemented concretely at the local level in light of relevant technological, economic, and geopolitical factors?; and (2) How does energy industrialization in Bolivia demonstrate in practice the values of what Patriotic Agenda 2025 calls “productive sovereignty," which is meant to be the political framework for the state’s development plans? The overall aims of the research project are to (1) document ethnographically the implementation of energy industrialization in Bolivia as the main basis for its broader socioeconomic and political goals; (2) evaluate the underlying tensions in the country’s efforts to make “productive sovereignty" the ideological basis for national development; and, (3) contribute more generally to our knowledge of the implications of resource nationalism as an emergent and contested ideology of governance in the Global South. The project will produce ethnographic data of broader significance based on research on the latest period in Bolivia’s long-term transformation under the post-2006 regime. Concrete results of the research will enlarge the anthropological understanding of resource politics in an era of neoliberal consolidation and extension; reveal the extent to which new forms of regional and global power are emerging, forms that are replacing the historic North/South, transatlantic axes; make a significant contribution to debates within the still emergent interdisciplinary field of “energy humanities"; and strengthen existing research in Switzerland and throughout Europe that focuses on the relationships between social and political processes and dynamics of economization, particularly in the Global South.