The<i>Buen Vivir</i>: A Policy to Survive the Anthropocene?

Diálogos. Revista Electrónica de Historia, 2020

Following the guiding thread of recent Ecuadorian economic history, this paper aims to mirror the evolution of environmental discourses across the Latin American region. During the last decades of the twentieth century, increasing social environmental awareness added up to the penetration of environmental thinking into the states’ developmental policymaking. For Ecuador, this cocktail resulted in the long-run in a particular discourse: Buen vivir. Central to rationalize buen vivir was its socioecological dimension, founded on a harmonic relationship between society and nature. Buen vivir was meant to materialize in a plan to save part of the Ecuadorian Amazonia from oil drilling by leaving a significant portion of the country’s reserves under the ground in exchange for an international monetary compensation: The Yasuní-ITT initiative. Despite the fact that the plan mobilized state and society, it succumbed to forty-years of oil dependence of Ecuadorian economy, politics, and society. The termination of the initiative unveiled two antagonist environmental discourses. Whereas the state held the notion of natural resources available for commodification in the global market, society bet on alternative meanings of nature such as natural heritage and ancient peoples’ habitat and means of existence. As outcomes of the foreseeable divorce between the environmental discourses, buen vivir turned into a polyphonic concept and the struggle over a hegemonic environmental discourse resumed. It is argued that during the twenty-first century, one of the consequences of such a struggle is the construction of different meanings of development alike.

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.

While buen vivir (good living) and sumak kawsay give name to a broad set of demands and aspirations that emerged in the last years of the twentieth century against the so-called “neoliberal model”, however in its meaning structure, these terms are not entirely equivalents, there are disputes about its significance and its implications for public action. In this article, I analyze the meanings and contradictions that appear in trying to translate these terms into specific instruments of public policy.

The 2008 Ecuadorian Constitution is often presented as building on the local traditions of indigenous peoples in order to propose a non-anthropocentric approach to the conservation of the environment, based on the concept of buen vivir. After providing a short introduction on anthropocentric and non-anthropocentric approaches to the environment, with attention to indigenous worldviews, this article attempts to: analyse the concept of buen vivir, appearing to have unclear boundaries; understand whether or not it is a concept derived from indigenous worldviews; and explore the innovative non-anthropocentric feature of the recognition of rights to the environment. Finally, the article uses the idea of rights of the environment as a key to interpret the fuzzy concept of buen vivir in the most effective way to enhance the conservation of the environment.

Latin American Perspectives

The Rafael Correa administration, usually characterized as “neo-extractivist,” did in fact propose an alternative development model that, under a particular understanding of the notion of buen vivir, aimed to overcome the country’s economic dependence on extractive activities through its gradual replacement by a knowledge-intensive economic sector. An examination of this model, some of the main policies implemented in order to configure it, and the main obstacles encountered in the process confirms the classic intuition of so-called dependency theory: that the ability of peripheral countries to overcome their reliance on commodities exports is constrained by economic and institutional mechanisms that limit their room for maneuver. La administración de Rafael Correa, generalmente caracterizada como “neoextractivista”, propuso un modelo de desarrollo alternativo que, bajo un entendimiento particular de la noción del buen vivir, tenía como objetivo superar la dependencia económica del ...

Ecological Economics, 2014

This paper aims at reviewing the content of Buen vivir as an emergent discourse within the “gravitational field” of sustainable development: its genesis, its foundations and its singularity. First, we consider the criticisms to the development discourse and to its direct descendant: sustainable development. Next, we review the position of Latin America in the global discursive field of sustainable development and the situation of Buen vivir facing the debates therein. Drawing on the traditional repository of the aboriginal cultures of the continent, this new discourse has been theorized in the academic sphere and translated into normative principles that have permeated the political sphere, which is especially visible in the cases of Ecuador and Bolivia. In this article we refer to “Buen vivir” as the contemporary reelaboration of the quechua concept Sumak Kawsay, and other similar concepts from other indigenous nations. It includes both the idea of interdependence between society and its natural environment, as well as a conception of the universal as plural. Lastly, beyond its implications for environmental debate, Buen vivir also involves an imperative for the redefinition of relations between the citizenry, the state and the market.

The 2008 Ecuadorian Constitution built a particular system for environment protection, breaking the dominant paradigm characterized by an anthropocentric and utilitarian relation with nature. The Ecuadorian Constitution raised the nature of the condition “subject of rights”. Such a conception is associated to “buen vivir” (Sumak Kawsay in Kichwa), which relates to the ways of life and world view of native peoples. Therefore, this article aims at understanding the social construction of this understanding of nature in the context of the processes experienced in Ecuador and called “New Latin American Constitutionalism”. To meet the proposed objective, the methodology used was based on the survey and review of references related to the rights of nature, held in university libraries and at the Supreme Court of Ecuador, as well as on interviews with indigenous leaders, which served to guide reflections. As a result, the analysis of recent legal changes experienced in Ecuador invite us to a comparative reflection on the Brazilian environmental policy.

2012

Diálogos Revista Electrónica

During the last decades of the twentieth century, increasing social environmental awareness added up to the gradual penetration of environmental thinking into the Latin American states’ developmental policymaking. For Ecuador, this cocktail resulted in the long-run in a particular discourse, which emerged in the dawn of the twenty-first century, buen vivir. Central to rationalize buen vivir was its socioecological dimension, founded on a harmonic relationship between society and nature. Buen vivir was meant to materialize in a plan to save a significant portion of the Ecuadorian Amazonia from oil drilling by leaving about one quarter of the country’s oil reserves under the ground in exchange for an international monetary compensation: The Yasuní-ITT initiative. Despite the fact that the plan mobilized state and society, it succumbed to forty-years of dependence on oil of Ecuadorian economy, politics, and society. The termination of the initiative unveiled two antagonist environmenta...

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)?

The Bulletin of Latin American Research, 2018

The Ecuadorian state frames its development interventions in infrastructure and human capital as advances in buen vivir or 'good living'. This paper reports ethnographic research that draws attention to everyday appropriations of state discourses on buen vivir in the Amazon and Andes. Non-state actors in marginalised communities often use state discourses strategically in engagements and negotiations with state actors. We argue that uses of official versions of buen vivir discourse often reflect such strategic appropriations of state idioms, rather than subjective commitment to state-led development and official notions of buen vivir.

Scaling up Buen Vivir: Globalizing Local Environmental Governance from Ecuador, 2014

How does the population of a small Ecuadorian province influence the development strategies pursued nationally and consequently push the global conversation toward an alternative model of sustainable development? This article explores watershed management reform in Tungurahua, Ecuador, to analyze how local communities challenged the dominant international model of sustainable development and—through a process of negotiation, learning, and network construction with international partners—produced an alternative model infused by indigenous norms of human wellbeing, or sumak kawsay—el buen vivir. The institutionalization of these norms was a catalyst for the development of Ecuador’s National Plan for Wellbeing (Buen Vivir) and Ecuador’s quest to change the way the world thinks about development and sustainability. This case illuminates how local populations working with competing interpretations from international agendas construct new environmental governance regimes, and how the scaling up of these regimes carry local norms of environmental management to the global level.

Bulletin of Latin American Research, 2018

Ecuador's postneoliberal policy of Buen Vivir seeks to reduce social inequality and tackle complex disadvantages associated with gender, location, race-ethnicity and other social differences. The paper analyses governmental Buen Vivir policy thinking and institutional arrangements to explore how Buen Vivir frameworks approach the constitutional commitment to equality in diversity, in light of the global Sustainable Development Goal of "Leaving No-one Behind" (LNOB). In many respects Ecuador has undertaken an array of policy efforts to tackle complex inequalities, and highlights the challenges of LNOB. Situating state Buen Vivir in Ecuador's postcolonial institutionalisation , the paper examines how colonial-modern legacies of knowledge production and governance channel state Buen Vivir policy into the reproduction of exclusionary configurations of power and difference.

In 2008, the Republic of Ecuador became the first country to grant legal rights to nature. In this article, I examine how this new category of rights became incorporated into the country’s constitution. My analysis shows that while proponents of nature’s rights effectively took advantage of a key political moment, it is unlikely their efforts would have succeeded without two historical developments: first, the presence of environmentalist social movements that elevated the environmental agenda at the national level during prior decades, and second, the power of indigenous organizations and their call to recognize Ecuador as a ‘plurinational’ polity, a form of multiculturalism which, along with demanding respect for indigenous territories and ways of life, incorporates politicized versions of indigenous beliefs about the environment. The study considers the consequences of mobilization for legal innovation and institutional change, as well as showing the complexity of struggles over the environment in the global South. The article is based on research at the Ecuadorian National Legislative Assembly archive, semi-structured interviews with respondents involved in the politics of nature and the constitutional assembly, and secondary historical sources.