The Rise and Fall of “Civil Society” in Bolivia

Abstract

ABSTRACTAnthropologists have criticized “civil society” as a Eurocentric, bourgeois, and individualist concept that brands the Global South and Eastern Europe as inherently inferior. In this article, I introduce an understudied meaning of civil society as collective action inspired by indigenous cultural institutions, which has been operative in Bolivia during the 1990s and early 2000s, and, I suggest, more widely in the Global South. This variant of civil society, however, served as a framework for development professionals to blame failures of development upon local people. But I also argue that civil society's meaning is historically contingent. The concept diminished in Bolivia following Evo Morales's government's return to central state patronage after a decade of austerity and liberal state decentralization. Massive new funding for development in central Bolivia allayed development workers’ concerns that locals weren't doing their part to achieve development. If the reemergence of the civil society concept in Bolivia marked the rise of citizen participation as a substitute for state‐funded development, the decline of “civil society” marked the return to state‐led development. [civil society, neoliberalism, decentralization, development, indigeneity, Bolivia]