Aprobación de los proyectos de urbanización.

While policy making is perceived to produce positive (governmental) form of power, it increasingly operates through the principles and goals of a global economic system that is based on immense inequalities. Development policy tends to be operationalized in contexts where other, more coercive forms of power tend to overrule the effects of the practice of government. Therefore, alongside the notion of government as a form of power, the notions of discipline and sovereign authority offer other analytical tools for examining how power works. What then is meant by discipline? Hardt and Negri (2000: 23) have defined disciplinary society as a:

[S]ociety in which social command is constructed through a diffuse network of dispositifs or apparatuses that produce and regulate customs, habits, and productive practices. Putting this society to work and ensuring obedience to its rule and its mechanisms of inclusion and/or exclusion are accomplished through disciplinary institutions…

In Foucault’s work, these disciplinary institutions included prisons, bureaucracies, and other institutions through which people are put under the constant exercise of rule. While government represents the productive dimension of power which aims at doing good for the conduct of people, discipline is about direct control, punishment and a negative relationship of power (Ferguson and Gupta 2005: 115). Unlike modern Western bureaucracies that, as expert regimes, entail both the practice of government and political rationality (Rose 1990, 1996), bureaucracies and state institutions in many parts of the Global South work differently. Due to the lack of governmental participation in such crucial issues as service provision, people are often more disciplined and controlled by the values and norms of their own communities than by the values of the state. In the case of Lesotho, for example, Ferguson (1994: 274) has suggested that the ways in which power works through the state do not conform to the model of a state-coordinated biopower as Foucault suggested is the case in modern bureaucracies:

The expansion of bureaucratic state power…does not necessarily mean that “masses” can be centrally coordinated or ordered around any more efficiently; it only means that more power relations are referred through state channels – most immediately, that more people must stand in line and await rubber stamps to get what they want. What is expanded is not the magnitude of capabilities of “the state”, but the extent and reach of a particular kind of exercise of power.

Instead of overseeing relations between people and things as resources for the political economy of the state, the state is associated with, and typified by, representation of the ruling regime and governing bureaucracies (ibid.). In reference to this thesis, Green has argued that in aid-dependent countries such as Tanzania, “government…is essentially about levels, about the staggering hierarchical intersections of those who govern and the governed” (2010: 21). Due to a combination of historical factors and external dependency relations, the role of the state in the Global South often entails more bureaucratic and authoritarian characteristics than those transparently aiming for the common good.

In the case of Latin America, the histories of state formation portray state bureaucracies as maintainers of colonial and neocolonial orders that have constantly benefited the already powerful (Dunkerley ed. 2002; Foweraker et al. 2003; Klein 2003; Vanden and Prevost 2012). Integral to this has been the maintenance of racial segregation and ethnic discrimination. In the case of Bolivia, for example, there is a long history of perceiving indigenous populations as potentially dangerous and, consequently, as targets of bureaucratic control and coercion. They have been drawn into state mechanisms through patron-client networks, corporatist arrangements and other forms of co-option (Lazar 2008; Moore 1990; Morales 2012). At the same time, many indigenous peoples, especially in the lowlands, have been left outside the gates of the state (Postero 2007); for them, if the state has presence at all, it has represented an extension of bureaucratic rule rather than provider of welfare.

The third concept in my analysis of forms of rule is ‘sovereignty’. According to a Foucault-inspired understanding of it as sovereign authority, Mitchell (1999: 86) has claimed that sovereignty:

[C]onceives of state power in the form of a person (an individual or collective decision maker), whose decisions form a system of orders and prohibitions that direct and constrain social action. Power is thought of as an exterior constraint: its source is a sovereign authority above and outside society, and it operates by setting external limits to behavior, establishing negative prohibitions, and laying down channels of proper conduct.

In Foucault’s sense, the purpose of sovereignty was to maintain and to feed the power of the ruler over his territory and population; the use of violence and coercion did not require justification, because power was absolute (Li 2007: 12). In this understanding, the crucial difference between sovereignty and government is that while the aim of sovereign

authority is rule itself, the aim of government is the improvement of the population (ibid.).

In colonial contexts, sovereignty was often based on conquest and the monopoly of violence on the part of the conquerors (Mbembe 2001). In the case of contemporary Latin America, this understanding of rule is still relevant because of the history of caudillismo, military dictatorships, and tendencies for the personalization and centralization of power to narrow economic and political elites (Foweraker et al. 2003). Vanden and Prevost (2012: 108) suggest that:

[M]uch of the basic socio-political structures of Latin America hearken back to the traditional large estate, plantation, or mine run by European or mostly European owners who commended absolute or near absolute power over the masses of people of color toiling on their property. In this hierarchical, authoritarian system, the peasants, laborers, servants, and even overseers were strongly subordinated to the patrón. The difference in power, wealth, and status was extraordinary.

Although coercive in many ways, patron-client relationships were at the same time one of the sole sources of protection for the people, when states were absent or people did not have the support of traditional community organizations. This elucidates Li’s remark that sovereign authorities “have often been judged good or bad according to their capacity to deliver well-being for the people” (2007: 12).

Li (2007) has another suggestion as to how sovereignty, that is, absolute power, works in today’s world: transnational corporations, she claims, are today’s sovereign authorities because they feed the pockets of individual corporate shareholders without consideration of the impacts of their actions on local people. She has argued that while IFIs and development agencies use the practice of government (development policy and practice) “by educating the desires and reforming the practices of their target population” (2007: 16–7), transnational corporations “select victims at their convenience and write the rules to legitimate their actions” (ibid.). In parts of South-East Asia, for example, the state response to the emergence of economic globalization gave rise to a combination of neoliberal governing practices, military repression and differential treatment of populations on the basis of ethnicity and race: a phenomenon that Ong (2005) calls ‘graduated sovereignty’. Consequently, the actions of aid donors exhibit contradictory characteristics: while development aid may aim to transform the lives of aid recipients in the name of positive principles and goals, the operations of transnational corporations, business sectors, and other forms of North-South relations tend to entail more coercive and authoritarian characteristics that often counteract these principles (Hansen and Stepputat 2006; Li 2007).

From the point of view of understanding countries in the Global South, one of the main criticisms of the notion of governmentality can be directed at its application to Western

societies, which are portrayed as normative ideals of societal governance (Clegg et al. 2006: 250–1).24 _{In this model, governmental rationalities and the practice of government}

are “less developed” in countries of the Global South than in “modern states”. Foucault himself stated clearly that “we need to see things not in terms of replacement of a society of sovereignty by a disciplinary society and the subsequent replacement of a disciplinary society by a society of government; in reality one has a triangle, sovereignty-discipline- government” (1991: 102). While Foucault noted that disciplinary and authoritarian forms of power co-exist with governmental ones even in Western state formation processes, Li (2007) has argued that coercive forms of power tend to overrule positive forms of power in many countries of the Global South because of uneven capitalist development and global structural inequalities. Consequently, various forms of rule have emerged and become articulated: governmental, bureaucratic and authoritarian.

In the contemporary Bolivian context, social movements have also tried to elaborate their own ways of governing through alternative political discourses and collective actions. The question then becomes whether, and how, social-movement regimes can create other, more democratic forms of power. Can they liberate themselves from the neoliberal hegemony of expert knowledge regimes and bring to the fore alternative local knowledges and epistemologies? Or will there be a continuation or even deepening of bureaucratic and authoritarian forms of power that are so deeply inscribed in the historical construction of Bolivian state-society relations? How will they attempt to change the external political- economic conditions and enhance the internalization of decolonial values through vivir bien policy?