A Neoliberal Nationalization?

Moving from a neoliberal ideological testing ground to part of the purported new wave of Latin American socialism, the current Bolivian state has attempted to exercise greater control over its number-one-grossing export—its natural gas—and use the sector’s profits to drive its program of socioeconomic change. While the state has been able to increase the government’s take of the country’s hydrocarbon rents, its ability to use its natural gas and associated rents to alter the country’s socioeconomic trajectory has been limited by the path-dependent effects of Bolivia’s neoliberal turn and the sociomaterial constraints of natural-gas extraction, transport, and use.