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Boundary Maintenance: An Examination Of Municipal Political Participation In Rural Bolivia, Spencer Fenniman

Honors Theses

On April 20, 1994, the Bolivian government promulgated Law 1551, the Ley de Participacion Popular (The Law of Popular Participation). This law was considered by policy-makers to be an innovative governance response to a history of rural exclusion from democratic procedures.Through the decentralization of many government functions to the level of the municipality, this new system of governance was heralded as the beginning to a new regime where there would be control social desde abajo-social control from below-and popular power in governance. The operating assumption was that through local control, rural populations would be able to effectively combat their own …