Of Rights and Responsibilities

Chapter 4 analyses the idea of biocultural rights, starting off by quoting the words of Sanjay Kabir Bavikatte. The chapter explores some cases (in Kenya, India, and New Zealand) which may be interpreted from a biocultural rights perspectives, and looks at biocultural rights’ justifications and holders, and at the set of rights necessary to maintain environmental stewardship roles. Departing from the claim that the foundations of biocultural rights are two concurring ones, exploring biocultural rights’ ancestors—Darrel Posey’s Traditional Resource Rights—and dismissing the noble savage myth, biocultural rights are analysed to fully understand what they are and what they are not. The foundations of biocultural rights are then explored in detail, focusing on the problems arising from the fact that biocultural rights, besides conferring rights to their holders, also seem to confer a set of environmental duties.

State Restructuring and the Scale Politics of Rural Water Governance in Bolivia

Recent attempts to grant private concessions to water in Bolivia raise questions regarding the effects of the state's neoliberal restructuring on environmental governance. Like other Latin American states, Bolivia has enacted sweeping neoliberal reforms during the past two decades, including privatization of public sector industries, reduction of state services, and administrative decentralization. These reforms have been accompanied by constitutional reforms that recognized certain resource and political rights on the part of Bolivia's indigenous and campesino peoples. This paper examines the reregulation and rescaling of rural water management in Bolivia, and associated processes of mobilization on the part of peasant irrigators aimed at countering state reforms. Although traditional resource rights of peasant irrigators are strengthened by cultural aspects of constitutional reforms, rural livelihoods are undermined by economic liberalization. The paper examines the implications and contradictions of neoliberal reforms for rural water management in highland Bolivia. These processes are illustrated through a brief analysis of current organizational efforts on the part of peasant irrigators.