Abstract
Buen vivir (good living) discourse emerged at the turn of the century in the context of global political contestation around the prevailing development model at the intersection of multiple actors, discourses, and struggles. A genealogical reconstruction of this discourse disputes the ethnocentric character often attributed to it outside Latin America as an allegedly indigenous discursive product. Instead, buen vivir is a prime example of “glocal” discursive articulation in pursuit of alter- and postdevelopmentalist utopias—a cultural-political experiment that holds valuable lessons for global debates around alternative socio-ecological futures.
El discurso del “buen vivir” surgió a principios de siglo en el contexto de la contienda política global en torno al modelo de desarrollo prevaleciente en la intersección de múltiples actores, discursos y luchas. Una reconstrucción genealógica de dicho discurso cuestiona el carácter etnocéntrico que a menudo se le atribuye fuera de América Latina, donde se le mira como un producto discursivo supuestamente indígena. Sin embargo, el buen vivir es un excelente ejemplo de articulación discursiva “glocal” en busca de utopías alter-y postdesarrollistas, un experimento cultural-político que puede brindar valiosas lecciones a los debates globales en torno a futuros socioecológicos alternativos.
Buen vivir (good living), understood as a contemporary cultural, social, and ecological regulatory ideal, is a discourse that has found anchorage in public and academic debates in the past two decades (Vanhulst, 2015), particularly in the field of development studies (Hidalgo-Capitán, 2011). It can be broadly defined as a community-oriented cultural paradigm of social organization based on a way of life that maintains a relationship of respect, harmony, and balance with everything that exists, understanding that everything is interconnected, interdependent, and interrelated (Huanacuni, 2010). Three dimensions are usually considered as central to buen vivir discourse: harmony with oneself (identity), with society (equity), and with nature (sustainability) (Cubillo-Guevara, Hidalgo-Capitán, and García-Alvarez, 2016).
While rooted in the cultural tradition of the indigenous peoples of the Andean-Amazonian region, as a contemporary discursive construction buen vivir is framed within global debates around alternative forms of development and alternatives to development (Vanhulst, 2015; Vanhulst and Beling, 2014; 2017). In this regard, buen vivir is part of a global field of social, political, and academic debate and participates in a dynamic of cross-pollination with other “discourses of transition”—discourses advocating a whole-societal transformation toward global social and ecological sustainability, breaking with the inherently ungeneralizable model of social organization of the modern West, which has, however, become globally dominant (Beling et al., 2018; Escobar, 2011). This article enquires about the origins and evolution of this contemporary Latin American discourse, 1 thereby seeking to elucidate the question of the allegedly idiosyncratic character of buen vivir and its relevance to broader international social and environmental debates.
Given that our interest is in understanding buen vivir as an emerging discursive phenomenon rather than as a concept with abstract meaning(s), 2 in the following we will focus mainly on (1) a spatial axis of political-institutional context analysis (at both the territorial and the global level) of its emergence, which contributed to a structural readjustment of political forces in the Andean-Amazonian region that produced buen vivir as a discursive and political innovation (Altmann, 2013a; de la Cadena, 2010), and (2) a temporal axis consisting of the phases of its emergence and consolidation as a distinctive discourse, highlighting the involvement of diverse political and social actors.
To this end, we will adopt a methodological approach of historically embedded critical discourse analysis (Fairclough, 1995; Seantel, 2013; Wodak, 2001). Implicit here is the initial hypothesis that buen vivir discourse emerged or evolved not through diffuse social interaction but through the deliberate action of concrete agents with specific goals, drivers, and socio-cognitive frameworks and embedded in a specific power matrix. The genealogical approach (Foucault, 1975) and the critical-discourse-analysis approach converge in their framing of discourses as meaning structures resulting from the contingent interaction of multiple actors in a specific and power-laden spatiotemporal context (Fairclough, 1995; Seantel, 2013). We therefore focus on the historical phases in which sociopolitical and cultural contexts have opened windows of opportunity for certain agents to (re)construct the discourse of buen vivir as a function of their own worldviews and interests. We seek to account for the discursive coalitions and points of intersection of (trans)territorial flows and structures that reveal how buen vivir emerged and evolved and, more important, how these intersections constitute potential docking points for strategic and deeper discursive articulations in the construction of civilizational alternatives that are socially and ecologically sustainable (Beling et al., 2018).
The Political and Social Context
Given that the emergence and mainstreaming of the buen vivir discourse happened in Latin America—particularly in Ecuador, Bolivia, Peru, Nicaragua, and El Salvador—it would be logical to conclude that the local and regional context must have been determinant of this outcome. However, taking into account the strong global (economic) embeddedness of the region, a proper analysis of the overarching global/international context cannot be neglected.
The Global Context
Drawing on a broad literature review, it is possible to highlight at least the following eight contextual factors at the global level as laying the groundwork for the emergence and subsequent mainstreaming of buen vivir discourse:
The emergence in the late 1960s of awareness of the earth’s ecological predicament and the imperative of socio-ecological sustainability. Historical landmarks in this regard were the UN Earth Summits (Stockholm in 1972, Rio de Janeiro in 1992, Johannesburg in 2002, and Rio+20 in 2012) and the Brundtland report, Our Common Future, of the World Commission on Environment and Development (1987), which canonized the concept of “sustainable development.” This concept reemerged with renewed urgency and was reframed as a civilizational challenge in the global public sphere in the early twenty-first century, particularly in connection with the mainstreaming of anthropogenic climate change as the catalytic environmental challenge.
The “cultural turn” and the consolidation of “multiculturality/ interculturality” as a global discourse from the 1970s on. This was linked to the struggles of ethnic communities for recognition and acceptance of their cultural difference, which led to the coining of the concepts of “development with identity” and “ethnodevelopment” in the 1981 UNESCO Declaration of San José on Ethnodevelopment and Ethnocide in Latin America, the 1989 International Labor Organization Convention 169, the 1996 publication of the report Our Creative Diversity by the UNESCO Commission for Culture and Development, and the 2007 United Nations Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.
The revival of inquiries into the idea of the “good life” banished from the field of Western political philosophy since the Enlightenment in favor of the alleged axiological neutrality of the liberal concept of “justice” (Sandel, 2010). Explanations for this rebirth are manifold, including the decreasing marginal utility of material affluence or even its decoupling from subjective happiness 3 (the so-called Easterlin paradox [Easterlin, 1974]), the postmaterialist turn (e.g., Inglehart, 1997), and the insertion of identity into politics driven by the new social movements.
The contemporary critiques and the buildup of an international agenda in the search for alternatives to the “ideology of development” in the face of cumulative evidence of chronic crises in the sociopolitical, environmental, and economic fronts (persistent poverty, growing inequality, accelerating ecological degradation, etc.) sharpened with the generalization of neoliberal policy frameworks worldwide from the 1980s on. Landmarks in this critique of development include the report What Now? Another Development by the Dag Hammarskjöld Foundation (1975), which calls for “alternative development” or “another kind of development,” and The Development Dictionary: A Guide to Knowledge as Power (W. Sachs, 1992), the main reference of the intellectual current of postdevelopment. Furthermore, such critiques have led some intellectuals to advocate for the “right not to develop” (Agostino, 2004). Hybridizations can also be observed with the above-mentioned societal critiques derived from the ecological boundaries of the biosphere, among them the idea of “ecodevelopment” as conceptualized in the prelude to the UN Conference on the Human Environment in Stockholm, embedded in the Founex report (de Almeida, 1971), and theorized by Ignacy Sachs (1974).
The destigmatization of the political left after the Cold War and the diversification of “successful” development pathways with the emergence of large state-managed economies on the world stage, a prime example being the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa) (Arsel and Ávila-Ángel, 2012). This made it possible for progressive politics to become credible, viable, and desirable alternatives to neoliberalism.
The crisis of the Westphalian nation-states, which, in the aftermath of the neoliberal globalization of the 1990s and 2000s, have seen a severe shrinkage of their capacity for regulating their national economies and attending to the social demands of their populations, becoming subject to the constraints imposed upon them by the global market (Crouch, 2004; Wolin, 2008).
The irruption of collective actions and alternative social movements articulated on a global scale against diverse forms of injustice and oppression. The main milestone here was the celebration of the 2001 World Social Forum in Porto Alegre, which popularized the slogan “Another World Is Possible” (World Social Forum, 2001) and established itself in successive versions as the world’s main critical stage against neoliberalism and neoliberal globalization. Other milestones in the recent history of alternative social movements are the so-called Arab Spring between 2010 and 2013 (Roberts et al., 2016), the protests of the Indignados and Occupy movements in Spain and the United States in 2011 and in France in 2016 (Hessel, 2010; Sampedro et al., 2011), and the movements against a “democracy without capacity for choice” (Pleyers and Capitaine, 2016).
The economic crisis starting in 2007, which promoted an anti-neoliberal rhetorical turn, and the emerging reframing of the West as an “anti-model” (Beck, 2015) that opened the way for extensive diagnoses of a socioeconomic and socio-ecological “multiple crisis” in the West (Brand, 2015) and of a “civilizational crisis” in Latin America (Escobar, 2011).
The Local Context
In Latin America, 4 at least five contextual factors for the emergence and consolidation of the buen vivir discourse in various territories can be identified:
The return of democracy to the region from the 1980s on, in most countries following distinct periods of military dictatorship and preceding the heyday of the social and economic neoliberal model in the 1990s, and then a slow restructuring and reorganization of civil society and the capacity for collective action in the 1990s and 2000s (Acuña and Vacchieri, 2007).
The debate around the historical and political meaning of the commemoration of the five hundredth anniversary of the “discovery of America” in 1992 (Bernecker, 1996). This debate opened the way for greater recognition of the identity and collective rights of the indigenous peoples of Latin America (or Abya Yala, the Kuna term with which indigenous peoples have come to identify the region), including the right to political participation. Latin American indigenous movements thus eventually became important political actors at the national level (Yashar, 2005), and this led to the inclusion of the above-mentioned rights in the national constitutions of more than 15 Latin American countries.
In the 1990s and 2000s, the social struggles of waged laborers in the public and private sectors, peasants, indigenous people, Afro-descendants, students, urban collectives, ecologists, and women (Seoane, Taddei, and Algranati, 2006), leading to the emergence of post-neoliberal, postcolonial, postdevelopmental, and postpatriarchal utopias in most countries in the region. Important milestones in the intellectual development of these utopias were the inaugural manifesto of the Latin American Group of Subaltern Studies in 1995 (Castro-Gómez and Mendieta, 1998) and the 1998 creation of the informal Modernity/Coloniality Group (Lander, 2000; Mignolo, 2007).
The building of subaltern electoral coalitions among alternative social movements (workers, peasants, cooperative associates, indigenous people, Afro-descendants, ecologists, feminists, liberationists, solidarity-oriented groups, and others), with the participation of representatives of the indigenous movement in some countries, especially in Ecuador with Alianza PAIS (PAIS Alliance) (Dávalos, 2014) and in Bolivia with the Movimiento al Socialismo (Movement toward Socialism—MAS) (Zuazo, 2008)—both prime examples of so-called party movements that successfully challenged the political establishment.
The “left turn” of many Latin American governments after the turn of the century (Bajoit, Houtart, and Deuterme, 2012), drawing on the impulse provided by the Bolivarian Revolution in Venezuela in 1999 and the arrival in office of the Brazilian Partido de los Trabajadores (Workers’ Party—PT) in 2003. These events launched a “post-neoliberal” political line that extended throughout the region to most Latin American countries. 5
Genealogical Reconstruction of the Emergence and Mainstreaming of Buen Vivir
In order to engage with the history of buen vivir discourse, this genealogical analysis will be divided into four phases: (1) incubation and emergence, which gathers the precedents of buen vivir as a political discourse; (2) prelude to the constitutional processes in Ecuador and Bolivia, where the hybridization of the discourse is analyzed; (3) constitutional processes, which deals with the institutionalization of buen vivir; and (4) the postconstituent phase, which witnesses a boom in the literature on buen vivir and a diversification of its (partially contradictory) appropriations by multiple political and social actors. This genealogical analysis is aimed at demonstrating that the emergence and rapid spread of buen vivir as a contemporary discourse are due not to diffuse social interaction but to the active fostering of concrete discursive agents, producing a handful of discursive strands with dissimilar implications for the political and cultural transformation potential of buen vivir within and beyond Latin America.
Incubation and Emergence (Pre-2000)
While it is impossible to speak of the existence of buen vivir as a discourse before 2000, 6 a variety of inputs stemming from diverse currents of thought (besides indigenous ones) and academic disciplines can be identified as invoking values, regulative principles, and arguments that are prefigurative of that discourse. Noteworthy examples in this regard are the thinking of the Peruvian politician and intellectual José Carlos Mariátegui (1928), who combined Marxist theory with the traditions and the particular ethnic-territorial trajectories of Latin America, or that of the Ecuadorian Vladimir Serrano (1992), who argued that an “indigenous cosmogony” could contribute to overcoming the dichotomy between industrial economy and ecology, an idea in line with the “ecodevelopment” proposal of the 1970s (Cortez, 2011).
In addition, decades-long developments in the indigenous world further prepared the ground for the emergence of buen vivir. The cross-fertilization of the indigenous movements with peasant-socialist identities (particularly in the 1920s and 1930s) in Ecuador, for instance, and their diversification alongside communist but also Catholic and Protestant identities during the second half of the twentieth century and the reassertion of indigenous political and identitarian demands in the 1970s, contributed to the potentiation of the creativity, resilience, connectivity, and political strength of the indigenous movement (Altmann, 2013a; Yashar, 2005).
Last but not least, during the 1990s the multiple socioeconomic and political crises of neoliberal projects regionwide were instrumental in paving the way for the emergence of a new cultural and political project.
It was in this context of growing sociopolitical influence of the indigenous world that, in the mid-1980s, early elaborations of the concept of buen vivir were essayed in cooperation with European anthropologists. The works of Philippe Descola on the Achuar concept of shiir waras in 1986, Bartomeu Meliá on the Guaraní ñande reko in 1988, Elke Mader on the Shuar penker pujustin in 1996, and Carlos Viteri on the Amazonic-Kichwa sumak kawsay in 2003 (all cited in Cubillo-Guevara and Hidalgo-Capitán, 2015a), similarly translated into Spanish as “buen vivir” (living well but also life in harmony), are the most prominent examples. This unprecedented interest in the indigenous world and way of life is no coincidence. In the context of a global legitimacy crisis of the idea of development, the development sector—widely criticized as centralist and paternalistic—undertook a process of self-exploration and a quest for revalidation that ought to come from the final recipients of international development funding, thus giving way to a paradigm shift that can be rhetorically synthesized in the replacement of the term “development aid” by that of “development cooperation.”
The most relevant episode in this period, in that it accounts for the first attempt at political articulation of the emerging buen vivir discourse, was the 1992 development of the Amazanga Plan (Viteri et al., 1992) for the management of the natural resources of the indigenous territories of Pastaza by the Organización de Pueblos Indígenas de Pastaza (Organization of the Indigenous Peoples of Pastaza—OPIP), with funding from the Italian nongovernmental organization (NGO) Terra Nuova (New Land) and the Danish NGO Ibis. This plan, initially modeled on the concept of “ethnodevelopment” promoted by international development cooperation agents in the Ecuadorian Amazon, was a reaction to the reification of nature implicit in the Brundtland concept of “sustainable development.” Indigenous peoples assembled in the OPIP to retrieve their vision of the future from their own traditional identity, thus establishing sumak kawsay as an idealized version of their way of life in open opposition to the idea of sustainable development but implicitly also to that of ethnodevelopment. In hindsight, this proved to have kick-started a process by which, with the help of intellectuals and indigenous leaders from the Amazonian region, sumak kawsay was diffused as buen vivir and as an alternative to the Western idea of development throughout the region, especially in the Andean area of Ecuador and Bolivia (Cubillo-Guevara and Hidalgo-Capitán, 2015a).
Thus, until the dawn of the twenty-first century, the discursive emergence of buen vivir was marked by influences mainly from the Catholic Church, academia, and European development cooperation (outside-inward flows), which accompanied the soul-searching of indigenous intellectuals inquiring into their own way of life and gave rise to sumak kawsay or what we have elsewhere termed the “primordial buen vivir” (Cubillo-Guevara et al., 2018). At the same time, and taking into account that this process of incubation and emergence of buen vivir as a political discourse was conducted by subaltern social actors with no links to the traditional political elites of Ecuador, Bolivia, and Peru, the process can be safely characterized as bottom-up, only later reaching the elite.
Prelude to the Constitutional Processes in Ecuador and Bolivia (2000–2005)
By the early years of the twenty-first century, however, the discourse of sumak kawsay or “primordial buen vivir” had clearly transcended the scope of the Amazonian political sphere and started spreading into political and academic circles in Ecuador, Bolivia, and Peru, drawing on the increasingly powerful regional process of indigenous self-assertion. The reworking of the cultural traditions of Latin American native peoples was taken as a stepping stone for articulating a civilizational critique in the framework of the above-mentioned reflection of the West on the development discourse. A creative tension emerged among various currents prioritizing ethnic, territorial, or ecological elements. Paradoxically, the indigenous cultural heritage, which had been (and still is) often considered as mutually exclusive with the paradigm of development, was now reframed as key to its renewal (Carballo, 2015).
A first historical milestone in this context was Carlos Viteri’s (2002) “Visión indígena del desarrollo en la Amazonía” and was followed by the Ecuadorian economist Alberto Acosta’s (2002) explicitly linking buen vivir to the design of alternatives to currently dominant unsustainable ways of life. Adding to this, the indigenous Amazonian Kichwa town of Sarayaku produced its Libro de la Vida in 2003, describing its daily way of life as organized according to the logic of sumak kawsay (Cubillo-Guevara and Hidalgo-Capitán, 2015a).
That same year, in the framework of a citizen consultation process called Diálogo Nacional 2000 in Bolivia, the German Gesellschaft für Technische Zusammenarbeit (Society for Technical Cooperation—GTZ) and the Federación de Asociaciones Municipales de Bolivia (Bolivian Federation of Municipal Associations) jointly conducted two programs titled Suma Qamaña and Ñande Reko under the direction of the Bolivian philosopher Javier Medina in 2001 and 2002. In this framework, members of the Aymara intellectual elite led by Simón Yampara and Mario Torrez of the Centro Andino de Desarrollo Agropecuario of Bolivia (Andean Center for Agricultural and Livestock Development) developed the concept of suma qamaña and started propagating it in Bolivia and throughout Latin America (Cubillo-Guevara and Hidalgo-Capitán, 2015a). Furthermore, in 2003 the GTZ organized an international seminar on “indigenous development models” that opened the way for the regionwide dissemination of early attempts at defining buen vivir under the indigenous terms suma qamaña, ñande reko, and sumak kawsay. Around the same time, in Peru in 2002, the engineer Grimaldo Rengifo started researching and theorizing about the idea of allin kawsay (also translated into Spanish as buen vivir) as an indigenous conception of well-being in the framework of the Proyecto Andino de Tecnologías Campesinas of Peru (Andean Project of Peasant Technologies—PRATEC) and with funding from the Belgian NGO Broederlijk Delen (Brotherly Sharing) and the Swiss NGO Tradiciones para el Mañana (Traditions for Tomorrow) (Cubillo-Guevara and Hidalgo-Capitán, 2015a).
The intertextual network emerging from the above-mentioned Ecuadorian (Viteri, 2002), Bolivian (Medina, 2001; 2002; Yampara, 2001) and Peruvian (Rengifo, 2002) inputs formed the backbone of the political discourse of buen vivir in Latin America. This is the work of local actors and accounts for the inside-outward flows dominant in this phase. However, virtually all these initiatives had the support of foreign actors, which renders the importance of outside-inward influences visible as well. The growing tide of buen vivir now began to permeate the Ecuadorian indigenous movement, with sumak kawsay being included in the strategic plan of the Consejo de Nacionalidades y Pueblos Indígenas del Ecuador (Ecuadorian Council of Indigenous Nationalities and Peoples—CODENPE) in 2003 and the educational strategy of the Universidad Intercultural Amawtay Wasi (House of Wisdom Intercultural University) in 2004 (Altmann, 2013b). Moreover, by 2006 buen vivir had made it into the government program of the Alianza PAIS, largely because of Alberto Acosta and other mestizo intellectuals close to the Ecuadorian indigenous movement (Cubillo-Guevara and Hidalgo-Capitán, 2015a). Buen vivir also permeated the Bolivian indigenous movement, which managed to insert the Aymara concept of suma qamaña into the platform of the MAS in 2002 (Cubillo-Guevara and Hidalgo-Capitán, 2015a).
This phase in the discursive development of buen vivir is characterized by the agency of intellectual elites close to the grassroots, where the bottom-up streaming of buen vivir into more or less formal political networks began to become apparent. The eventual assimilation of buen vivir by the formal partisan political sphere was the result of the political organization of historically subaltern groups, even though in this phase their political influence was still marginal compared with that of the traditional political elites.
Constitutional Processes In Ecuador and Bolivia and Ensuing Institutional and Programmatic Materializations (2006–2009)
After Evo Morales’s MAS and Rafael Correa’s Alianza PAIS were elected to office in Bolivia and Ecuador, respectively, both countries set out to reform their national constitutions. This phase was thus mainly characterized by the protagonist role of the state in the process of discursive articulation and dissemination of buen vivir, as well as by a tension between two main forces: a “decolonial” strand coming from the indigenous world and the grassroots and a reformist strand represented by state agents exerting pressure to adapt buen vivir to the dominant structures, frames, and policies (Cubillo-Guevara and Hidalgo-Capitán, 2015a; Vanhulst and Beling, 2017).
During this time, both the Bolivian and the Ecuadorian government took ownership of the concepts of suma qamaña (translated as vivir bien) and sumak kawsay (buen vivir) and introduced them into their official development programs under the names Plan Nacional de Desarrollo: Bolivia Digna, Soberana, Productiva y Democrática para Vivir Bien, 2006–2011 (National Plan for Development: Dignified, Sovereign, Productive, and Democractic Bolivia for Living Well, 2006–2011) (Ministerio de Planificación del Desarrollo, 2007) in Bolivia and Plan Nacional de Desarrollo 2007–2010: Planificación para la Revolución Ciudadana (National Plan for Development 2007–2010: Planning for the Citizens’ Revolution) (SENPLADES, 2007) in Ecuador.
The Bolivian and Ecuadorian indigenous movements also included these concepts in their proposals to the respective constituent assemblies. 7 The convergence of interests arising between the MAS government in Bolivia and the administration of Alianza PAIS in Ecuador and their respective indigenous constituencies allowed for the concepts of vivir bien (suma qamaña) and buen vivir (sumak kawsay) to be adopted as regulative ideals in the new constitutions. These constitutional reforms, together with the official development plans in Bolivia and Ecuador (Ministerio de Planificación del Desarrollo, 2007; SENPLADES, 2007; 2009), were unequivocal indicators of the institutional mainstreaming of buen vivir and its dissemination in social and ecological debates beyond the region (Vanhulst and Beling, 2014). Besides the state and the grassroots (especially indigenous) movements, academic intellectuals, 8 mainly Latin American but also European ones, played a major role in this mainstreaming process (Vanhulst and Beling, 2014), as did local and international environmental NGOs such as Acción Ecológica (Ecologic Action), the Pachamama Alliance, Oilwatch, and the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund. The most important institutional innovation of the constitutional reform process in Bolivia was arguably the recognition of the country as a “plurinational state,” while the new Ecuadorian constitution is probably best-known for its recognition of legal “rights of nature” (which later also attained legal status in Bolivia).
In general terms, this phase was dominated by inside-outward discursive flows in that the new constitutions of Ecuador and Bolivia have become references at the global level. At the domestic level, the dominant direction in discursive transfers appears to be top-down, with political representatives in the constituent assemblies functioning as both decision-making and meaning-making elites. 9 However, taking into account the fact that, at this point, the political leadership in both the MAS and the Alianza PAIS administrations included many representatives of the grassroots, displacing the traditional political establishment (de la Cadena, 2010), this phase could also be understood as a process of institutionalization permeated by a bottom-up influence from the grassroots on the otherwise conservative political elites.
The Postconstitutional Phase (2010–)
After the new constitutions were adopted in Ecuador and Bolivia, there was a boom of literature on buen vivir in which intellectuals, politicians, and media people from Ecuador and Bolivia but also from the rest of Latin America and from abroad participated in discourse production and reproduction, which thus became increasingly delocalized. At the same time, however, at the territorial level an increasingly intense struggle for the appropriation of buen vivir began to unfold. Indeed, in the case of Ecuador, while the Confederación de Nacionalidades y Pueblos Indígenas del Ecuador (National Confederation of Ecuadorian Indigenous Nationalities and Peoples—CONAIE), under the brand-new presidency of Marlon Santi (one of the protagonists in the emergence of the “primordial buen vivir” at Sarayaku), finally decided to embrace buen vivir, together with the rights of nature as an emblem of the nationally organized indigenous movement. In 2008 a conflict around new legislation on water and mines sparked a political break with the government that would thereafter steadily grow. This meant that indigenous organizations were increasingly marginalized from key policy processes and important projects such as the groundbreaking Yasuní-ITT initiative, 10 which elevated Ecuador to an ecological champion in the international sphere (Espinosa, 2015). This eventually led to a formal breaking off of relations between the two sides in 2010.
At the same time, at the level of the state, many of the key figures of buen vivir (such as Alberto Acosta, former president of the Ecuadorian constituent assembly and former minister of energy and mines, and Mónica Chuji, former secretary of communication and spokesperson for the government), distanced themselves from a government perceived as increasingly disconnected from the grassroots. Buen vivir was increasingly framed in a conciliatory fashion vis-à-vis established views of development, as, for example, in the national buen vivir plans for 2009–2013 and 2013–2017 (SENPLADES, 2009; 2013), where the continuation of the extractivist economic model geared toward petroleum exports was justified with the argument that “more extractivism is needed to finance the transition out of extractivism,” allegedly allowing time for a transformation of the productive matrix that remains elusive.
Meanwhile, in Bolivia, the battle for the appropriation of buen vivir (in Bolivia vivir bien 11 ) was waged mainly within the MAS administration itself, which split into two wings: a socialist wing led by Vice President Álvaro García-Linera, who promoted the resignification of buen vivir /vivir bien as “Andean community socialism,” and an indigenist (or Indianist) wing led by Chancellor David Choquehuanca (later replaced by Fernando Huanacuni), who sought to remain true to the indigenous meanings of suma qamaña. At first, the indigenous movement aligned itself with the indigenist wing, but as government policies became increasingly biased toward Andean community socialism to the detriment of suma qamaña, with the concomitant reduction of indigenist postulates to ritual and folkloric aspects, the former alliance between government and indigenous movement deteriorated. Indigenous support for the Morales administration became increasingly polarized between the unionized coca-growers (cocaleros) and the communitarian indigenous groups (comunarios), particularly around the emblematic conflict over the proposed highway through the Isiboro Securé National Park and Indigenous Territory (TIPNIS). The cocaleros would benefit from the highway, which would allow them easier access to markets, while the comunarios argued that it would create a structural incentive to extend coca plantations into the park, forcing a massive exodus of the indigenous communities settled there (Perrier-Bruslé, 2012). This context of political confrontation between the governments of Ecuador and Bolivia and a coalition of indigenous movements and environmental groups caused a discursive diffraction of buen vivir. Most scholars converge in conceptualizing this diffraction as a division of buen vivir into three discursive streams: 12 indigenist, socialist, and ecologist/postdevelopmentalist (Cubillo-Guevara, Hidalgo-Capitán, and Domínguez-Gómez, 2014; Le Quang and Vercoutère, 2013; Vanhulst, 2015; Vanhulst and Beling, 2014).
The flourishing of the indigenist literature about buen vivir can be regarded as a bottom-up flow derived from demands for territorial autonomy and/or for identity, often conceived in a rather essentialist way (Vanhulst and Beling 2014). This gravitation of the grassroots notwithstanding, the fact that indigenist buen vivir was largely a product of indigenous intellectual and political leaders 13 would equally validate interpretations framing it as a (partly) top-down process driven by meaning-making elites. The indigenist strand of buen vivir did not seek to exert influence beyond the local sphere but focused on avoiding exogenous interference in its own territories—in particular, European influences, typically framed as “colonial.” This strand had a close link with the indigenous movements, although readiness (to variable degrees) to bond with other subaltern groups in devising opportunities for collaboration was apparent. This meant a search for epistemic affinities extending to both Latin America and other regions of the world such as with ubuntu in Africa, swaraj and svadeshi in India, gawis ay biag in the Philippines, and sansaeng in Korea (Cubillo-Guevara and Hidalgo-Capitán, 2015b).
The literature matching the socialist strand of buen vivir, in turn, can be clearly viewed as a sign of outside-inward influences in that it constituted an attempt to assimilate globally circulating (neo)Marxist and neo-Keynesian discourses. 14 This strand was closely linked to (and dependent on) institutional politics and open to hybridization only with established proposals in international political discourse. This also indicates a top-down dynamic of discursive production and reproduction in which the political establishment featured as main protagonist.
In the case of the ecologist and postdevelopmentalist strand, discursive agents were prominently scholars and social activists from almost every Latin American country and some European ones. 15 This literature was also dominated by outside-inward influences: a local anchorage of a global discourse in the innovative character of the Ecuadorian and Bolivian constitutions, though certainly including solid local intellectual production. Inside-outward influences were therefore by no means negligible, particularly at the academic level, where scholars like Alberto Acosta and Eduardo Gudynas have been pivotal in the international dissemination of buen vivir (Vanhulst and Zaccai, 2016).
Of the three discursive strands of buen vivir identified, the ecologist/postdevelopmentalist current is the one that has received the most academic attention and has had the most fertile cross-pollination with other visions of fundamental social transformation. Insofar as academic scholars and environmental NGOs are its main discursive carriers, the discursive production and transfer process is eminently top-down in nature, with a prominent role for meaning-making elites.
Conclusions
From an international policy-sphere perspective, buen vivir is often fetishized as a monolithic, exotic, and romantic—if not hopelessly naïve—approach that is vaguely related to welfare, perhaps with a multicultural or ethnic hype, the main challenge being how to operationalize it in (ideally, quantifiable and) generalizable indicators. The purpose of this article has been to dispute both of these notions. On the one hand, it shows that buen vivir is neither a neo-ethnodevelopmental discourse pouring indigenous worldviews into the global public sphere nor a lineal one analogous to any quantifiable Western conception of well-being that can be seamlessly assimilated into existing bureaucratic structures and rationalities. Rather, its genealogical reconstruction as a spatiotemporally situated discourse has shown that buen vivir is rather to be understood as a “glocal” field of contention whose (limited) discursive variations can be traced to concrete agent-constellations and struggles in a context of global and local contestation around the prevailing model of development. This has evident far-reaching implications for any attempt at operationalizing buen vivir and for the fate of its transformative potential.
Given the complexity of the emergence and dissemination of buen vivir as a “glocal” discursive process, the potential and limitations of various discourse coalitions in the search of alter- and postdevelopmentalist utopias become apparent. Our analysis underpins the conclusion that the main value-added of buen vivir comes neither from its “retrotopian” significations (Bauman, 2017) nor from its (in)efficacy as a government program but from its politically and culturally subversive character, which produces an epistemic break with dominant languages and mind-frames with open outcomes. Our analysis shows that, as a contemporary discourse, buen vivir cannot be reduced to its origins in the traditional indigenous cosmologies. Instead, while it remains heavily influenced by the latter, it has forked into distinct discursive currents emphasizing diverse goods as prioritized by the various social groups performing the function of discursive articulation. Thus attempts to portray every interpretation of buen vivir that deviates from (a rather reified view of) the indigenous world as a “distortion of its original meaning” or as “epistemic extractivism” (Grosfoguel, 2016) simply does lip service to the goal of fostering a wider socio-ecological transformation, as do attempts at assimilating it to conventional notions of well-being. A focus on identifying the conditions under which the idea of buen vivir can generate broader convergences (or not) toward transformative pathways challenging the status quo (or, alternatively, mild reformist approaches with a status-quo-stabilizing effect) would help advance the transition to a fairer and more sustainable world (for an example see Beling et al., 2018). By helping to identify such conditions as a macro-societal real-life experiment in the context of the Andean-Amazonian region, buen vivir can offer relevant insights for global debates about alternative socio-ecological futures.
Footnotes
Notes
Adrian E. Beling is a researcher with the Global Studies Program of the Latin American Faculty of Social Sciences (FLACSO) in Buenos Aires, Argentina, and executive director of Ecocene Foundation. Ana Patricia Cubillo-Guevara is a temporary lecturer of sociology at the University of Huelva, Spain, and a member of the Transdisciplinary Research Group. Julien Vanhulst is a sociologist and sustainability scientist in the Urban Territorial Studies Center of Maule Catholic University in Talca, Chile. Antonio Luis Hidalgo-Capitán is an associate professor of economics at the University of Huelva and a member of its Research Center on Contemporary Thought and Innovation for Social Development.