Monni, S., Pallottino , M. (2015) "Beyond growth and development: Buen Vivir as an alternative to current paradigma" (original) (raw)
Related papers
Beyond growth and development: buen vivir as an alternative to current paradigms
International Journal of Environmental Policy and Decision Making, 2015
The aim of this paper is to investigate to what extent buen vivir ("good life"), Latin America's new concept for collective well being, can be considered a way forward beyond current paradigms related to economic growth, development, ideology and state building, with its strengths and potential weaknesses or just a new version of political discourse. In order to answer this question, we will briefly review the literature that can help to trace the buen vivir origins in the cosmovisions of latinoamerican indigenous peoples, and to connect it to reflections made in different areas of social, economic and political sciences, trying to identify the areas in which divergences arise using established approaches and frameworks. In the conclusions we'll also try to look at the added value brought by the buen vivir towards a renewed understanding of political, social, economic objectives of the associated life.
International Development Policy | Revue internationale de politique de développement, 2017
The purpose of this chapter is to identify the different meanings of Latin American Good Living (buen vivir) and its diverse intellectual wellsprings, with a focus on the political economy of development. The authors try to answer the following questions: What different types of Good Living lie behind the overall concept? What intellectual wellsprings have the authors drunk from? The authors use the methodological strategies of deconstruction and conceptual genealogy, based on a broad bibliographic review. They conclude that three different types of Latin American Good Living exist: ‘indigenist’ and ‘pachamamist’, socialist and statist, and ‘ecologist’ and ‘post-developmentalist’. Moreover, they argue that synthesised notions of the concept exist. These versions are associated with different intellectual influences, such as sumak kawsay, suma qamaña and allin kawsay; the Andean world view; development with identity; the theory of reciprocity; post-development; liberation theology; dependency theory; the theory of ‘coloniality’; sustainable development; world-system theory; human development; endogenous development; eco-socialism; twenty-first century socialism; social justice; the economics of happiness; eudaemony; the economic theory of relational goods; the social and solidarity economy; intercultural feminism; the feminism of care; eco-feminism; the self-sufficient economy; community economy; barefoot economics and human scale development theory; the Buddhist economy; ‘post-extractivism’; ‘de-growth’; deep ecology and the theory of conviviality.
Buen Vivir: A Latin American Contribution to Intra- and Intergenerational Justice
The Oxford Handbook of Intergenerational Ethics , 2021
The concept of buen vivir (“good living”) has become an emergent discourse of resistance for social, ecological, and indigenous movements in Latin America, especially in Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia. Due to the rebirth of theories of decolonization and its political impact against extractive practices, buen vivir has attracted attention both from academic and from political domains. Although there are different and conflicting conceptions of buen vivir, three common theses can be identified: the rejection of an anthropocentric moral ontology, the abandonment of an idea of a linear progress toward welfare through economic growth, and the defense of complementary and reciprocal relations between humans and the rest of nature. This chapter critically analyzes the contributions and challenges that this radical platform can make to three paradigmatic problems in the intergenerational literature: the non-identity problem, the epistemological problem of the uncertainty of future needs, and the tyranny of the contemporaries. The authors argue that a moderate and environmentalist version is the fittest conception of buen vivir to provide public and legitimate reasons for those intergenerational justice issues and, at the same time, a richer non-resourcist metric to assess them.
Between Life and Policies: The Politics of Buen Vivir in Bolivia and Ecuador (Dissertation)
Since the beginning of the 21 st century a new project promoted by indigenous movements both in Bolivia and Ecuador has gained especial relevance: the Buen Vivir. This new project basically set the principles to live in harmony both with others and with nature. With the particular additive that it is based in their own cosmology, that is to say, their lifeworld, which is embedded in their cultural history as well as in present communitarian practices. At the same time, governments of both countries have taken Buen Vivir as part of their policy framework. Furthermore, it was included in their national constitutions as general guiding principle. Nevertheless, the above occurred alongside an apparent increasing tension between government policies and indigenous peoples. I argue that this contradiction is the effect of the institution of two discursive 'parts' grounded in two epistemologically different bases. Moreover, it is what illustrates one of the central political questions behind the current formation of social order in Bolivia and Ecuador.
What does it mean to 'live well'? The contentious politics of vivir bien as alternative development
Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 2024
Vivir bien is widely used by academics, activists, and governments of the Latin American 'Pink Tide' to refer to alternatives to conventional economic development based on indigenous worldviews claimed to oppose capitalist modernity. Through ethnography of local politics within a Bolivian Quechua community, this article explores how the term has been vernacularized and contested among local leaders, illustrating that their understandings of development and 'living well' do not reflect a binary opposition between 'Western' and 'indigenous' ways of being. Debates concerning vivir bien instead express varied notions of self-government and aspirations for autonomy informed by centuries of struggle as colonized peoples.
Buen Vivir: Praise, instrumentalization, and reproductive pathways of good living in Ecuador
Latin American and Caribbean Ethnic Studies, 2017
In this article, we trace the avatars of the official concept of Buen Vivir (Good Living), and its understanding and translation as Sumak Kausay in the new Constitution of Ecuador, where it was converted from a subaltern concept that emerged in the 1990s to the country's trademark. Our main hypothesis is that although Buen Vivir may be described as a social phenomenon in some specific social contexts (such as among Amazonian Sarayaku indigenous communities), it mostly represents an invented tradition. As a subordinate hypothesis, we argue that Buen Vivir, which originally appeared at the margins of the State and political power, later became an empty signifier, allowing for its instrumentalization and co-optation by the Citizens' Revolution and generating an opening for future prospects in the way of operationalization and internationalization that converged with efforts to promote alternative measures and notions of development to the GDP.
In Bolivia and Ecuador the concept of Buen vivir, based on indigenous cosmologies, has been formulated by indigenous organisations as an alternative paradigm to mainstream development theory. It has also inspired environmentalist movements in their struggle for a different environmental governance beyond extractivism, and it has been appropriated by national governments to justify economic and social policies and their political agendas. In Peru, Buen vivir is emerging as a political project to express ecological concerns, as well as self-determination, territoriality and cultural rights of indigenous peoples. In these experiences the formulation and implementation of Buen vivir is a complex and contentious process which expresses the tensions and dynamics between indigenous politics and the political economy of extraction. This article explores the different meanings of Buen vivir in Bolivia, Ecuador and Peru and the struggle of indigenous peoples to re-appropriate the concept which has been co-opted by the state using conventional views of development. We argue that Buen vivir serves as a political platform on the basis of which different social movements articulate social and ecological demands based on indigenous principles, in order to challenge the economic and political fundamentals of the state and the current theory, politics and policy-making of development.
Interest in the cosmovisions of the Andean indigenous peoples, which are collectively referred to as buen vivir, has given origin in recent years to a lively debate on their implications in terms of social, political and economic models. These debates have generated arguments in the context of the so-called 'turn to left' of Latino American politics and have contributed to building up an understanding of society that is opposed to the neo-liberal mainstream. The cornerstones of this perspective are the processes through which (ethno-linguistic) communities seek their full recognition and where the rights of 'mother earth' (pacha mama) can be put at the basis of a renewed approach to natural resources management and exploitation: all this is part of a reconfiguration of political spaces, implying new opportunities for social groups that had long been marginalised. Based on a heated critique of the neo-liberal global order and mainstream development paradigms, buen vivir has thus become a powerful call for social movements in search of alternatives to current mainstream approaches, as well as the basis for processes of constitutionalisation and institutionalisation, namely in countries such as Ecuador and Bolivia, and has been further translated into attempts to create a new 'plurinational' state model. Concrete policies have also been inspired by the same principles and have substantiated in a sort of 'buen vivir-based' state and development. The space between the cultural roots of the different forms of indigenous cosmovisions (in which many different Andean indigenous peoples can be recognised) deserves to be understood and questioned: how are the ideological foundations of the political programme based on (or recalling) buen vivir actually based on their claimed roots? To what extent can this translation be seen as a sort of 'betrayal' of those roots? To what extent have the concrete policies that claim that origin been able to retain their principles (community, rights of 'mother earth', harmonic coexistence of all living beings in nature)?
Good Life As a Social Movement Proposal for Natural Resource Use: The Indigenous Movement in Ecuador
2013
The Ecuadorian indigenous movement has developed the concept of Good Life (Sumak Kawsay or Buen Vivir) as a conceptual weapon in order to defend the territories of indigenous nationalities as the movement itself defines them. Starting in 2002, petroleum exploitation in indigenous areas in the Amazon has been denounced as an attack against the principles of the traditional concept of Good Life. The introduction of the concept of Good Life allowed the local as well as the national indigenous organizations to define their vision of the country and society, while allowing easier coalitions with a growing Ecological Left. Good Life is not only a new content in the indigenous discourse, but also an instrument for social movement mobilization and coalition building. This text aims to offer a clearer idea of what the indigenous movement in Ecuador understands as Good Life, the development of the concept, the different contents and relations it has, and its strategic use in Ecuadorian politics.