ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the complex and contested process of translating Vivir Bien improvement schemes into concrete bureaucratic practices during Morales’s first executive period. It will be shown that, to a large extent, Bolivian bureaucratic logic differs from discursive and ideological framings of state transformation and, therefore, it is argued that more attention should be paid to examining the internal functioning of state governance. Consequently, the chapter describes and analyzes how multiple and nuanced micropractices of power work through everyday bureaucratic actions in the course of major state transformations.
