CEJIS: CSB in Bolivia

Publication date: Wednesday 28 September 2005

What are the particular preconditions in your country that enable or obstruct civil society building strategies of your organisation?

Based on your experiences, how do initiatives and strategies of your organisation contribute to improving the responsiveness and performance of the state?

What are the particular preconditions in your country that enable or obstruct civil society building strategies of your organisation?
Even a diagnosis about the situation of the country, prepared by the World Bank (2004) developed like part of the Strategy from Attendance to the country (CAS), indicates that the crisis by which crosses Bolivia is integral, so it affects the economic, political and social scopes. From a structural perspective, the crisis of the country indeed is integral, since it is showing accumulated contradictions throughout the republican life: ethnic, social, regional conflicts and the situation of economic and political dependency.

About the economic situation the manifestations of the crisis are the following ones: lack of reduction of the poverty, high inequality level, vulnerability of the economy to the external shocks, precarious fiscal situation and the breach generated by the organic incorporation of the strategic sectors of the national economy to the transnational capital, that stops to cover this breach the State has resorted to the increase of the taxed taxes to the population, increase of the internal and external national debt, greater dependency with respect to the originating donations of the international cooperation, that place it in a high level of economic and political vulnerability.

In the political scope the crisis is pronounced in: political clientelism and tolerance or support to the corruption from the traditional political parties, exclusion of a multicultural perspective that integrates to the poor men and the indigenous towns.

The social crisis, on the other hand, is pronounced in: inequality, specially referred the distribution of lands, perception of the population about the little benefit of the operation of the natural resources (silver, tin, gas), elevated inequality levels and the polarities between urban and rural sectors; between the Altiplano and the Llanos; between indigenous and not-indigenous people.

How do initiatives and strategies of your organization contribute to improving the responsiveness and performance of the state?
Bolivia, in the last years, since the year 2000, lives a process in which the civil society has taken greater enhancement, due to the permanent oppositions to impositions on state policies. With the disadvantage that the organizations suitably are not structured so that its performance has greater effect.

In the popular field, the mobilizations of last the three years have shown the necessity to develop effective joints between the State and the Civil Society. The indigenous town of low lands and the original nations of the West - between May and June of 2003- they marched from Santa Cruz to La Paz demanding the Call to a Constituent Assembly that is not half-full unavoidably - for its integration by the political parties. This demand will be revived that already before had been expressed by the Unique Coordinator of National mobilization (April of 2001) and the Coordinator of Defense of the Water (September of 2001).

In February of this year the Constituent was incorporated to the constitutional text and exists the commitment of the President of the Republic to make it. The ideal would be that it takes ahead with a social and political pact.

The Constituent Assembly must face these structural problems in the direction of improving the conditions of the democracy.

The CEJIS works with some of the social, mainly rural organizations, located in low territories of the country and supports to their national instances, to face these activities has defined work strategies from a denominated program Political Incidence, that it has like objective to contribute to increase the capacity of incidence and governance of the organizations, mainly rural around their sectorial and national vindications.

In order to obtain that objective one considers to work in the organizational fortification of the instances of representation of the rural social sector, mainly, supporting them in the processes of reaffirmation of his identity and its organic fortification in legitimacy terms and representatively; also to support them in its joint with other organizations of its surroundings and other social sectors like urban - the popular ones.

Also we looked for to contribute to that the social organizations with whom we worked improve their capacity of lobbying before the levels of decision making of the public policies.

A fundamental question is the support to qualification processes, to understand the reality and to construct tools theoretical, methodological and practical to face it, this considering that the levels of mainly rural education in Bolivia are lowest, which forces to us to implement to use methods and techniques for education of adults.