Within the framework of Bolivia’s Bicentennial (2025), Zera Bolivia invites contributions for a collective volume gathering research on poverty, well-being, and inequalities in the country. The goal is to critically reflect on the advances, limits, and gaps in academic and social knowledge, and to propose new research agendas that guide action, improve measurement tools, and strengthen public and community intervention strategies.

Poverty in Bolivia has been a historical constant, even as its expressions and explanations have shifted. From the colonial era and early republic—marked by regimes of Indigenous servitude and land concentration—to the 20th-century agrarian reforms, the mining “relocalización” of the 1980s, the neoliberal policies of the 1990s, and the redistributive programs of the 21st century, one major question persists: why does poverty endure and reproduce through structures that racialize, gender, and territorialize exclusion? Shortages, risk, and lack of access to markets, services, and decision-making spaces tend to concentrate among historically marginalized groups.

Although recent decades show improvements in measurement and reductions in monetary poverty, deep class, gender, and ethnoracial inequalities persist. The Bicentennial is an opportunity to reassess what we know, what we ignore, and what we must study more deeply. We seek not only to accumulate knowledge but to answer the “so what”: public policy recommendations, practical guidance, and action horizons useful for applied research and decision-making. This book aims to contribute to the understanding of poverty in Bolivia and to the comparative Latin American debate on poverty, inequalities, and well-being.

We welcome proposals from researchers in the social sciences and humanities—including, but not limited to, economics, sociology, political science, history, education, anthropology, law, and interdisciplinary approaches—that contribute to this collective effort.