La "durabilité" en débat dans une communauté de front pionnier en Bolivie. Modèle parcellaire vs. gestion communale des ressources. (Sustainability in debate in a Bolivian pioneer community. Individual landholding vs. community management of resources )

Abstract

How can marginalized colonists remove themselves from a logic of pioneers ' frontier when they know it will lead them nowhere ? This is a question they often ask themselves, describing in their own words the mechanisms of an « unsustainable » production system in which they feel stuck, for a lack of means to invent another one. From their point of view, the quest for a sustainable production system cannot be dissociated from the aspiration for a more just social order, but none of these is evident, and it is hard to remove themselves from a system that overwhelms them and gives them no choice. However, some new — or recycled — ideas may bring some elements of response to the crisis of the frontier economy. The young Landless Peasants Movement tries, for instance, to leave behind the lot-based and individualistic appropriation of land, aiming rather for a collective appropriation based on communal management of resources, and to go beyond the split between agricultural and forested lands, within the framework of a co-management with state autorities, still to be experimented with.