The Bolivian Climate Justice Movement

Natural Resources, Indigeneity, and Redefining a State

Starting in the 1980s, the Bolivian government had little choice but to accept an international agenda of making the state more accountable to private capital than to its citizenry. Bolivia, deep in debt, initially asked the International Monetary Fund for loans in order to pull itself out of crisis. The first round of reforms was packaged as the New Economic Policy, which cut government spending and imposed rigid monetary policy and succeeded in bringing hyperinflation under control. It floated currency against the U.S. dollar, privatized state-owned industries, opened the country to direct foreign investment, and ended protectionism (Conaghan, Malloy, and Abugattas, 1990). A second round of neoliberal reforms came in the 1990s under President Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada’s Plan de Todos (Plan for All) and had seven key components that aligned with this project, including privatization of hydrocarbon, telecommunications, and other sectors, administrative decentralization and popular participation, and reforms of the judicial, educational, and pension systems (Kohl, 2003).

These reforms had major implications for speeding environmental transformation and instituting neoliberal approaches to environmental governance, both of which contributed to the development of an environmental movement (McCarthy and Prudham, 2004; Perreault, 2005). The Law of Popular Participation, a key component of the Plan for All, transferred responsibility for previous state functions such as infrastructure, health care, and education to municipalities, effectively buffering the state from accountability (Kohl, 2002; Kohl and Farthing, 2006). Importantly, however, this was paired with centralized resource governance, with regulators more responsible to the private sector and supranational bodies than to democratic institutions; the Sectoral Regulation System of 1994 created superintendencies for hydrocarbons, telecommunications, electricity, transportation, and basic sanitation with essentially no state or public oversight (Perreault, 2006).

The results of this process can best be illustrated with the example of water (Perreault, 2006). The World Bank and the Inter-American Development Bank extended loans to Bolivia during the early 1990s to pave the way for the privatization of water. The Sánchez de Lozada administration used these loans to help create a vice ministry of basic services to oversee this process behind closed doors. In 1997 and 1999, 30-year water concessions, first for the contiguous cities of La Paz and El Alto and then for the city of Cochabamba, were sold to multinational firms. As Laurie and Crespo (2007) note, these concessions were celebrated as models of “pro-poor” water delivery. However, the lack of accountability to the poor created an enormous backlash from users, leading to the water wars and eventually ending the concessions in both cities. One of the justifications for water privatization in the international development community was that commodification would promote resource conservation (Goldman, 2007), but, as in the case of the pro-poor language, this consideration was secondary to a built-in guarantee of corporate profits (Spronk and Crespo, 2008). Successful broad-based mobilization over water as a human right demonstrated the power of Bolivian social movements and helped spur a broader movement aimed at local control of resources.

Resource-based struggles sparked conversations on issues of indigenous citizenship, national sovereignty, and the rewriting of legal frameworks such as the constitution (Canessa, 2012; Postero, 2010). It was in this context that a wealth of academic scholarship emerged after the water wars of 2000, exploring the ways in which the privatization of water sparked new forms of organizing across identitarian, class, and regional distinctions. As Albro (2005) and Olivera and Lewis (2004) have noted, water warriors created a discourse centering on the defense of indigenous usos y costumbres (traditional use and distribution of water) as a collective cultural right. While many of the protesters were not indigenous but urban mestizos, usos y costumbres became a powerful discourse that cut across race, class, and social sectors in the negotiations for “collective” water rights. Tom Perreault (2008) notes that this framing and scaling up to the regional and national levels was facilitated by collaboration with a complex and dense associational network of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs).

Three and a half years after the water wars, when Sánchez de Lozada announced his plan to export Bolivia’s gas through Chile by pipeline, a number of groups in the largely Aymara city of El Alto campaigned against the dispossession associated with the extraction and exportation of this resource. The gas wars of 2003 amplified the ways in which local movements could help frame a national political agenda to recover control over a resource that was seen as the country’s patrimony. Demands for nationalization were packaged with other demands for indigenous rights, greater indigenous representation, and the rewriting of the constitution (Gustafson and Fabricant, 2011). This kind of organizing around resource reclamation, recovery, and nationalization propelled the former coca grower and union leader Evo Morales to the presidency. Morales was elected on a platform to implement the October Agenda, which included nationalization of resources and a constitutional convention to recognize indigenous rights. His election represented a joining of a local movement politics to a national change agenda and the turning back of neoliberalism (Perreault, 2006).

Morales and his Movimiento al Socialismo (Movement toward Socialism—MAS) came to power in 2005 by challenging the neoliberal policies of previous regimes and promising to protect majority indigenous control of resources. This anti-neoliberal agenda was paired with a promise to “decolonize” the Bolivian state, to overcome the structures and practices of racism against its majority indigenous population, and to implement a new vision of sustainable development based on an indigenous worldview called vivir bien (living well) (Fabricant and Postero, n.d.). In part, Morales’s victory was about the new alliances between highlanders and lowlanders known as the Unity Pact. However, in recent years this alliance has dissolved in the face of various environmental threats and proposals by Morales for large-scale development. One critical tipping point has been the controversy over the Isiboro Sécure National Park and Indigenous Territory, involving a plan to build a massive highway through indigenous lands and territories with Brazilian development dollars. Many indigenous peoples in the region were initially not necessarily opposed to this form of development, but resistance surfaced in response to Morales’s failure to consult with the local communities—a requirement that had been written into the new constitution. ¹ The Consejo Nacional de Ayllus y Markas del Qullasuyu (National Council of Ayllus and Markas of the Qullasuyu—CONAMAQ) and the Confederación de Pueblos Indígenas de Bolivia (Bolivian Confederation of Indigenous Peoples—CIDOB), which focus on indigenous rights and land titles in the lowlands, aligned interests in response to this kind of development project and in resistance to the Morales administration.

While the administration has worked to create a functional ministry of the environment, it has not challenged regional development projects such as the Initiative for the Integration of Regional Infrastructure in South America, a program to build ports and transportation routes negotiated by the neoliberal regime in 2000 and dominated by Brazil that is a major concern for environmental groups (Farthing, 2009). Further, it has violated constitutional statutes on protecting basic resources and consulting local indigenous communities about development projects (Bebbington, 2009). This is not an illustration of a lack of commitment to the underlying principles of environmental justice; rather, the fact that Andean nations are following the same economic path regardless of political orientation illustrates their limited power in a global capitalist system (Bebbington, 2009).

As a number of scholars have noted, Morales’s victory was based as much on resource nationalism—the continued extraction of resources like minerals and hydrocarbons but to the benefit of national popular sectors—as on protection (Bebbington, 2009; Kohl and Farthing, 2012; Merino, 2011). His overarching project of “progressive extractivism”—using natural resource revenue such as that from oil and gas for redistributive programming—has led to substantial material benefits for the majority indigenous and poor in Bolivia (Fabricant and Postero, n.d.). For instance, the United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean shows that poverty decreased from 2005 to 2011, from 63.9 percent to 42.4 percent, inequality (as measured by the Gini coefficient) was reduced by more than 3 percent, and unemployment fell from 6 percent to 5.5 percent. This is quite remarkable, and in part this is why Morales won again in 2014 with 63 percent of the vote.

Climate Change in Bolivia

As Canessa (2012: 16–17) notes, “the language of political indigeneity has been used by various groups as a critique of neoliberal globalization, but it has also been used to argue for a new relationship with the state”—and, we would add, with the natural environment. Many social movement actors have negotiated a path of continued support for the Morales administration alongside active and public pressure to influence state policies. Now, some of the same social movements, particularly organizations like the Bartolina Sisa (the rural peasant movement focused on land rights), the CIDOB, the Confederación Sindical Única de Trabajadores Campesinos de Bolivia (Sole Union Confederation of Rural Workers of Bolivia—CSUTCB), which is the largest peasant union in Bolivia, and the Coordinadora de Pueblos Étnicos de Santa Cruz (Santa Cruz Coordinating Committee of Ethnic Communities—CPESC), involved in these earlier struggles have turned their attention to issues of climate justice. The CONAMAQ, for example, advocated for a constituent assembly that would expand the citizenship rights of indigenous people, including protection of territorial resources, participated in the mobilizations of the early 2000s (Lucero, 2011), and now argues for a relationship with nature based on indigenous worldviews.

Bolivia, along with other nations of the Global South, has contributed negligibly to greenhouse gas emissions (Grubb, 1995) but is beginning to experience their effects, particularly in indigenous communities. The impacts of climate change will be complex, given the country’s ecological diversity, and will undoubtedly pose major challenges for this resource-poor nation. The Bolivian government estimates that recent extreme weather related to climate change has cost the nation hundreds of millions of dollars each year in loss of infrastructure and crops and that the associated ecological decline is a major cause of rural-to-urban migration (PNCC Boliviana, 2007). The El Niño Southern Oscillation, which tends to cause drought in highland and flooding in lowland regions, may be increasing in frequency and intensity, and this limits recovery time and reduces adaptive capacity (World Bank, 2010). Projections for the period of 2006 to 2050 under a range of different assumptions include an overall rise in temperature in each region by an average of 2.3°C, less precipitation in dry seasons, and more precipitation in wet seasons (World Bank, 2010). Among the diverse likely consequences of climate change for human health is the spread of illnesses like malaria and dengue to regions where they were previously absent (PNCC Boliviana, 2007).

One of the primary reasons for growing concern in Bolivia is that high-altitude regions (the world’s “water towers”) and islands are among the areas most sensitive to climate change (Akin, 2012). Over the past several decades, highland regions of Bolivia have begun to experience more extreme diurnal and seasonal temperature fluctuations, likely related to reduced cloud cover (Andersen and Verner, 2009). This means that increased temperatures during the daytime and summer months are mirrored by a greater frequency of colder nights and winter days. Hotter daytime temperatures, more direct sunlight, and reduced precipitation all contribute to the melting of Bolivia’s glaciers, many of which are expected to disappear within the next several decades (Hoffmann, 2008; Vuille et al., 2008). This has implications for water scarcity in settlements in the highlands, including rural agricultural communities and several major cities, but also for the rest of the nation.

Lowland regions have experienced consistent increases in temperature and precipitation since the mid-twentieth century (Andersen and Verner, 2009; IPCC, 2007). Agriculture in the Chaco region has been negatively affected by the decreased frequency of frosts, shorter and more intense rains, and longer and more severe periods of drought (UNDP Bolivia, 2011). Northern and eastern regions and particularly the departments of Beni and Santa Cruz have experienced dramatic flooding in recent years, involving considerable damage to homes and crops and a number of deaths each year (UNDP Bolivia, 2011). Whole communities have been uprooted and displaced (Postero, 2013). A particularly severe drought in 2010 resulted in significant deforestation across the Amazon basin, with an epicenter in north-central Bolivia, raising the possibility of profound and devastating ecological shifts (Lewis et al., 2011).

The direct experience of rural communities with visible ecological change and a history of successful social movement actions have contributed to the formation of a movement focused on climate justice, mobilizing indigenous cultural frames to put pressure both on the state and on the international community.

The Platform Against Climate Change

The environmental movement in Bolivia involves a strategic alliance between indigenous communities and middle-class leftist intellectuals (Farthing, 2009), and the interests of the two groups are often different. Indigenous climate organizing, in particular, is fundamentally transnational, based on the shared history of oppression and dispossession across states (Powless, 2012). Similarly, movement activists are united by their shared distrust of modern nation-states based on experiences of colonialism and neocolonialism and have long worked both to gain equal status with states in multilateral negotiations and to challenge states’ tendency to act in ways that marginalize human rights (Powless, 2012). Finally, this community has openly challenged Eurocentric values in favor of nonmaterialist relationships with nature (Powless, 2012). Indigenous peoples gained recognition as a constituency in 2001, but the first multilateral negotiation to recognize any of their claims took place only in 2006. These characteristics are evident in the efforts of the Platform against Climate Change.

The Platform, founded in 2009, receives funding from international NGOs focused on rural development such as Oxfam and Christian Aid and is made up primarily of national NGOs headquartered in the capital city of La Paz and rural social movement groups. Representatives of both national and international NGOs argued in our interviews that the objectives and strategies of the Platform were driven by these social movement organizations. Accordingly, much of the discussion was framed in terms of indigenous culture and rights and an emphasis on the effects of climate change in rural communities. This alliance between international NGOs and indigenous political organizations is not new but emerged in recent years through an interactive process of mutual legitimation. For example, Lucero (2011) argues that organizations like Oxfam America helped create a “regime of indigeneity” and authenticate a return to indigenous social forms as an alternative to union-based political organization. Conversely, Bolivian organizations made strategic use of transnational resources to pursue demands across a range of scales from local to global (Lucero, 2011).

Several of the NGO-supported strategies for dealing with climate change that emerged from this coalition involve investigating and renewing prehistoric strategies for dealing with problems for agriculture such as flooding and drought. For example, Oxfam International has hired a team of researchers and engineers to teach poor farmers in the Beni Region how to build camellones, the raised earth platforms surrounded by canals that pre-Columbian societies used to protect seeds and crops and facilitate irrigation. In the highlands, Oxfam has supported ayllu projects and alternatives to large-scale agricultural dependency and promoted food sovereignty. A representative of Oxfam described these projects as having been successful because “these indigenous communities have deep connections to land, territory, and space” (interview, La Paz, June 10, 2010). NGO representatives recognize that the work of the social movement groups in the Platform is more overtly political.

Members of the Platform work on both the local and global consequences of climate change. In communications to the international community, they have emphasized the link between colonialism and environmental destruction and the need for countries in the Global North to take responsibility for their historical role by implementing steep cuts in greenhouse gas emissions. They propose an international climate change agreement involving emissions cuts by 45 percent of 1990 levels by 2020 and 95 percent by 2050, the free flow of information and technology between nations for adaptation and mitigation, and the financing of adaptation in developing countries by wealthy nations at 6 percent of their gross national product. Finally, they highlight the value of indigenous knowledge for the global community and the importance of respect for indigenous rights (Bolivian Climate Change Platform, 2011). While such discourses have been quite effective in challenging normative conceptions of human-environment interactions, their effect internationally has thus far been largely symbolic.

The Platform is a signatory to a number of statements by coalitions of grassroots and social movement organizations across the globe contesting approaches to environmental problems rooted in capitalism and models of perpetual economic growth driving international climate change efforts. These include, for example, an open letter rejecting the UN-driven Global Alliance on Climate-Smart Agriculture as a means of propping up agribusiness and advocating instead an approach centered on “agroecology, food sovereignty, and support for small-scale producers” (Climate-Smart Agriculture Concerns, 2014). Member organizations of the Platform speak in terms of protection of indigenous rights and sovereignty over resources, respect for the rights of Pachamama or Mother Earth, and vivir bien. In preparation for the UN climate change meetings in 2014, the CONAMAQ released a statement critical of the human rights records of both the UN and the Bolivian state and arguing for alliances with other grassroots organizations to demand transparency and meaningful action on climate change (CONAMAQ, 2014).

In part, the Platform was a response to the challenges that emerged from the UN climate change negotiations, and the positions taken by Evo Morales in international contexts directly reflect its concerns and cultural framing. The most disappointing climate change conference, perhaps, was that of Copenhagen in 2009, when Bolivia first became a key player. Some observers characterized Evo Morales and Rafael Correa, the left-leaning president of Ecuador, as “Marxists from the mountains” and attributed some of the failure of these negotiations to their vocal demands (Stevenson, 2011). When we spoke to Teresa Hose, the primary coordinator for the Platform, in July of 2010, she noted that some of these discourses emerged from movement organizing and that the Platform was an important component of the negotiating team. The anticapitalist and indigenist language of the Platform was evident in Morales’s communications. In a much-reported speech at the UN conference, he linked exorbitant U.S. spending on “wars on terror” to the minimal preparations for climate change (Democracy Now, 2009):

I was looking at some figures. The U.S.—how much does the U.S. spend to export terrorism to Afghanistan, to export terrorism to Iraq, and to export military bases to South America? They don’t only spend millions but billions and trillions. . . . Trillions of dollars are going to the wars. On the other hand, to save humanity and the planet, they only want to direct $10 billion.

The Copenhagen Accord, drafted by the United States, China, India, Brazil, and South Africa, recognized climate change as one of the greatest current challenges and stipulated that action should be taken to keep any temperature increases below 2°C, but it did not contain any legally binding mitigation commitments from industrialized nations. In response, Morales and members of the Platform convened a World People’s Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth, in which 30,000 activists, labor organizers, and NGO representatives came together in Tiquipaya, Cochabamba, to propose an alternative legal framework. The planning for the climate summit began a few months before the event, with 17 working groups authorized to explore a variety of topics ranging from climate debt to food sovereignty.

Morales has emphasized that the poor and indigenous are at greater risk and the globe should call upon their wisdom and leadership. Yet Bolivia as a resource-dependent country continues to rely upon extractive industries and the degradation of the environment as a strategy for redistributive governmental programming and national economic development (Weinberg, 2010). The conference exposed some internal tensions and contradictions within the MAS government and the Platform and between the two. An unauthorized group called Mesa 18 encapsulated some of these tensions. Rafael Quispe, a representative of the CONAMAQ, argued for the expulsion of all extractive industries from Bolivia because this model of development entails environmental degradation, disruption, and displacement for indigenous peoples. He asserted that Bolivia needed a new development model based upon the ayllus (an Andean political and territorial unit based on kinship groups and communally held lands) and local self-sufficiency, what indigenous peoples have called “Andean worldviews.”

Platform members contributed substantially to the writing and passage of the People’s Agreement, which outlined ways in which the Global South could hold the Global North responsible for emissions reductions and preventive measures to protect the rights of Mother Earth. The document is a severe critique of the capitalist model of development (People’s Agreement of Cochabamba, 2010):

The capitalist system has imposed on us a logic of competition, progress, and limitless growth. This regime of production and consumption seeks profit without limits, separating human beings from nature and imposing a logic of domination upon nature, transforming everything into commodities: water, earth, the human genome, ancestral cultures, biodiversity, justice, ethics, the rights of peoples, and life itself.

To stand up against this model, the document proposes refashioning economies, forms of governance, and even natural resource “protections” through a universalizing of this idea of vivir bien:

We propose to the peoples of the world the recovery, revalorization, and strengthening of the knowledge, wisdom, and ancestral practices of indigenous peoples, which are affirmed in the thought and practices of “living well,” recognizing Mother Earth as a living being with which we have an indivisible, interdependent, complementary, and spiritual relationship. To face climate change, we must recognize Mother Earth as the source of life and forge a new system based on the principles of harmony and balance among all and with all things; complementarity, solidarity, and equality; collective well-being and the satisfaction of the basic necessities of all; people in harmony with nature; recognition of human beings for what they are, not what they own; elimination of all forms of colonialism, imperialism, and interventionism; peace among the peoples and with Mother Earth.

In the context of this history of social movement organizing, it is no coincidence that indigeneity is being put to work in the new resource battles centering on climate change. Climate justice activists mobilize the idea of sumak kawsay, suma qamaña, the Quechua phrase for living well. Arturo Escobar (2010: 65), exploring the socioeconomic, political, and cultural transformations taking place in South America over the past 10 years, argues that we can think about this as an alternative form of modernization coming out of indigenous communities—what he calls “a post-liberal, post-developmentalist, post-capitalist form of development.” However, Sarah Radcliffe (2011: 248) warns of the dangers of interpreting Ecuadorian sumak kawsay as post-neoliberalism. She asserts that grammars of “neoliberal governmentality are hard to shift, regardless of transformations in rhetoric” such as that associated with the Ecuadorian constitution. The Ecuadorian government, like that in Bolivia, remains in practice a colonial state and continues to interpret and prioritize certain constitutional principles over others in ways that serve to reproduce particular hierarchies.

The Scaling up of Living Well and Indigenous Worldviews

Some of these movement discourses, initially grounded in local community and territorial life, have now migrated into national and international arenas to inform climate change negotiations. In the aftermath of the Cochabamba Summit, Morales, at a press conference at UN headquarters, advocated the adoption of the People’s Agreement as a means of “decolonizing atmospheric space,” 80 percent of which has been used by rich nation-states (UN, 2010). Also present was Tom Goldtooth, executive director of the Indigenous Environmental Network, who added that indigenous people are suffering human rights abuses from market-based climate change solutions such as carbon trading and offsets and are concerned about a world that privatizes air and water and commodifies Mother Earth. He labeled the Copenhagen “deal” a “Copenhagen steal” because it did not recognize the rights of indigenous peoples.

At the Doha Climate Convention in December of 2012, many of these discourses once again influenced international negotiations, particularly when José Antonio Zamora Gutiérrez (2012), Bolivian minister of the environment and water, argued that “the climate is not for sale” and referred to the withdrawal of developed countries from the Kyoto Protocol as an attack on Mother Earth and on life. He went on to say that “developing countries are making greater efforts to reduce emissions and paying the price of a climate crisis that every day leaves droughts, floods, hurricanes, typhoons, etc.” He warned of the effects on indigenous peoples of turning forests into “carbon markets” and pointed to living well as a solution: “In Bolivia we have the vision of living well as a new approach for civilization and cultural alternative to capitalism, and in this context we focus our efforts to create a balance and harmony between society and nature.”

The Rio+20 conference, which took place in Brazil in June 2012, 20 years after the landmark 1992 Earth Summit, brought together world leaders and thousands of participants from the private sector, NGOs, and others to shape policy. The official discussion focused on building a green economy to achieve sustainable development and lift people out of poverty and improving international coordination for sustainable development. From this perspective, the solution to the current ecological crisis is in large part tied to green economics, the idea that economic policies should build environmental costs into the price of products and services. The Platform took a critical stance on the green economy, once again using indigenous worldviews and the People’s Agreement to challenge market-based approaches to sustainable development: “Putting a price on nature is not a solution and will only benefit big capital” (Bolivian Climate Change Platform, 2012).

Here indigeneity moved from anticapitalist discourse to ways of thinking about alternative local and collective management and use of forests, water, and lands. These universalized discourses of living well may turn indigenous peoples into stewards of the environment (Conklin and Graham, 1995), a theme echoed by several members of the Platform. Despite anthropology’s best efforts to complicate our analyses of indigeneity—to illustrate the ways in which indigenous peoples were historically assimilated into market-based economies and continue to reap the benefits of capitalism—discourses of “the ecological Indian” serve a strategic political purpose in problematizing normative models of development.

The Platform offers some important lessons for working on issues of climate change, but it also benefits from the historical success of social movements in Bolivia. First, it has worked both in collaboration and in tension with the Bolivian state to establish its negotiating position. Morales’s former role as the head of a coca-growers’ union and current position as leader of the MAS means that he has been active in resource-based social movement mobilizations and understands their inner logic. Although the realities of his position as head of state often put him at odds with their objectives (Aguirre and Cooper, 2010), his administration maintains its sometimes precarious alliance with indigenist, Marxist, and other popular movements (Kohl and Farthing, 2012). This alliance provides a unique opportunity for activists to be a part of national policy making and have influence in the international arena. Morales’s administration has taken activist calls, primarily those of indigenous communities, for climate justice beyond Bolivia’s borders (Stevenson, 2011). At the same time, the Platform maintains active pressure on him and exerts influence on local and national issues.

Second, the Platform has made strategic global alliances and uses indigeneity as a frame to problematize the neoliberal agenda and Eurocentric values underlying multilateral negotiations by advocating a view of nature as a set of interconnected processes rather than a collection of resources (De Angelis, 2011). Its message has gained broad recognition and support among leftist intellectual and popular movements as an effective alternative to global capitalism and a means of holding nations in the Global North accountable (De Angelis, 2011; Gudynas, 2011; Klein, 2010). These alliances recognize that efforts must be aimed at the nations with the highest greenhouse gas emissions. An important success for both the Morales administration and the Platform was the UN General Assembly’s recognition of April 22 as International Mother Earth Day. The Platform, in collaboration with activists from Southeast Asia, South Africa, and the Middle East, continues to advocate the adoption of a Universal Declaration of the Rights of Mother Earth.

Building an International Movement

The intent of the climate justice march on September 21, 2014, in which more than 400,000 people marched through the streets of downtown New York in what has been called the largest environmental protest in history, was to pressure President Obama and the international community to reach a binding agreement on carbon dioxide emissions, particularly with a view to the renegotiation of the Kyoto Protocol in 2015. Indigenous people from around the globe were at the front of the long line of protesters. When Amy Goodman of Democracy Now (2014b) interviewed several indigenous organizers, one activist responded:

We’re here to march for the next seven generations and to take a stand against Big Oil companies that are coming through our territories and trying to take our ancestral lands and destroy them. We’re here because it’s going to take all of us—all of us—not just the indigenous people, but everyone in the whole world, to come together to save our water.

This demonstration was perhaps the most spectacular attempt by grassroots organizations to contest the terms of the global debate on climate action—more than 1,100 organizations endorsed the march. These groups, including 350.org, Avaaz, the Sierra Club, the Climate Justice Alliance, and the Service Employees’ International Union, came together and took to the streets. The Platform was not only present at the demonstration but had taken part in some of the organizing work. This is perhaps one of the clearest recent instances of localized movement building’s taking the global stage, dramatizing the problem through music, dance, chanting, and grabbing the attention of the mass media. The goal, activists said, was to mobilize as many people as possible and create a global climate movement from the bottom up, a social movement that would fight the long battle to curb global warming. The challenge in the wake of such a massive demonstration will be to sustain and build a movement with the power and reach to alter climate negotiations, particularly as movement activists face threats from nonrenewable-fossil-fuel giants working in collaboration with government officials.

Confronting the Challenges of Reaching a Binding Agreement

Multilateral negotiations to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and limit a rise in global temperature to at most 2°C have largely failed. The Kyoto Protocol, negotiated in 1997, still serves as the basis for current action on mitigation. This agreement involves the commitment of 37 industrialized nations to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions relative to 1990 levels. A major focus of recent talks has been to establish a second commitment period to fill the gap between the current regime and a 2020 regime to be negotiated by 2015 and to involve caps for all nations. One major challenge to the effectiveness of the Kyoto Protocol is that, while it was signed by President Bill Clinton, the U.S. commitment to it was never ratified by Congress. The United States, the single greatest historical contributor to greenhouse gas emissions, appears unlikely to play a meaningful role in any potential agreement in the near term (Kulovesi, 2012). It is worth noting President’s Obama’s historic Climate Action Plan, including reduction of emissions from power plants, new efficiency standards for appliances and federal buildings, and other measures that fall within his authority. Also of historic importance is the November 2014 agreement between the United States and China calling for a 26–28 percent reduction from 2005 greenhouse gas emissions in the United States by 2025 and a cap on Chinese emissions in 2003.

Leaders and civil society in the Global South continue to face enormous barriers in influencing multilateral climate change negotiations. The relative importance of the UN and other international governing bodies dealing with the environment and those focused on economic relations and international development goes a long way toward illustrating the hurdles involved in prioritizing climate change. While current climate change agreements recognize differentiated responsibility and, in theory, mechanisms for addressing the effects in less powerful nations, the concept of climate justice is inconsistent with neoliberal governing philosophy and practices.

Some of the most intense resistance has come, unsurprisingly, from the United States, the nation with the most power to limit multilateral agreements (Kulovesi, 2012). This position is facilitated by the efforts of some powerful corporate leaders to shift public opinion on the validity of climate science (Hellberg et al., 2012). The most influential of these are the fossil-fuel billionaires David and Charles Koch, who have mobilized their vast personal wealth to influence U.S. public opinion. Their strategies have included lobbying Congress to vote in favor of fossil fuels and increased subsidies and to promote climate-change denial. Naomi Klein (2011) has noted the effectiveness of these and similar campaigns in reducing belief in and concern for climate change in the United States. This means that, although there are important social movement actors in the United States advocating for immediate action (for example, mobilizations against TransCanada’s Keystone XL pipeline to carry tar sands through the United States [(Democracy Now, 2013]), there is limited electoral pressure on members of Congress, and corporate profits continue to rise. Of equal importance is likely the fact that residents of the Global North continue to benefit disproportionately from greenhouse gas emissions.

The anthropologist William Roseberry (1982) argued that a fundamental basis for social inequality is inequality of access to the means of cultural production—that individuals with more wealth and power have more power to shape cultural norms in ways that reinforce their interests. This reality is illustrated by the power of wealthy industrialists to help generate uncertainty regarding the likely effects of climate change and by the implicit assumptions associated with multilateral climate change negotiations. Representatives of the Platform, in collaboration with NGOs, the Bolivian state, and a broader indigenous rights movement, have negotiated a number of ongoing tensions and contradictions to organize around climate justice. Their primary strategy has been an effort to shape implicit international norms of nature as a set of resources, relying on normative constructions of indigenous and human rights and less familiar notions of the rights of Mother Earth, and they have been very successful in conveying this message to an international audience. Others have recognized the potential of indigenous philosophical tenets such as living well and the rights of Mother Earth to serve as a unifying vision for climate activists around the globe because it avoids the productivism of classical socialism (De Angelis, 2011) and the potential market-driven approach of liberal environmentalists. Whether they can be translated into new forms of governance is an open question. Members of the Platform recognize the critical importance of building a transnational environmental justice movement based on an alternative vision of human-environment relationships (Bolivian Climate Change Platform, 2011). Sustained and transnational popular mobilization is likely the only way of persuading the most powerful actors in the climate change negotiations to agree to binding and significant greenhouse gas emission reductions.

Conclusion

We have focused on the collection of grassroots organizations and NGOs known as the Platform that is reframing issues of sustainable development in terms of indigenous worldviews and contesting climate injustice. We have highlighted their use of pre-Columbian values, indigenous philosophy, and worldviews such as living well to reduce our carbon footprints and reinvent the way we relate to the natural environment. This model is an important alternative to the normative neoliberal model of development and a meaningful framework around which to organize and demand action. However, when it is scaled up to inform national and international policy making, it may lose its localized and grounded meanings. This is illustrated by ongoing tensions between members of the Platform and the administration of Evo Morales. The Platform and other movements face enormous challenges. As the Lima climate change conference opened, the gap between social justice and indigenous activists and the international community was illustrated by their sheer physical distance from the site of negotiations (Democracy Now, 2014a). However, the activists’ presence in Lima, along with actions such as the climate march in New York, illustrated the potential of grassroots movements to maintain pressure on climate change negotiators. The challenge will be sustaining such a movement beyond the streets to continue the organizing work of pursuing an alternative socioeconomic order.