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the concept of 'buen vivir' (in Ecuador) and 'vivir bien' (in Bolivia), as opposed to the
achievement of ever-growing levels of economic wealth (Esteva 2009). These concepts
are drawn from Latin American indigenous cosmologies and can be considered the
strongest challenge to the Western conceptions of well-being and development that
have been articulated in recent years.
7.3 NATIONALISATION AND PROPERTY RIGHTS
In the context of Bolivia and Ecuador, nationalisation is a politically-charged concept.
While its detractors use it pejoratively to characterise any extension of state activity
that interferes with the perceived sanctity of private property rights, its proponents see
it as a step towards the achievement of the twin goals of socialism and sovereignty.
The diverse use of the word nationalisation creates tensions and challenges around
the 'real' meaning of nationalisation and one can easily find references to attempts at
nationalisation being 'false' or 'incomplete'.
In this chapter, we study nationalisation by focusing on property rights. After all,
the nature of property rights is key to identifying the type of political economic sys-
tem that prevails in a particular setting. We define nationalisation as a policy measure
that increases the sphere of action of the state, ranging from complete take-over of a
company or a sector without compensation to the establishment of regulatory powers
and/or increases of taxes and royalties by the state. This definition differs from some
of the stricter conceptualisation of nationalisation found in earlier literature. Fran-
cioni, for example, defines nationalisation as “the compulsory transfer to the State, by
virtue of legislative or executive act of a general and impersonal character, of private
property or activities'' (Francioni 1975: 256). The choice of a quote from nearly three
decades ago is not coincidental: little attention has been paid to the concept of nation-
alisation and its varieties in the recent scholarly literature. This absence can perhaps be
attributed to the dominance of the neoliberal doctrine, which has of course emphasised
'privatisation' and much of the recent discussion in academia has therefore focused on
this type of property relationship. In this chapter, we build on existing understandings
of nationalisation that focus on property rights but reject a binary distinction of the
ownership of productive resources by the state or private interests. In other words,
the focus is not at a technical level of 'who owns what', though that is certainly part
of the overall picture. Instead, the approach adapted here is one that scrutinises the
political economy of property relations, because it is through these relations - and the
ways in which they are being transformed - that we can apprehend the significance
of the ongoing changes in Latin America. Furthermore, by focusing on the emerging
property structures that are created by nationalisation processes, we go beyond stale
discussions of whether nationalisation has taken place or not. Instead, we contribute
to a re-emerging discussion of what nationalisation - both in promise and deed -
seeks to accomplish, what (perhaps unexpected) shapes it takes and whose interests it
ultimately serves.
The complexity of - and diatribes over - the concept of nationalisation are inter-
twined with the multifaceted nature of property and property rights. In fact, the
understanding of nationalisation as an extension of state rights over certain prop-
erties immediately raises the question of which rights are changing hands. Here we
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