Abstract, Everyday Crafting of the Bolivarian State Lower-level State Officials and Grassroots Activism in Venezuela

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Everyday Crafting of the Bolivarian State
Lower-level State Officials and Grassroots Activism in Venezuela
by Iselin Åsedotter Strønen


Venezuela’s communal councils are legally sanctioned organs for popular participation implemented mostly in poor communities since 2006. The promotores integrales, lower-level state employees who assist the communal councils in their everyday work, serve as mediators between state policies and community politics, and study of their roles and perspectives provides important insights into the complexities of implementing policies of popular participation and transforming state practices in the context of radical social change. While the cultural politics and knowledges of the popular sectors have become imprinted on the Venezuelan state, attempts to change the state in accordance with Bolivarian ideology are subject to intense contestation and struggle.

Abstract, Contested Spaces The Communal Councils and Participatory Democracy in Chávez’s Venezuela

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Contested Spaces
The Communal Councils and Participatory Democracy in Chávez’s Venezuela
by Matt Wilde


Since their launch in 2006, the communal councils have been heralded as a significant step toward the establishment of a radical, participatory democracy in Venezuela. Ethnographic fieldwork carried out in a working-class barrio in Valencia, Venezuela’s third-largest city, shows that local residents perceive and make use of the communal councils in a variety of ways. Older women in particular have become central players in community political life as a result of the reforms, although the burdens they take on arguably reproduce patterns of gendered inequality. Some residents express suspicion of new community leaders, accusing them of corruption, and there are conflicting views of what participatory democracy actually means in practical terms. The communal councils should be understood as contested spaces, the ambiguities and conflicts within them reflecting broader tensions within the Bolivarian project as a whole.