The research project Negotiating New Political Spaces: claims for redistribution and recognition in Chile and Bolivia looks at how broad processes of societal change affects the ability of civil society to press claims and negotiate their interests.

Across Latin America, the past two decades have seen the emergence and consolidation of several concomitant and contradictory processes. Political actors in civil society are currently negotiating in a context shaped by neoliberal reforms, an institutionalization of indigenous rights, institutional democratization, ‘new left’ presidents. These civil society actors are engaged in various political projects, rescaling their relations in different and overlapping networks, engaging in new discourses and introducing new narratives and claims. Through case studies in Chile, Bolivia and elsewhere, our research focuses on how different types of actors are manoeuvring this context and creating their political projects within it.

A central idea in this project is that important aspects of development can be evaluated and critiqued by looking at how development processes affect political spaces. This involves looking at how these processes open possibilities for actors to press their claims, both towards state institutions and towards other sites of power. We hypothesize that the scalar dynamics of these political spaces are particularly important for the type of influence civil society actors will have – actors that are able to press their claims at a different scales are likely to be influential.