The National Development Plan As A

The National Development Plan as a Political Economic Strategy in Evo Morales’s Bolivia Accomplishments and Limitations by Clayton Mendonça Cunha Filho and Rodrigo Santaella Gonçalves Translated by Ariane Dalla Déa Bolivia’s National Development Plan is the most detailed official document on the objectives of Evo Morales’s administration and therefore an important reference point for the evaluation of the intentions, difficulties, and approaches of his political project. Analysis of the plan reveals bold objectives such as transforming the nation’s structure of development and making the country the energy center of the continent and more modest goals of reducing poverty and social inequality. The greatest advance in the first four years of the Morales administration is regaining state control of the economy; Bolivia has effectively changed its economic model from a predominantly free-market one to a mixed model in which state management of the basic sectors of the economy predominates. Changing the structure of development has taken second place to these changes, but the government has acted to promote the needed diversification by encour- aging environmental protection, guaranteeing workers’ rights, and providing improved access to credit. The implementation of some of the plan’s main features has been delayed by political opposition from the eastern part of the country, but with a congressional majority for Morales’s party in his second term further advances can be predicted. Given the plan’s limitations and moderation and the problems in its implementation, it is sig- nificant that Bolivia has witnessed an impressive increase in the gross domestic product and a decrease in income inequality. Keywords: Bolivia, Evo Morales, National Development Plan, Neo-developmentalism, Twenty-first-century socialism In the past decade, South America has undergone a process of left-leaning political transformation that has attracted great attention from both political activists and social scientists. Despite the substantial differences among the Clayton Mendonça Cunha Filho is a researcher at the Observatório Político Sul-Americano, Instituto Universitário de Pesquisas do Rio de Janeiro (South American Political Research Center, University Research Institute of Rio de Janeiro), and a doctoral candidate in political science at the institute. Rodrigo Santaella Gonçalves is an undergraduate student in social sciences at the Federal University of Ceará and a member of the Rede Universitária de Pesquisadores sobre América Latina e Núcleo de Estudos para América Latina e Caribe (University Network of Researchers on Latin America and the Latin American and Caribbean Study Group). Ariane Dalla Déa, an anthropologist, teaches social problems at Chapman University and has been a translator in Los Angeles since 1987. A first version of this paper was presented at the Twenty- first World Congress of Political Science held in Santiago, Chile, in 2009. The authors thank Cesar Zucco Jr. for assistance with some indices and the editors of Latin American Perspectives for comments and suggestions on the original manuscript. LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES, Issue 173, Vol. 37 No. 4, July 2010 177-196 DOI: 10.1177/0094582X10372513 © 2010 Latin American Perspectives 177 Downloaded from lap.sagepub.com at SMITH COLLEGE on February 17, 2016 178 LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES parties and social movements that have attained power in various countries in the region, the process has frequently been described as an almost uninter- rupted wave (with a few exceptions) of consecutive electoral victories by leftist parties. In January 2006 the indigenous coca grower and political leader Evo Morales Ayma assumed the presidency of Bolivia, marking this country’s entry into the region’s progressive wave after three tumultuous years of mass popu- lar mobilizations and protests that forced the resignation of two presidents and made Morales’s inauguration and government the focus of great attention and expectations. Within this leftist wave, Morales’s Bolivia is frequently cited as radical when compared with those of more moderate leftists such as Lula in Brazil and Tabaré Vásquez in Uruguay. However, for conservative critics this is an accusation and for activists on the political left a form of praise. NEO-DEVELOPMENTALISM VS. TWENTY-FIRST-CENTURY SOCIALISM The political and economic changes that Bolivia is experiencing today place it at the center of the contemporary debates on the direction and projects of the continent’s new leftist governments (Borón, 2008; Boschi and Gaitán, 2008; Fiori, 2007; Katz, 2007). Although some approach this subject from a Manichaean perspective, of limited explanatory value, that creates a dichot- omy between a bad (or populist) left and a good (responsible) left (with the more radical governments falling into the former category and the more moderate ones into the latter), a richer and more interesting discussion emerges from the distinction between the concepts of neo-developmentalism and twenty-first-century socialism. Starting from Boschi and Gaitán’s (2008) identification of neo- developmentalism as a new form of state intervention in the economy intended to increase national revenue and to guarantee social welfare while maintaining certain aspects of the preceding neoliberal model such as monetary stability and fiscal equilibrium, it is possible to find many similarities between contemporary Bolivia and this conceptual model of development. However, whereas in the neo-developmentalist model the state seeks not to act directly in the productive sector but only to regulate it, in the Bolivian case the state has taken a direct productive role in several sectors. Another important characteristic of the past few years in Bolivia that does not fit the neo-developmentalist frame- work is the state’s opening up of new forms of direct political participation, including collective forms that go beyond a liberal—that is, individual- based—logic and have been institutionalized in a new constitution in which the demands of social movements and governmental proposals occupy as central a position as any economic changes. These characteristics—a direct state role in production and expanded democratization—may place Bolivia closer to the twenty-first-century-socialism paradigm, in which, according to Enrique Dussel (2007) and Boaventura de Sousa Santos (2007), expanded democratization is at least as important as state intervention in the economy. The truth is, however, that there has been very little effective conceptualiza- tion of what would constitute the socialist project in this new century, and the various proposed classifications of governments differ, in general, only on the Downloaded from lap.sagepub.com at SMITH COLLEGE on February 17, 2016 Cunha Filho and Santaella Gonçalves / NATIONAL DEVELOPMENT PLAN 179 presence or absence of state control of certain economic sectors or on the level of presidential rhetorical radicalism. The high degree of continuity between the political economies of the countries said to be neo-developmentalist and those called socialist makes precise classification often seem an impossible task. STRUCTURE OF DEVELOPMENT VS. ECONOMIC MODEL Another theoretical approach that can be used to analyze the Morales government’s project for Bolivia is the distinction proposed by the Bolivian economist George Gray Molina (2006: 65) between the structure-of- development and the economic model. The structure refers to “the way an economy’s factors of production are linked, function, and work together or obstruct each other in the context of competitive advantages and disadvan- tages that may or may not drive a particular productive configuration.” In other words, it refers to the content or substance of the economy and espe- cially whether it is narrowly or broadly based. In contrast, the model refers to the way these factors of production are administered—the economic form rather than the content, which may evolve in different ways (e.g., market- based, state-led, or mixed). Although its economic model has changed several times during Bolivia’s history, its structure of development has not. Development has always been a type of mono-production structured around the exploitation of a small num- ber of primary natural resources, among them silver, tin, and gas. In contrast, the liberal or free-market economic model dominated in the early twentieth century, with very little state intervention in the tin industry; later, with the nationalizing of Standard Oil in 1937 and the 1952 Revolution (which resulted in nationalization of the tin mines), the economic model turned nationalist. In the 1960s Bolivia returned to the free-market model, and in 1969 it entered into its last statist period before the total reliance on markets that occurred during the neoliberal years beginning in 1985. At present, as is apparent from the nationalization of hydrocarbons in 2006, there is a new economic model in the country. The question is whether the state’s increased role in this new model will be sufficient to transform the country’s structure of development. Whereas neo-developmentalism seeks not to change the structure of development but to change the economic model, twenty–first-century socialism necessarily points toward structural change, and this makes the theoretical distinction between the economic model and the structure of development very useful for analyzing the long-term character and approaches of the Movimiento al Socialismo

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