Tag Archives: road construction

By: Lykke E. Andersen*

For more than a year now (since 20 July 2016), the road between Santa Barbara and Caranavi (on the primary road between La Paz and Rurrenabaque) has been closed from 7 am to 5 pm, Monday to Saturday, due to road construction activities. We didn’t know that, though, when we left La Paz at 5 am last Tuesday morning in order to drive to Rurrenabaque. When leaving La Paz, well before dawn, we paid the road toll of Bs. 9.50, and the guy in the toll booth didn’t think to warn us that we would soon have to wait for 9.5 hours because the road is closed all day.

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By: Lykke E. Andersen*

Academic research is rarely nauseating, and I did not expect to get sick to my stomach from a research project we have with Boston University called “Safeguarding Sustainable Development.” The project is simply trying to find out whether the social and environmental safeguards of the institutions that finance major infrastructure projects in Latin America (e.g. CAF, IDB, WB) help secure the successful implementation of the projects with minimal environmental harm and minimal harm to the people living in the affected areas. The project covers several countries, but at INESAD we just have to evaluate three Bolivian road projects.

Last week we visited the first of our road projects, which is the double-road between La Paz and Oruro (Bolivia’s Highway No. 1). Most people appreciate this new road because it makes travelling between La Paz and Oruro much quicker and safer. It also created lots of local jobs during construction, and local communities have generally been adequately consulted and well compensated for the direct adverse effects of the road construction project. Local people quickly figured out how to get from A to B using this new road (even if it means driving in the wrong lane in the wrong direction for a stretch), so for them the lack of, or highly confusing, road signs were not considered a big problem.

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