The Political Ecology of Bolivia’s State-Led Lithium Industrialization for Post-Carbon Futures
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Discourses on sustainable development seldom question the mode of production behind so-called green technologies. Yet so long as these technologies are developed under a capitalist framework, they too will necessitate the cheapening of nature and labor. The socio-ecological costs of development in the Global North have long been borne by the Global South, and the production of green technologies risks reproducing this pattern. To critically engage with these dynamics, we use a political ecology framework to analyze lithium extraction in Bolivia. Supported by interviews with experts on Bolivian lithium extraction, we consider: (1) the anticipated socio-ecological impacts of lithium extraction; (2) the political economy of contemporary Bolivia; and (3) the governance/politics of lithium extraction at the local and global levels. The Bolivian state’s effort to exercise its sovereignty and develop its economy through “100% state-led lithium industrialization” risks re-inscribing Bolivia’s subordinate position in the world-system. Given the anticipated ecological impacts and unequal revenue distribution, local communities may be on the verge of accumulation by dispossession.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.009 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".