Insurgent Practices of Restoring the Commons: Cases from Bolivia

Abstract

This article offers a problematisation of the concept of the commons through an analysis of Indigenous ways of theoretically and practically expressing a communal way of relating to the environment. The article focuses on the political and social implications of conceptualising a pluralised idea of the commons through practices of restoration. It contends that, to go beyond singularised and romanticised definitions, the commons are better understood as a clash of different temporalities which ends up displaying plural forms of alternative communal ownership. It does so by proposing a de-romanticised notion of restoration through the analysis of two events that occurred in Bolivia between 1999 and 2010. It maintains that claims to restore harmony with Mother Earth, far from turning to a romanticised lost past, display the possibility to reconfigure traditional forms of communal ownership within the contingency of the present struggles. This article was published open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ .