Paper short abstract:

In this paper, I examine the initial take-up of the 2015 UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in Bolivia, a site of both intensifying extractivism and Development alternatives, to offer an understanding of how powerful, extractivist Development logics are being maintained and reworked.

Paper long abstract:

In this paper, I examine the initial take-up and implementation of the 2015 United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in Bolivia, a site of both intensifying extractivism and Development alternatives. Drawing on recent fieldwork, I argue that that uneven power dynamics between the state, the market and civil society are a structuring force of the SDGs, in ways that support the hegemony of extractive-led development and prevent a more complicated reading of growth-led Development in the global South. Drawing on the work of Delanda (2006), I identify a spatiality of sustainable development by analysing the institutions, discursive alignments and dynamics of power and exclusion that underpin the implementation, practice and constitution of the SDGs. From the work of Delueze and Guattari (2010), I include the infrastructure of Bolivia's extractive-led development model (the roads, bridges and energy mega projects) to argue that these extractivist infrastructures co-constitute the materiality of sustainable development. In doing so, I argue that Agenda 2030 is being constituted in ways that ring fence it from the contentious politics of extractivism, whilst simultaneously aligning sustainable development to extractive-led Development. As global momentum to combat climate change and environmental crisis is rising, I offer an understanding of how powerful, extractivist Development logics are being maintained and reworked.