Interviewing

In addition to the time spent in the field, another challenge in my fieldwork was the difficulty of being constantly present in the lives of the people I studied. In traditional, often small and rural, ethnographic settings participation in, and observation of, everyday practices is facilitated by the compact size of the observable location and people. Within the state, it is difficult, or even impossible, to linger in the ministries, and after working hours, ministers, public servants, and consultants all go in different directions. Therefore, I decided to complement participant-observation with the systematic use of interviewing. Although ethnographers have tended to give more prestige to spontaneous conversations and participation in everyday life in order to interfere as little as possible in the data (Wolcott 2005: 155), in the case of modern bureaucracies presolicited visits and interviewing may in fact be a more practical way to conduct research than aimless “hanging around” in the institutions. My tactic was to use reflexive, semi-structured interviews as much as possible, meaning that many were closer to conversations than formal interviews. In addition to conversational interviewing, I had a chance to conduct life-history collection with a few key informants, and I also used projective techniques such as questions related to the future of the interviewed individual and the institution/ group s/he was representing. An obvious benefit arising from the social characteristics of my fieldsite was that in bureaucracies there was no restriction on making notes. Documenting and recording interviews were in fact encouraged as a natural part of bureaucratic practices.

Interviews were also observational events. Presolicited meetings with various kinds of officials and experts gave me a chance to enter the premises of ministries and development agencies and to observe bureaucrats in action, which otherwise would have been difficult to do. Coffey and Atkinson (1996) have indeed suggested that in ethnographic fieldwork “there is no need to privilege either participant observation or interviewing as the primary source of data, once one recognizes that spoken discourse always takes place within forms of action or performance” (Quoted in Hammersley and Atkinson 2007: 170). As discursive events, interviews were actually part of the everyday lives of decision-makers, such as ministers and vice-ministers. There were tens of individuals and groups of people queuing daily at their offices in order to make a request or express concern on specific matters important to them. This procedure was an integral part of the construction of their authority. Presolicited interviews were also a comfortable fit with the everyday bureaucratic routines of public servants, who appreciated the assumed formality, neutrality, and objectivity of these encounters. All things considered, interviewing appeared an optimal methodological choice when the state was the fieldwork site.

All in all, I conducted sixty ethnographic interviews. They included fifty-four individual interviews and six group interviews with political and policy actors (see,

Appendix 2). All but three interviews were taped14_{, and later they were transcribed. The}

topics varied reflexively according to the interviewed individuals and groups, location, and time of the fieldwork (topics early on in the fieldwork were more general than those raised at the end). In general, the questions were directed at disclosing the perceptions of different actors of the notion of vivir bien, its introduction to policy-making, its content, practices, and challenges. A more general conversational framework for these questions was built around the ongoing process of Bolivian state transformation and the role of indigenous peoples and social movements within it.

The ministers and vice-ministers whom I interviewed represented the Ministry of Development Planning, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Ministry of Education, the Ministry of Transparency and Fight Against Corruption, the Ministry of Justice, the Ministry of Autonomies, and the Ministry of Mining.15 _{The greatest number of interviews}

was conducted with Noel Aguirre. Other ministerial contacts came either through making a formal petition for an interview or informally through influential friends or events in which I participated. Contacts with public servants and consultants working in the Ministry of Development Planning and other ministries were initially facilitated by Aguirre and later by my participation in policy events. Although most of the interviewed public servants and consultants worked at the Ministry of Development Planning, I also had interviews with those working in foreign affairs, education, environment, social protection, decentralization, rural development and lands, and presidency. After initial contacts, I used snowball sampling methods, asking the interviewed individuals to recommend me to new informants. Although I chose not to follow all the recommendations, this strategy offered me an important opportunity to map social connections and relations which could markedly differ between interviewees from different categories (public servants, development donors, social movements), but also correlate in interesting ways.

Functionaries of international development agencies represented the following organizations: Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (SIDA), Norwegian Agency for Development Cooperation (NORAD), Deutsche Gesellschaft für Technische Zusammenarbeit (GTZ)16_{, Canadian International Development Agency}

(CIDA), Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA), USAID, the World Bank, and the UN agencies. Three of the interviewed donor representatives were foreign, while the rest were Bolivian professionals. Many had served earlier governments as economists,

14 The USAID was the sole place where my tape recorder and cellular phone were confiscated by the security guards. If I had solicited an interview with the use of tape recorder, it would have been possible. Two other taped interviews were lost due to technical problems, and solely hand written notes exist. 15 It has to be remembered that the fluctuation of ministers and vice-ministers in the current government

is continuous and rapid. Therefore, many of those whom I interviewed do not currently occupy the position they had at the time of my fieldwork.

16 Since January 2011 the German development cooperation has operated as Deutsche Gesellschaft für

advisors, and some even as vice-ministers. In general, ministers, academics, and experts were very analytic, explicit, and open about their views of policy and political processes. It seemed that although elites and experts “are not themselves doing science…, they’re reflective about their lives [that] are cut by…scientific or legal or financial vectors of truth claims” (Rabinow and Marcus with Faubion and Rees 2008: 78).

Some indigenous organizations, social movements, and peasant unions were also eager to provide information about the Bolivian political situation and to let the outside world know their version of the process of state transformation. As Bolivia’s political change and indigenous uprising have been of great interest to foreign researchers and media, it became apparent to me that representatives of the social movements were used to giving interviews to foreign media. Political speeches known by heart started as soon as the tape recorder was switched on. This made it difficult to get behind the façade, and I am not sure if I ever did. With academic scholars who had written about vivir bien or indigenous worldviews and cosmologies more in general, I had more luck. Other intellectuals that I interviewed included those who had written about social movements and indigenous political activism. I also interviewed a few scholars who had openly criticized the political agenda of the MAS.

On the basis of interviews, the political opposition seems to be underrepresented. This, indeed, is the case and it is so by choice. This study concentrates first and foremost on the internal contestations and power relations in the state bureaucracy and among agents of change including decision-makers and social movements. Therefore, conflicts, contestations, and power struggles between the MAS and the political opposition or between the Andean highlands and the Bolivian lowlands where most of the political opposition resides are not at the core of this study. Yet these battles obviously contextualize the contemporary process of change. Although I conducted merely two interviews with oppositional political figures (one with a parliamentarian from the lowlands and another with a presidential candidate for the opposition), the views of the opposition are not totally absent in my data. While interviewing, it became quite clear that the heterogeneous political opposition was well represented both in development agencies and in academic circles. Additionally, I was able to participate in events and meetings of the political opposition, although I did not conduct formal interviews. Some of the discussions at the meetings I taped with the consent of the participants and later discussed them in normal settings without conducting formal interviews.

Out of 54 individual interviews, only 12 were with women. Out of 13 individuals participating in group interviews, only 3 were women. The gender balance was most equal in indigenous organizations, social movements, and NGOs, as well as among international development agencies. The most serious imbalances were among ministers and vice-ministers, public servants, and intellectuals. To some extent this reflected the

masculine nature of decision-making processes and the state bureaucracy in Bolivia.17 _On

the other hand, female decision-makers and public servants were less eager to share their time with me than males in corresponding positions. With female public servants I had more informal discussions than presolicited interviews.