L’agency de la route Yucumo-Rurrenabaque entre développement, conservation et autonomie indigène: une étude de cas dans l’Amazonie Bolivienne

Very often roads that are continuously built through Amazonia are thought to mechanically and irreversibly
induce colonisation, deforestation and environmental and cultural degradation. This paper provides a detailed
case study questioning this taken-for-granted idea. It concerns the Pilón Lajas (Bolivia) and shows that the road
gets irreversible only through the interplay between development framing and conservation framing as both
define road and spaces, and through the interactions these framings induce between actors that refer to them.
Road agency only performs by reciprocal relations that actors develop to stabilise their own practices around
roads. Indigenous people, quartered between dilution in interculturality and domination bay conservation, are
trying to reconcile autonomy and development by skipping between these frameworks.