Negotiating through nature: The resistant materiality and materiality of resistance in Bolivia’s natural gas sector

Abstract

Over the past two decades, the natural gas of Bolivia has been a point of international interest and internal contention. Materially and discursively using Bolivia’s natural gas to express their demands, transnational energy firms, the Bolivian state, and Bolivia’s social movements have made the country’s natural gas into an object of profit and protest. In this paper, I examine how these actors have used the country’s natural gas to both secure and disrupt processes of capital accumulation. Extending regulation approaches that take into account the materiality of nature, I argue that the differential abilities of transnational energy firms, the Bolivian state, and the country’s social movements to materially and discursively use Bolivia’s natural gas have provided each of these actors with differential mediums through which to express their often times contradictory interests, and thus to the challenge or stabilize existing regulatory frameworks. Within this context, the Bolivian state has been forced to continually balance the tensions surrounding its natural gas in an attempt to secure a stable regime of accumulation.