| In the past decade, approaches to the management of water within Latin American policy-making circles have begun to change, especially in countries with significant development needs and external debt. At the same time, however, development budgets are being reduced and the high financial and environmental costs of large-scale infrastructure projects are increasingly criticized. As a result, many Latin American governments now look for new ways to restructure management of natural resources to enhance efficiency and to lower their costs. Water management, a critical issue in the Andean countries where most agricultural production is irrigation dependent and small-scale, has become a major focus of the restructuring efforts.; In the mid 1980's, the Bolivian government began the process of restructuring by dismantling state bureaucracies, eliminating economic interventionist policies and privatizing the economy, putting the country on a path of austere economic stabilization and structural adjustment. As a result of the new legal and development currents, irrigation systems in Bolivia are in the process of dramatic institutional change. The 1994 Popular Participation Law, which called for the redrawing of municipal boundaries throughout the country, has incorporated every communidad indigena into the newly expanded category of seccion municipal. Isolated rural communities now have legal status and therefore a vehicle for participation in local and national governance and rights to a share of national tax revenue.; Further institutional changes are anticipated to take place if Bolivia's proposed new water law is implemented. The proposed law is intended to simplify and correct obvious deficiencies in the 1906 Ley de Aguas, and to take into consideration the newly expanded municipal structure. Progress on the law, however, has been halted for the present time.; In the context of these shifts in the legal framework and the increasing prominence of irrigation issues in national politics developments, Bolivia provides an apt case for examining three main issues significant to scholarship on Andean irrigation. They are, first, the organization of irrigation systems, second, the governance of irrigation systems, and third, the impacts of external agents intervening in irrigation systems. |
