Coca Communications: Tales from the Bolivian Coca Field

This work draws on ethnographic fieldwork undertaken in a coca-growing region of Bolivia to ask how, on the most practical level, development projects, and ICT projects in particular, might hold more relevance to the lives of their target groups than they have tended to do in the past, as well as how the power imbalances between development organisations and local people may be understood and addressed. Coupling the concept of an ecosystem of coca communications with a political economy approach, the study explores the multifariousness of communicative avenues within the system, while attempting to understand the social and power relations that surround the production, distribution and consumption of resources, both material and cultural. The study argues that development organisations will do well to consider a given locality in these terms in order to facilitate the implementation of ICT projects that are relevant and compatible with local social and communicational systems, and further, that these organisations must reflect upon their own role as ¿introduced organisms¿ within local communicative ecologies.