Paper short abstract:

Bridging scholarship in natural sciences and social movements, I examine existing dynamics between the epistemic claims of climatologists working in the Amazon basin, and the political claims of the social movement resisting the construction of a motorway through the TIPNIS in Bolivia.

Paper long abstract:

In Bolivia, with two thirds of the TIPNIS motorway built, and with the movement defending the territory severely weakened, this is an opportune moment to reflect critically on what might be done to reinvigorate resistance to this infrastructure project. In this paper, I examine existing dynamics between the epistemic claims of climatologists working in the Amazon basin, and the political claims of the social movement in defence of the TIPNIS. To do this, I first present and analyse the different framings of the TIPNIS controversy over the development of motorway infrastructure that have been mobilised by the movement in defence of the TIPNIS, the Morales government, and critical scholars. I characterise these multiple framings as instances of ‘mobilising through nature’: the construction and deployment of political claims based on discourses of ecology. I argue that, willingly or not, the framings that the Morales administration and academics have mobilised undermine the indigenous movement’s historical narrative, dwarf local agency, and foreclose broad societal solidarity. Thereafter, I bring together literature on the politics of solidarity in the defence of TIPNIS (Cusicanqui, 2015; Laing, 2015) and scholarship on hydrological cycles in the region (Arraut et al. 2012; Gonçalves, 2018) to propose an alternative, socio-hydrological framing of the controversy. Here, the water cycles linking socionatural communities of lowland forests and highland valleys serve as a lens through which to reformulate the TIPNIS controversy in a way that could open up new avenues of solidarity and resistance for the lowland indigenous movement.