Indigenous organizations are local-level institutions with a community base, such as women's groups, ethnic associations, traditional religious groups, and a wide variety of other social groups.

As indigenous peoples in Latin America have achieved greater prominence and power, international agencies have attempted to incorporate the agendas of indigenous movements into development policymaking and project implementation. Transnational networks and policies centered on ethnically aware development paradigms have emerged with the goal of supporting indigenous cultures while enabling indigenous peoples to access the ostensible benefits of economic globalization and institutionalized participation. Focused on Bolivia and Ecuador, Indigenous Development in the Andes is a nuanced examination of the complexities involved in designing and executing “culturally appropriate” development agendas. Robert Andolina, Nina Laurie, and Sarah A. Radcliffe illuminate a web of relations among indigenous villagers, social movement leaders, government officials, NGO workers, and staff of multilateral agencies such as the World Bank. The authors argue that this reconfiguration of development policy and practice permits Ecuadorian and Bolivian indigenous groups to renegotiate their relationship to development as subjects who contribute and participate. Yet it also recasts indigenous peoples and their cultures as objects of intervention and largely fails to address fundamental concerns of indigenous movements, including racism, national inequalities, and international dependencies. Andean indigenous peoples are less marginalized, but they face ongoing dilemmas of identity and agency as their fields of action cross national boundaries and overlap with powerful institutions. Focusing on the encounters of indigenous peoples with international development as they negotiate issues related to land, water, professionalization, and gender, Indigenous Development in the Andes offers a comprehensive analysis of the diverse consequences of neoliberal development, and it underscores crucial questions about globalization, governance, cultural identity, and social movements.

Authored as a result of a remarkable collaboration between indigenous people's own leaders, other social activists and scholars from a wide range of disciplines, this volume explores what is happening today to indigenous peoples as they are enmeshed, almost inevitably, in the remorseless expansion of the modern economy and development, at the behest of the pressures of the market-place and government. It is particularly timely, given the rise in criticism of free market capitalism generally, as well as of development. The volume seeks to capture the complex, power-laden, often contradictory features of indigenous agency and relationships. It shows how peoples do not just resist or react to the pressures of market and state, but also initiate and sustain "life projects" of their own which embody local history and incorporate plans to improve their social and economic ways of living.