Climatic dissenters in Bolivia: Mesa 18 and the critique of Climate Governance

Abstract

In April 2010, during the Conferencia Mundial de Pueblos sobre Cambio Climático y Defensa de la Vida (also known as the World Peoples' Summit on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth) in Cochabamba, sponsored by the Plurinational Bolivian State, a growing demand among social movements sought to demonstrate the deficiencies of normative climate governance, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, and its long history serving the status quo. The tens of thousands of attendees at the summit engaged in conversations organized into 17 working groups, or “mesas,” to highlight how grassroots and local peoples have already been living ongoing climatic changes envisioned by the United Nations as a far off future. Peripheralized from the existing working groups, “dissident” local Indigenous federations and social movements proposed “Mesa 18” dedicated to addressing what were rendered provincial, as opposed to globally relevant, environmental affairs. In this presentation, we examine Bolivia’s prominent grassroots critiques of climate governance, turning to the events that transpired Mesa 18, which aimed to complicate the Plurinational State’s sacrosanct and revolutionary narratives around climate change and environmental politics. Amidst extreme record-breaking temperatures, water shortages and rationing, and large-scale fires burning the Amazonian rainforest, we ask, what has changed in 30 years?