ABSTRACT
The rise of the populist right and the concomitant crisis of progressive neoliberalism have reactivated debates about the possibility and desirability of a left populism. Through an engagement with the work of Ernesto Laclau, and drawing insights from contentions around resource governance in Evo Morales’s Bolivia, this article addresses the question of whether and how populism can be a valid strategy to achieve emancipatory transformations in environmental governance. In Bolivia, the construction of a collective identity out of indigenous–popular mobilizations facilitated a counterhegemonic articulation capable of subverting the neoliberal order and achieving progressive changes in the governance of natural resources. Yet, following the electoral victory of Morales in 2005, this counterhegemonic project turned into a passive revolution that frustrated its most genuinely transformative political aspirations. Reflecting on the Bolivian experience, I make three interrelated claims. First, the main strength of populism lies in enabling socioenvironmental movements to transcend their particularistic struggles and, through the (re)definition of a collective identity, build a broader counterhegemonic bloc capable of subverting the dominant institutional order. Second, for populism to be conducive of emancipatory transformation, the process of articulation should emerge out of subaltern socioenvironmental struggles and revendications and have radical, egalitarian-democratic ambitions transcending the horizon of the state. Third, short of a full social reordering, counterhegemonic projects are likely to be reabsorbed within the dominant institutional configuration and yet they remain necessary to challenge the socioenvironmentally regressive tendencies of capitalist domination and enable progressive transformations in environmental governance.
