Good Living, Buen Vivir

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 Latino American 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 will also try to look at the added value brought by the buen vivir towards a renewed understanding of political, social, and economic objectives of the associated life.

Getting public opinion to see 'mining' and 'Nature's Rights' as non-contradictory and even equivalent and harmonious, calls for far-reaching power strategies. Nature was entitled to rights by Ecuador's Constitution at about the same time that the Government began promoting mining as central to Ecuador's future. Building this equivalence to make 'mining mean nature', and materialize large-scale mining in the Quimsacocha páramo wetlands, the State and its institutions tested new tactics to manage territory, coined new imaginaries and subjectivities, and limited indigenous/rural political participation. In response, communities started to dispute these governmentality strategies through political practices that framed new meanings of territory and identity. They use formal political and legal arenas but, above all, their day-today practices. This article analyzes forms of power and counter-power in the Quimsacocha páramo mining conflict, through the four different, interrelated 'arts of government' (Foucault, 2008) and mutual strategies by promoters and detractors of extractive industry who, in apparent paradox, both appeal to Nature's Rights. We conclude that using Nature's Rights to promote mega-mining manifests the limitations of social and environmental rights recognition under neoliberal gov-ernance, and the tensions inherent in Nature's Rights themselves. However, anti-extraction struggles like Quimsacocha's critically make visible as well as challenge the development model and economic system that is implicit in the debate over Nature's Rights, inviting us to rethink the socio-natural order and foster more just, equitable alternatives.

There is a growing awareness that a whole-societal "Great Transformation" of Polanyian scale is needed to bring global developmental trajectories in line with ecological imperatives. The mainstream Sustainable Development discourse, however, insists in upholding the myth of compatibility of current growth-based trajectories with biophysical planetary boundaries. This article explores potentially fertile complementarities among trendy discourses challenging conventional notions of (un)sustainable development-Human Development, Degrowth, and Buen Vivir-and outlines pathways for their realization. Human Development presents relative transfor-mative strengths in political terms, while Degrowth holds keys to unlocking unsustainable material-structural entrenchments of contemporary socioeconomic arrangements, and Buen Vivir offers a space of cultural alterity and critique of the Euro-Atlantic cultural constellation. The weaknesses or blind spots ('Achilles heels') of each discourse can be compensated through the strengths of the other ones, creating a dialogical virtuous circle that would open pathways towards a global new "Great Transformation". As one of the main existing platforms for pluralist and strong-sustainability discussions, Ecological Economics is in a privileged position to deliberately foster such strategic discursive dialogue. A pathway towards such dialogue is illuminated through a model identifying and articulating key discursive docking points.

As produções científicas que integram esta coletânea dividem-se em 2 volumes e são resultados de pesquisas apresentadas durante o III Congresso Internacional: Constitucionalismo Latino-Americano, Pluralismo Jurídico, Buen Vivir e Direitos da Natureza, apoiado financeiramente pela Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa e Inovação do Estado de Santa Catarina (FAPESC). Os capítulos foram classificadas em 6 linhas temáticas: 1) Pluralismo Latino-Americano; 2) Novo Constitucionalismo Latino-Americano; 3) Direitos Humanos; 4) Direitos da Cidadania; 5) Bem Viver e Direitos da Natureza; 6) Justiça Ambiental, ancoradas em pesquisa científica no âmbito constitucional latino-americano e voltadas ao pensamento e aos desafios e potencialidades das práticas do constitucionalismo emancipa-tório e da realidade dos povos latino-americanos, atendendo aos princípios da Política Catarinense de Ciência, Tecnologia e Inovação.

In the face of worsening ecological and economic crises and continuing social deprivation, the last two decades have seen two broad trends emerge among those seeking sustainability, equality and justice.

First there are the green economy and sustainable development approaches that dominate the upcoming Paris climate summit and the post-2015 sustainable development goals (SDGs). To date, such measures have failed to deliver a harmonisation of economic growth, social welfare and environmental protection.

Political ecology paradigms, on the other hand, call for more fundamental changes, challenging the predominance of growth-oriented development based on fossil fuels, neoliberal capitalism and related forms of so-called representative democracy.

The false answers of the green economy

If we look at international environmental policy of the last four decades, the initial radicalism of the 1970s has vanished.

The outcome document of the 2012 Rio+20 Summit, The Future We Want, failed to identify the historical and structural roots of poverty, hunger, unsustainability and inequity. These include: centralisation of state power, capitalist monopolies, colonialism, racism and patriarchy. Without diagnosing who or what is responsible, it is inevitable that any proposed solutions will not be transformative enough.

Furthermore, the report did not acknowledge that infinite growth is impossible in a finite world. It conceptualised natural capital as a “critical economic asset”, opening the doors for commodification (so-called green capitalism), and did not challenge unbridled consumerism. A lot of emphasis was placed on market mechanisms, technology and better management, undermining the fundamental political, economic and social changes the world needs.

In contrast, a diversity of movements for environmental justice and new worldviews that seek to achieve more fundamental transformations have emerged in various regions of the world. Unlike sustainable development, which is falsely believed to be universally applicable, these alternative approaches cannot be reduced to a single model.

Even Pope Francis in the encyclical Laudato Si’, together with other religious leaders like the Dalai Lama, has been explicit on the need to redefine progress: “There is a need to change ‘models of global development’; [...] Frequently, in fact, people’s quality of life actually diminishes [...] in the midst of economic growth. In this context, talk of sustainable growth usually becomes a way of distracting attention and offering excuses. It absorbs the language and values of ecology into the categories of finance and technocracy, and the social and environmental responsibility of businesses often gets reduced to a series of marketing and image-enhancing measures.”

Radical alternatives

But critique is not enough: we need our own narratives. Deconstructing development opens up the door for a multiplicity of new and old notions and world views. This includes buen vivir (or sumak kawsay or suma qamaña), a culture of life with different names and varieties emerging from indigenous peoples in various regions of South America; ubuntu, with its emphasis on human mutuality (“I am because we are”) in South Africa; radical ecological democracy or ecological swaraj, with a focus on self-reliance and self-governance, in India; and degrowth, the hypothesis that we can live better with less and in common, in western countries.

These worldviews differ sharply from today’s notion of development, challenging the dogmatic belief in economic growth and proposing in its place notions of wellbeing. They are internally diverse, but they express common fundamental values, including solidarity, harmony, diversity and oneness within nature.

There are already thousands of initiatives practicing elements of such socio-ecological transformation: the reclamation of indigenous territories and ways of life in the Americas, the Zapatista and Kurdish movements for self-governance, solidarity economies, producer cooperatives, transition towns and community currencies in Europe, land, forest, and direct-democracy movements in Latin America and South Asia, the rapid spread of organic farming and decentralised renewable energy across the world, and others.

Many of these form a basis for transformational politics, potentially supported by the case with Syriza in Greece and Podemos in Spain. This is what has been called plan C, a reinvigorated bottom-up project of the commons and communal solidarity. This would be an alternative to the failed plan A (austerity) and untested, but flawed, plan B (Keynesian growth based on further indebtedness).

The inability or unwillingness of UN processes to acknowledge the fundamental flaws of the currently dominant economic and political system, and to envision a truly transformative agenda for a sustainable and equitable future, is disappointing. Even as civil society pushes for the greatest possible space within the post-2015 SDGs agenda, it must also continue envisioning and promoting fundamentally alternative visions and pathways.

Radical wellbeing notions are unlikely to becoming prevalent in the current scenario. But it is not an impossible dream. As intertwined crises increase when even the green economy fails to deliver – as it inevitably must – people everywhere will be resisting and looking for meaningful alternatives.