Abstract: | After an initial discussion of the ‘diverse spaces of democracy’, which sets out the main points of the author's approach to democratic politics, this article considers three perspectives on the relations between governmental decentralization and territorial democracy in Latin America. These two interrelated sections provide a thematic and conceptual background to a more specific treatment of the development and dynamics of decentralization in the Bolivian case. In examining the decentralization process in Bolivia, the article highlights the two spatial modes of this process — the regional and the local — and includes an appraisal of the relation between both modes and the nature of democratic politics. |