Environmental Engineering Reference
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deal with the relatively mundane and arcane language of concessions, windfall taxes,
etc. are about the ways in which collective decisions are being contested and made
regarding the future shape of development in Latin America and beyond. As it has also
been argued here, these changes are intimately linked to the demands of indigenous
communities, as well as other groups who have been pressing their demands for radical
reformulation of societal visions. To the extent that these demands have been success-
ful, they have left an imprint on the legal design of these states - be it the shift towards
a plurinational state (Radhuber 2012), granting of rights to nature (Arsel 2012), or the
incorporation of civil society's demand for a post-petroleum future (Arsel and Angel
2012).
The process of contestation in which the 'nation' begins to exercise different forms
of control over natural resources by using the capabilities of a strengthened 'state' is
also a period of societal rethinking of the relationship between 'the nation' and 'the
state'. The numerous conflicts that have emerged in Bolivia and Ecuador over extractive
industries - the ongoing struggle against large scale mining in the south of Ecuador and
the Tipnis road in Bolivia being just two examples - are not simply conflicts over the
preservation of environmental quality or distribution of economic rents. The changing
nature and significance of collective-choice rights in these new regimes make these
conflicts sites in which the relationship between state and society is being contested.
Therefore, nationalisation is transforming the state itself and not just its relationship
with economic processes.
This is not to argue, however, that ownership is irrelevant to the study of nation-
alisation. Rather, the evidence coming from Bolivia and Ecuador demonstrates that
it is also important to ask what is being claimed by representatives of the nation in
the process of nationalisation, and furthermore what this nation actually constitutes.
Thus, the focus on the stream of benefits arising from resources extraction and the
associated bundles of rights must be coupled by due attention to their distribution. In
fact, these rights and the new limits to their exercise that are in the hands of the State
in Bolivia and Ecuador are crucially matched by changes in royalty systems and tax
rates. First, these distributional changes provide new legitimacy to extraction and to
the state, and are a cornerstone of the political projects of President Morales and
President Correa. Second, at least at the level of ambition if not in concrete practice,
new legal frameworks require that new state incomes need to be explicitly used for
the further construction of plurinational states (see for example Radhuber 2012;
2013; 2014).
Such a position is underscored by the long and abusive history of extractive pro-
cesses that have and continue to take place in these two countries, where foreign entities
or their comprador associates essentially funnel 'national' wealth away from those who
often own (e.g. indigenous communities) or operate (e.g. poor andmarginalised classes)
them. These new processes of 'nationalisation' have thus focused first and foremost on
controlling the value generation process, whether through profit-sharing agreements,
higher taxation, windfall taxes or other mechanisms, and aimed at financing not only
social policies, but also the state transformation processes towards plurinational states.
Considered in this manner, a theory of nationalisation needs to engage with one
further implication that emerges from the Bolivian and Ecuadorian examples. Nation-
alisation cannot be considered as a fixed moment in time that conveniently marks pre-
and post-nationalisation phases. Instead, nationalisation, as the preceding empirical
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