Supreme Decree No. 5675 repeals ten supreme decrees. Eight of them were issued between 16 November 2025 and 13 April 2026 — a span of five months. The oldest on the list, Supreme Decree No. 4857, had been the organising rule for the executive branch since January 2023. The decree also strikes down individual provisions of six others.
That repeal list tells you something the operative articles do not. The decree presents itself as rationalisation: twelve ministries where there were fourteen, and seventeen under DS 4857. It is also an admission that the previous reorganisations never settled. Eight rules in under five months, all of them now repealed, describe an administration that has not yet decided what shape it wants.
Which is why, for anyone with a file open before the Bolivian state, the interesting part of DS 5675 is not the size of the cabinet. It is the set of clauses — Articles 124 and 134, and the First and Third Final Provisions — through which the decree tries to ensure that institutional churn destroys nothing on its way through. They are well built. But their effectiveness is not settled in the text. It is settled in ten working days of ministerial resolutions, fifteen days of budget adjustments and ninety calendar days of notarised handover records, with no additional money from the national treasury.
The reorganisation extinguishes no rights and no contracts, but it changes the addressee of almost everything filed with the state.
What actually moved
Two ministries disappear. The Ministry of Development Planning and Environment is split four ways: Science and Technology goes to Education; Strategic Planning to the Ministry of the Presidency; Public Investment and External Financing to Economy and Public Finance; and Environment, Biodiversity, Climate Change and Forestry Management and Development to the Ministry of Sustainable Production, Environment and Water (First and Third Transitional Provisions). The Ministry of Sustainable Tourism, Cultures, Folklore and Gastronomy moves wholesale to Foreign Affairs, where its subject matter now sits under a Viceministry of Sustainable Tourism and Cultures.
The resulting structure has twelve ministries (Article 27) and forty-three viceministries. DS 4857 had established seventeen ministries and some fifty-eight viceministries.
Two of these transfers matter more to business than the rest. First, foreign trade, economic integration and foreign investment now sit in the Foreign Ministry, in a viceministry of their own, while domestic commerce and consumer rights go to Sustainable Production, Environment and Water. The office that promotes your inbound investment and the office that polices your consumer-facing conduct no longer share a minister. Second, that same Ministry of Sustainable Production, Environment and Water now holds the registration and certification bodies that touch nearly every formal productive activity in the country: the commercial registry (SEPREC), the intellectual property office (SENAPI), the metrology institute (IBMETRO), the agricultural health and food safety service (SENASAG) and the export verification service (SENAVEX), among others.
The scale of that concentration shows up in the Annex of Institutional Linkage, which assigns each public entity and state company to a ministry. Of the annex's one hundred and forty-five entries, thirty-eight fall to Sustainable Production, Environment and Water — more than a quarter of the executive's institutional apparatus under a single portfolio that also covers water, sanitation, irrigation, environment, agriculture, industrialisation and domestic trade.
The clauses holding the transition together
This is where the drafting earns its keep. Four provisions, read together, form a system.
Article 124, paragraph IV, provides that omitting an entity or state company from the Annex of Institutional Linkage does not suppress or extinguish it; the linkage established under existing law, or inherent in the entity's institutional nature, survives. Article 134 requires entities to adapt their organisation to the new classification, but expressly limits what that adaptation may reach: it is organisational and regulatory only, and cannot alter legal nature, autonomy, structure, assets, powers or appointment regimes set by higher-ranking law. The First Final Provision carries powers held under sector-specific rules across to whichever ministry or viceministry now exercises them. The Third Final Provision reads every reference in existing regulation to a renamed or relocated body as a reference to whoever now holds the relevant power.
Taken together, no competence is orphaned by a change of name, no entity is extinguished through a drafting oversight, and no earlier decree becomes unworkable because it cites a ministry that no longer exists. The protection is deliberate, and by the standards of Bolivia's recent reorganisations it is unusual.
It is worth being precise about what these clauses do and do not achieve. They settle validity. They do not settle processing. A rule stating that a reference to the former Planning Ministry now means the Ministry of Economy does not stop a filing lodged at the wrong counter from sitting for several weeks while someone decides whose it is. Legal continuity and operational continuity are different things, and a decree can only legislate the first.
What the annex leaves out
The Annex of Institutional Linkage has eleven ministry headings. There are twelve ministries. The Ministry of Labour has no entry.
Nor does the annex list the business regulator (AEMP), the forestry and land authority (ABT), the water and sanitation authority (AAPS) or the mining administrative authority (AJAM) — even though the decree names all of them when setting out ministers' powers. Two regulators appear nowhere in the text at all: the financial system supervisor (ASFI) and the national hydrocarbons agency (ANH).
None of this is a defect, and Article 124.IV exists precisely so that it is not one: absence neither extinguishes nor unlinks. But it does mean the annex has to be read for what it is. It is not a census of the state or a complete map of institutional dependencies. It is a partial schedule of assignments. Anyone treating it as an inventory — concluding, say, that a regulator has changed hands because it is missing from where they expected it — will reach the opposite conclusion to the one the decree actually reaches.
Who decides your appeal now
For in-house counsel this is probably the most useful page in the decree, and it is scattered across the ministerial powers rather than gathered into one article.
The Minister of Sustainable Production, Environment and Water hears and decides hierarchical appeals against decisions of AAPS, and appeals against the reconsideration rulings issued by the Executive Directors of ABT and AEMP, as well as against reconsideration rulings of the National Competent Environmental Authority and the National Competent Authority on Biosafety. The Minister of Public Works, Services and Housing decides appeals against the telecommunications and transport regulator (ATT). The Minister of Labour decides appeals against the head of the cooperatives regulator (AFCOOP).
The first of those is worth pausing on. A single ministerial authority now sits at the top of four separate appeal chains — water and sanitation, forestry and land, competition and business regulation, and environment and biosafety — while also holding dependency, oversight or sector control over thirty-eight entities. That is a substantial concentration of administrative decision-making, and the natural consequence of merging so many subjects into one portfolio.
The deadlines, and the money that isn't there
The decree sets three clocks, all running from the date it takes effect. Receiving ministries have ten working days to begin adapting and to issue the ministerial resolution approving their organisational structure. The Ministry of Economy and Public Finance, together with the other bodies involved, has fifteen working days to process the budget modifications arising from the restructuring. And the administrative and legal directorates of the extinguished ministries have ninety calendar days to close and hand over, through notarised records, an inventory covering movable and immovable property, vehicles, stock, assets, liabilities, obligations, contracts, agreements, procurement processes, administrative and judicial proceedings, and physical and digital archives.
Two provisions weigh on that effort. The Second Final Provision states that implementation will require no additional treasury resources. And the Second Transitional Provision, paragraph V, states that the extinction of the ministries means the employment relationship with the extinguished ministry does not continue. A notarised inventory of two entire ministries must therefore be produced on existing budget, with part of the staff on their way out.
This is where the decree's ambition and its execution base diverge most sharply. It is not a legal flaw. It is an operational risk, and the decree states it itself.
What to check in practice
Four concrete verifications over the coming weeks.
Contracts and agreements
Those signed with the extinguished ministries remain fully valid and pass to the receiving ministry (Seventh Transitional Provision, paragraph III). Identify the receiving ministry and record the change of counterparty in writing before the next contractual milestone.
Live procurement
Procurement processes not completed by the effective date pass to the receiving ministry, which is empowered to continue them or to set them aside. This is the commercially weightiest discretionary power in the entire transitional regime, and it bears directly on state suppliers with bids on the table.
Trusts
Trust agreements in which the former Ministry of Development Planning and Environment was settlor pass to the Ministry of Sustainable Production, Environment and Water, and the relevant entities must execute addenda (Fifth Additional Provision).
Draft legislation
Every draft supreme decree goes to the Ministry of the Presidency with a technical report and a legal report, is routed through the Viceministry of Coordination, Strategic Planning and State Modernisation to UDAPE and CONAPES, and — for entities under ministerial dependency, oversight or sector control — must be channelled through the relevant sector minister (Articles 118 and 119). Anyone with a regulatory proposal in train needs to redo the route.
A closing read
The number of ministries is the easiest variable to move in an administrative reform, which is why it moves most often. Argentina went from eighteen to nine by decree in December 2023; Bolivia has gone from seventeen to twelve in three years and seven months, through nine intermediate decrees that this one has just erased. The headcount changes fast. What does not change at the same speed is the capacity of the offices that receive the paperwork.
What separates DS 5675 from its immediate predecessors is not the arithmetic. It is that someone took the trouble to write down how the rest of the legal order survives the decree's own entry into force. Articles 124 and 134 and the Final Provisions were drafted by someone who anticipated the right questions. Whether the reform is remembered as a tidying-up or as an interruption depends on whether those clauses are applied at the counter with the clarity they were written with, and on whether ninety days is enough to hand over two ministries with notarised records and no new money.
For companies the operational conclusion is simpler than the decree. The reorganisation extinguishes no rights and no contracts, but it changes the addressee of almost everything filed with the state. For the next three months, checking who signs, who decides and who receives is ordinary diligence.
