Buen vivir as a territorial practice. Building a more just and sustainable
life through interculturality (Miriam Lang)
Buen vivir is an understanding of well-being emanated from
indigenous people’s modes of living.
It is not part of
an expansive or accumulative logic of progress and infinite
growth, but rather seeks plenitude in balance and sufficiency.
The assumption that guides this case study is that indigenous peoples should have the right to engage with whatever
dimensions of the modern world they choose to, as well as
to reject others on an informed and self-determined basis,
while at the same time advancing their own historical trajectory as a people on the basis of collective memory and
ancestral knowledge.
Despite those discursive appropriations of buen vivir
from diferent angles of the western/modern episteme, in
Ecuador, a number of mostly rural socio-political-territorial
processes with some degree of indigenous participation went
on organizing aspects of the reproduction of life along the
principles of sumak kawsay—now rather using the term in
kichwa, in order to distinguish it from more neodevelopmentalist ‘buen vivir’ approaches. They originate in the long
history of indigenous resistance against the expansion of
capitalist modes of living, centered on the illimited accumulation of private material wealth, as well as in communitarian organizational practices. They understand sumak
kawsay as an ethical-civilizational perspective rooted in the
historical memory of the region’s communities.
In this context, epistemologies which radically differ from western hegemonic
ways of knowing or validating knowledge, mainly those of
indigenous societies or people’s movements of the global
South, are actively produced as “non-existent” through their
categorization as marginal, backward, primitive or irrelevant, thus making them invisible in the discussion about
societal alternatives through “epistemicide”
Commons always have a material base but come into existence through social processes of sharing, collective administration and a specifc associated knowledge producti
The first ordinance passed by the new local government
was to declare itself plurinational and intercultural, making explicit the horizon that would orient its strategies. The
principles of interculturality and plurinationality had been
central claims of the indigenous movement since the 1990s
and go hand in hand with sumak kawsay.
Communitarian logics are at the core of sumak kawsay, understanding
community not as a simple feature of property administration for certain marginal social groups, but as an organizing
principle of society as a whole, which extends to economic
organization and a specifc way of decision-making and collective self-government
Instead
of the capitalist homo oeconomicus, always rationally interested in getting the best out of everything for just himself
(see Schöneberg et al. 2021, in this volume), it proposes an
ontology of being collectively, in community, in awareness
of our deep interdependences with others and our surroundings. Sumak kawsay understands that life is only possible
on the basis of this web of relations. Instead of dividing it
into diferent realms, e.g. ‘the social sphere’, ‘the political’
and ‘the economical’, it conceives life as a whole. Instead of
defning nature as a set of resources external to human life
and prone to exploitation, it defnes human life as a part of
the community of all beings
In modern/colonial capitalist societies, politics is reduced to
“a competition to assume command and take over government positions, based on the clear diferentiation between
those who govern and those who are governed” (Salazar
Lohmann 2018: 495). The communitarian logic of politics
instead designates the process of giving a specifc shape to
the reproduction of life in all its dimensions. It means the
constant, collective, (re-)generation of sociality between
humans and with other living beings, the permanent revision
and adaptation of binding rules of coexistence, which allow
a satisfactory strategy for the reproduction of life.
In the colonial political culture that still prevails in the
Andean region, public works are often presented as a personal gift of the current ruler or used as a tool for political
control. For example, it is common that municipalities carry
out infrastructure improvements only in those neighborhoods who predominantly voted for them. A move against
the grain of this persisting colonial, paternalistic and patriarchal political culture in Cayambe consisted of extending
mingas to the urban neighborhoods of Cayambe city. Minga
is unpaid communitarian labour normally performed collectively on weekends to maintain the commons in rural indigenous communities. When public works are to be carried out,
people are now given the option to have it carried out either
by a contractor or through co-management, which means
they participate in mingas with their unpaid labour force,
while the municipality provides the materials, machines and
technical advice if necessary. The co-management modality means a signifcant reduction in the costs of the work,
between 30 and 35%, which allows for expanding its scope.
Jurisprudence
has been generated to defend specifc places or species (e.g.
Acosta 2018), but the relation of state and mainstream society toward the environment is still shaped by the understanding that nature is a collection of ‘resources’ to be exploited
for proft. Eloquent testimony is the recent expansion of
large-scale mining concessions in one of the most biodiverse
countries of the planet
Another step in assuming the care of the páramos as a
commons was the issuance of a Law of Communitarian Territorial Regime by the Confederation of the Kayambi People in 2018, which declares the whole jurisdiction of this
organization as a water reserve. The text afrms a reciprocal
relationship with nature, emphasizing that the páramos, forests and wetlands constitute living beings. The declaration,
which claims legislative authority on the basis of plurinationality and the rights of nature, also implies the prohibition
of exotic plantations such as eucalyptus or pine in the water
recharge area, as well as metal mining (Confederación del
Pueblo Kayambi 2018a)
During Churuchumbi’s frst term, 14 water
treatment plants were built, a laboratory for water quality
inaugurated and the access to safe drinking water extended
by 24%
“Sometimes they call us people, who don't have money,
poor. And actually, I don't have much money. But I do not
consider myself poor, because beyond having money, I have
my family united, I have all I need to feed them, I have something to ofer my children and time to dedicate [to] them'
For me, this is wealth, and I feel sorry for those poor
people who work in monoculture. They produce, grab and
sell everything, and then they run to give the money to the
big supermarkets and they run out of money. They are poor.
The only moment they have left to be happy, or get sad, is
telling others how much they spend.”12
By prioritizing self-consumption, agroecology does not
contribute much to GDP or produce spectacular fgures,
and subtracts consumers from (super)-markets.
It is an agrifood model inconvenient for capitalist interests because it
de-commodifes many aspects of food production, for example those related to fertilization and pest control. In summary, the main changes in societal nature relations during
Churuchumbi’s frst term evolved around water and food.
Communitarian care for highland water reserves and water
justice were improved, as well as the conditions for local,
agroecological food production and its distribution.
In the public system, initial education focuses on child ‘development’ and is compartmentalized into diferent aspects, according to the epistemology of
western science: social, cognitive, language, physical and
psychomotor development, which all must be ‘stimulated’
early by educators. Wise nurturing, in contrast, corresponds
much more to letting be and growing in community, with an emphasis on afection. Learning is based on shared experience, in an informal process outside the classroom; it occurs
in intergenerational coexistence. ‘Knowledge is not taught but rather shared. There is no belief that the teacher is the
one who has wisdom and imparts it’
While Villalba acknowledges that community governments do not always reach just sentences, depending on
existing power relations within each community, she depicts
the Confederation of the Kayambi People as an alternative
form of indigenous justice, to which the women can turn.
And indeed, there are precedents of alternative sentences
in cases of sexual violence, for example, which managed to
protect and heal both the afected woman and her family as
well as the aggressor’s community
Plurinationality as a Strategy : Transforming local state institutions toward buen vivir (Miriam Lang)
While the state tries to legitimize itself as the single platform for social transformation, other processes can be enhanced at the local level to empower transformative ways of organizing beyond development and extractivism.
The example of Buenvivir in Ecuador is one where principles of practice instead of a single path for political change are given. This alternative to development does not consider a linear and relentless pursuit of a single definition of betterment, but rather open spaces where the commons and relations are back to the center of human organization.
Buenvivir seeks equilibrium with existing forms of existence, considering a threat and not something to celebrate the accumulation of wealth. Accumulation and extreme inequality is a threat to the community.
Communitarian action is not shaped by tradition but by a dynamic consideration of the needs to be covered by the community.
Buenvivir was coopted by the state, adding an extractivist flavor to the terms of addition that is far from the original understanding of the relation between the social and the natural. The constitutionalization of Buenvivir was not a protection against colonial arrangements and the violation of autonomy perpetuated by the state and the large corporate on indigenous communities.
State-led Buen Vivir creates a framework where short-term results are prioritized to be re-elected where metrics are key. Not only that, it is falsely equated with development, modernism... which justified large infrastructures, despite being in clear conflict with indigenous livelihoods.
To be protected from the political forces of cities, indigenous communities unite forming a party that tries to recognize the plurinational of Ecuador as a strategy to respect alternative ways of organizing and autonomy. The localities where political organizations where present leverage assemblies and participatory processes to take challenging but necessary decisions on water, energy, and other topics...
It is also dealing with justice differently, not punishing the perpetrator of the crime or using complex rules to solve a conflict, but rather seeking to reestablish balance as soon as possible and facilitating resolutions much faster than centralized justice schemes. The jurisdiction empowerment facilitates decisions on land management and infrastructure, ensuring sufficient school and health facilities are available for the people.
There is also transparency and knowledge of the public budget and the expected actions taken. For many tasks, such as water management, and fire extinction, there is a lot of common work, and the institutions enable and facilitate but intervene or provision minimally.
It is notable to share that despite most of the people 70% report being very satisfied with their lives, the traditional development frameworks label 90% of the population as poor or not having their needs satisfied.
It is clear that buen vivir cannot flourish purely without a state that recognizes the interculturality and plurinationality of its people, who, contrary to what we see in many Western countries, refuse to delegate the management of the commons and its justice to a centralized state.
NABÓN COUNTY: BUILDING LIVING WELL FROM THE BOTTOM UP
(Miriam Lang and Mabrouka M’Barek)
Ecuador, a country in the northwest of South America, has made international headlines
in the last ten years since it introduced revolutionary concepts and principles into its new
constitution, drafted in 2008. Nature, or “La Pachamama,” was declared to have rights of
its own. Buen Vivir – Sumak Kawsay in the indigenous Kichwa language, which is accurately translated as “living in plenitude” – was introduced as a guiding principle. And the state was declared plurinational, in recognition of the existence of 14 indigenous peoples, each of which have their own forms of social organization, their own health and educational systems as well as systems of justice and reparation for dealing with conflict.
Our analysis is situated in a rural and sparsely inhabited county in the Southern Andes region of Ecuador called Nabón where, in less than two decades, a significant process of multidimensional transformation and alternative-building in the spirit of Sumak Kawsay, or Buen Vivir, has taken place in a strikingly democratic way. Sumak Kawsay is an open and contested concept which constitutes one of the most important Andean contributions to the debate on alternatives to development.
It considers humans as part of Nature, and thus promotes harmonic relations with all other beings, placing emphasis on communitarian construction from below in a territorial sense, which leaves plenty of room for diversity.
Other important principles are equilibrium, reciprocity, and complementarity, instead of
accumulation, progress, growth, and competition
Our analysis shows how a radical process of democratization was able to address some of the patterns of domination, like patriarchal and racist relations within the diverse population of the county, which had trapped the population in poverty. Once people became protagonists of their own lives, they could also reverse some of the negative effects of recent modern development, in particular by building more harmonic relations with Nature and improving food sovereignty.
Hunger and malnutrition were well known in Nabón, where poor, eroded soil could not provide the necessary food for self-consumption, while at the same time more than 90 percent of the population were peasants.
Just sixteen years later, 97 percent of houses have access to drinking water (Quezada,2017); sewage infrastructure coverage improved from 13.7 percent in 2001 (SIISE-INEC, 2001)to 20.4 percent ten years later (SIISE-INEC, 2010)and today supplies all village houses. Road infrastructure is significantly better; chronic malnutrition in children under five years of age in the canton plummeted to a rate of 33 percent in 2014 (PYDLOS, 2014) compared to 67.3 percent in 2001 (SIISE-INEC, 2001).
Income is once again mainly generated by the agricultural and artisanal production of the people of Nabón (Quezada, 2017). Even by 2008, female heads of households earned 270 percent more than a decade before, and the average income had risen by around 180 percent (Unda & Jácome, 2009: p. 39).
But since the unsatisfied basic needs criteria that was applied puts emphasis on access to public services, it does not capture all the dimensions of the transformation in terms of well-being that have taken place in Nabón.
The survey inquired about issues central for well-being, such as whether people were satisfied with their freedom of choice and their capacity to control their own lives – to which, on average, more than 70 percent of the people responded “very satisfied.” Furthermore, the survey asked them about their satisfaction with their occupation, their family life, their financial situation, their leisure time, their environmental surroundings, their housing, their spiritual life, food security, etc. The results of this survey showed 75.8 percent of the local population of Nabón expressing high satisfaction with their overall lives (Morocho, 2013), and this despite 87.8 percent of its inhabitants being declared poor by the Statistical Institute.
This profound contrast might shed light on the fact that standardized quantitative poverty indicators like income poverty or basic needs do not necessarily give a comprehensive picture of well-being or quality of life, as they do not take into account either the specificities of each context or cultural differences. Thus, they tend to single out rural zones, characterizing them as poor, as the standards
regarding the decency of housing, access to public services etc. are mostly drawn from
urban/modern modes of living.
These communities are organized according to the principles of indigenous Andean sociopolitical organization, which is essentially based on three pillars: a direct assembly democracy led by a yearly rotating cabildo of five elected people, unpaid community work for building and maintaining collec-
tive infrastructure, and the collective ownership of land. These indigenous principles of territorial and sociopolitical organization have been recognized by the Ecuadorian state since the first commune’s law was issued in 1937.
Finally, it is important to note that the colonial matrix of power has been a determinant factor of influence in the distribution of land. In Nabón County, the indigenous communes were pushed towards higher land, to areas which often have páramo ecosystems that are not suitable for agriculture, or to less fertile lands characterized by steeper slopes, allowing for less intense exploitation, enough to feed only small livestock such as chickens, rabbits, and the traditional guinea pigs. By contrast, the mestizo population lives in the lower areas which are fertile ground for intense exploitation and the breeding
of cattle and horses. During the postcolonial process, everything associated with indigeneity was systematically inferiorized. The indigenous constituted the symbolic imaginary from which people had to flee and keep their distance. Mestizo identity emerged as a negation of the indigenous and subsequently as a path for upward social mobility.
A strong material indicator that a process of de-patriarchalization has taken place relates to women’s control over land and productive processes: According to the cadaster of Nabón, in 2006, only 5 percent of land property was legally possessed by women, although women were already playing a leading role in the struggles to regain land possession and in agricultural production (Herrera, 2009: p. 42). An actualization of the cadaster carried out in 2016 for the county’s four parishes17 shows that, nowadays, an average of 37.5 percent of the plots are owned by women.
He supposes that the generational transition between female leaderships has partly failed, as “many young women who went to the city to work or to study at the university do not show the same enthusiasm to support the processes inside the communities.” For Vega, this is a well-known dilemma: while contact with modernity allows women to move forward individually, at the same time, it unlinks them from communitarian processes (Vega, 2016: p. 202).
One main axis and goal of participation are the decisions around the municipal budget, especially regarding public expenditure. Nabón implemented a method of participatory budgeting that bridges between the situated needs and priorities of its people and the formal requirements of the central state and the law. Based on information relating to available public funds, each community, and in turn each parish or commune, decide their spending priorities, which are then compiled by municipal employees and made public in the county’s first general assembly.
It is striking to see how well informed the inhabitants of Nabón have become with regards to budgetary assignments. They know exactly where there are budget remainders, and discuss their best use with the mayor or in their community. In parallel to this new budgeting process, the municipality has instituted several thematic roundtables on integral health, relations with Nature and biodiversity, tourism and patrimony, economic development, children and youth, and so on, in which individuals have opportunities to become involved.
These new instituent practices challenge the very understanding and practice of representative democracy whereby citizens delegate their power or agency to elected representative proxies.
As Magali Quezada rightfully points out: “When a population is poor and weak, it is
easily influenced by outsiders.”32 Beyond official poverty indicators generally based on
income and some international standards regarding housing etc., which often do not
align with local ideas of living, the Mayor points out that for the people of Nabón, getting
out of poverty was about having “enough food to eat; this will allow us to be in adequate
health later, and to commercialize these crops (regionally), and at the same time put
them at the disposal of the community, to trade them.”
Attaining food sovereignty on these terms is not only about leaving poverty behind; it
is a way of de-commodifying food and returning it to its original purpose – nutrition,
not profit – and of decoupling agriculture from the neoliberalized global market.
One central aspect of the strategy of regaining food sovereignty in order to strengthen
the organization of communities has been the defense of water sources and forests. In
Nabón, like in other parts of the Ecuadorian Andes, the páramo ecosystems constitute,
together with forests, the most important water storage reserves.
The 2011 education law claimed to put the system in order and returned all powers
to the central state under the auspices of a “return of the state” policy often lauded as an anti-neoliberal strategy by the Correa government. Firstly, the law ousted indigenous organizations from the co-management of the intercultural education system.
Most indigenous teachers were dismissed, some for political reasons, the majority
because they lacked formal qualifications like a university degree, which were now
mandatory in the context of Correa’s “meritocratic” system. As a consequence, many
indigenous children now have mestizo teachers from anywhere in the country who neither understand nor adapt very well to indigenous cultural realities, which again are often considered merely something to be overcome. Thousands of small intercultural community schools were shut down because a new centralized model of Millennium Schools was now prioritized by the Correa government.
Because the school was an important part of the community and the community was an important part of the school. Now, the children have to go a long way to their classroom; they have started
to use modern systems like a school bus that picks them up from their homes. Before, they just walked to the school at the center of the community. The sense of community is disappearing because they send them to the center of the county now. They are centralizing everything.
In an apparent attempt to contain the potential of Buen Vivir, President Correa was
swift to claim ownership of the transformative experience by institutionalizing it at the
central government level, for example with the creation of a Secretary of Buen Vivir, a
role which had a merely symbolic function. In contrast, the National Plan for Buen Vivir
2013-201746 was a central instrument in the recovery of the state’s regulatory capacity
in its move towards Neo-keynesianism. Its very creation by the National Secretariat of
Planning and Development (SENPLADES) was a process precisely at odds with the
core principles of Buen Vivir, since it was drafted using a top-down approach and was
closely supervised by government experts.
For Mayor Magali Quezada, Buen Vivir means: Life in the community, socio-activity, coop-
erativism, the relationship between the mestizo and the indigenous, the recovery of those
good ancestral practices we had, because it means going back to the good times, of course
good times in the community, when decisions were taken collectively in the attempt to
effectively include all sectors. It doesn’t mean just looking at how we give the poor more.
He explains: There is no such thing as individual happiness; there is [a sense of] commu-
nity welfare. For the community to be in ‘good health,’ three concepts that constitute it must be strengthened: identity as a community, community work, and the integration of
all its members. (...)
While at the national level citizen participation was institutionalized, channeled into bureaucratic procedures and redefined in a rather passive, acclamatory way, Nabón sought to deepen and extend the possibilities for decision-making from below.
In retrospect, the territorial process of multidimensional transformation initiated in the mid-
1990s in Nabón has proved resilient to many economic, cultural, and political obstacles and
adversities.
Finally, through its specific system of participatory budgeting, it has constructed a method of material redistribution that disseminates power to the smallest entities, the communities, in contrast with the centralizing redistribution pattern that extractivism generates. It has managed to sustain a process of progressive self-reliance and strengthening democracy; it has largely marginalized private local potentates and has restored in both indigenous and mestizo people a sense of dignity, of community, and, above all, the capacity to directly determine important aspects of their own lives.
From a Buen Vivir perspective – which breaks with anthropocentrism – these projects aim to care for Nature and all living beings, humans and non-humans. Thus, irrigation and reforestation contribute to enabling conditions on the ground for the reproduction of life to flourish and for Nature to regen-
erate in harmony with all living beings of the past, present, and future.
the people of Nabón took what was for them the simplest and the most obvious
course of action: they collectively decided to act by occupying their own space without
waiting for the central state to engage with anything. From a Buen Vivir point of view,
seeking reciprocity or knowledge-sharing beyond the community is valuable, but trying
to ‘take power’ at a national level in the way that traditional leftist strategies have tried to is not included within this horizon of transformation that revolves around community-
building and the search for harmony and equilibrium.52
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