Buen Vivir as an Alternative to Sustainable Development

Lessons from Ecuador

Natasha Chassagne

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000257939
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Economics
• Subtopic: Sustainable Development
• Index: Economics

Until recently, the concept of Buen Vivir has only been loosely articulated by practising communities and in progressive policy in countries like Ecuador. What it actually means has been unclear, and in the case of policy, contradictory. As such there has been a lack of understanding about exactly what Buen Vivir entails, its core principles and how to put it into practice. This book, based on extensive theoretical and field research of Buen Vivir as an alternative to sustainable development, fills that gap and offers a concrete way forward. It uses an ethnographic study in Cotacachi County, in Ecuador's highland communities, to explore how communities understand and practice Buen Vivir. Combining this with what we already know about the concept theoretically, the book then develops a framework for Buen Vivir with 17 principles for practice.

Exploring Buen Vivir's evolution from its indigenous origins, academic interpretations, and implications for development policy, to its role in endogenous, community-led change, this book will be of interest to policy-makers and development professionals. It will also be of great value to activists, students, and scholars of sustainability and development seeking grassroots social and environmental change.

Part I

1 A brief history of development and Sustainable Development

Development is not a new concept. It has its roots in early thinking on progress in the 18th century with philosophers like Nicolas de Condorcet, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, and Auguste Comte. Gardner and Lewis (1996) argued that it started with Larrain, who reasoned for the idea of social and economic progress in his “age of competitive capitalism,” 1700–1860. Adam Smith also played a key role in establishing the modern capitalist market thought in 1776 with his book Wealth of Nations, in which he argued that the “invisible hand” of the market (individual consumers making buying decisions based on self-interest) would result in economic growth, wealth, and therefore prosperity for all (Opello & Rosow 1999). Some scholars, however, believe that development started in the pre-Enlightenment period with Plato and Aristotle.

Modern development started at the end of World War II when former US President Harry Truman took office (Esteva 2010). On the day he took office, 20 January 1949, Truman changed the way the world understood development by introducing the term “underdevelopment” to distinguish the poorer economic regions from those more prosperous economically (Cerdán 2013). This distinction has had profound consequences on the way development has been conceptualised and carried out since (Esteva 2010). Today, we politically refer to underdeveloped regions as the periphery, Global South, or Third World. The idea of underdevelopment thus refers to countries in the periphery, which have historically been considered “lesser” because of their lack of industrialisation and economic growth.

Since that day in 1949, development as a theory has grown into the Western neoliberal ideal of economic growth as a means of “developing” the “underdeveloped” to achieve quality of life and wellbeing for all, albeit narrowly defined. Traditional neoliberal development is anthropocentric, meaning that human wellbeing is the core focus. It links economic growth to human progress, and wellbeing is commonly measured by a country’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP). Economically, it is underlined by capitalism. However, it has failed at its primary objectives: Poverty reduction and improving quality of life for everyone on the planet.

Post-developmentalists like Arturo Escobar see neoliberal development as a driver for the core’s colonial and neo-colonial desire for domination over the South (Escobar 1995; Gardner & Lewis 1996). Whichever viewpoint one takes, development has become synonymous with progress, an idea which has both negative and positive connotations depending on one’s ideological stance; but one thing is certain: It has created greater inequalities.

The international community introduced Sustainable Development as a reaction to the failure of traditional neoliberal development, with a recognition that we must start to consider the impact of development on the natural environment and aim for intergenerational ecological sustainability. We can understand it as a development alternative because it takes the aims of development and reframes them for greater environmental sustainability – that is, economic growth, within the limits of the environment.

Yet, Sustainable Development as a development alternative has not sought to address the root of the problem; instead it has upheld the status quo of neoliberal development. As a result, it has not achieved its own core aims. In fact, climate change has destabilised ecological sustainability and social disparities have amplified. The only objective that has been achieved (albeit unequally) is increasing economic growth, which is argued to be the cause of the aforementioned failures in the first place (Acosta 2012; Harcourt 2013; Ruttenberg 2013).

Underdevelopment and the myth of progress

It is now widely acknowledged that the Western construct of “progress,” underlining development and its alternative derivatives, is seriously flawed (Gardner & Lewis 1996). The idea of progress, of “having more and more,” started around 500 years ago in Europe; it has since been perpetuated by capitalism, a system which places nature external to humanity (Villalba 2013), and has been believed to be a sure way to overcome the “curse” of underdevelopment. Former President Truman influenced well-meaning populations in the West and turned the desire for progress and consumption into a need to find a solution to a problem that could hamper that progress:

More than half the people of the world are living in conditions approaching misery. Their food is inadequate. They are victims of disease. Their economic life is primitive and stagnant. Their poverty is a handicap and a threat both to them and to more prosperous areas.

(Morse 2008)

Let us examine that last phrase. The intention here was to not let the lack of economic progress in the periphery hamper prosperity in the core. It was again this anthropocentric, individualist way of thinking that drove the desires for what we now call “development.” Esteva (2010) argues that diversity was lost, and the world homogenised, on 20 January 1949, when suddenly “two billion people… were transmogrified into an inverted mirror of others’ reality.”

This unique era that we are living in has contextually shaped modern ideas of poverty, promoted by the neoliberal economy (Haslam, Schafer & Beaudet 2012). Post-developmentalists are now calling for a deconstruction of that idea, and a reconceptualisation of what is actually going on. Haslam et al. (2012) note that there are two important and distinct understandings of the idea: Relative poverty, which is quantifiably measured against societal standards, and absolute poverty, which is measured against benchmarks like living costs, literacy, and the like. There is a further distinction between extreme and moderate poverty, the former of which prevents people from meeting their basic needs for survival (Haslam, Schafer & Beaudet 2012).

Whether or not one ascribes to the idea that poverty is real or perceived, absolute, or relative is irrelevant here. This does not imply ignoring the problem, far from it. We need to address the roots of the issue, and to do so it is unhelpful in the desire to overcome the ills of development to frame the argument in terms of poverty and underdevelopment, as it brings the debate right back into the framework of neoliberal development. This would necessarily hamper any efforts to look beyond, to the root of the problem. Post-development therefore calls for “new paradigm thinking” (Tesoriero & Ife 2010), a different way of perceiving the world than the way society sees itself now. Real needs rather than “progress” must be at the forefront.

The Western neoliberal development expectation that countries on the periphery must focus on economic growth has resulted in an exploitative and unbalanced unilateral resource flow that has supported the proliferation of neoliberal thinking that continues today (Cobey 2012). We have created the situation as it is now, in the name of development: A deteriorating environment and growing social injustice. The failure of development is that it has been reduced to economic growth (Gardner & Lewis 1996) at all costs, but there are limits to this pursuit of growth.

The failure of development and the path to alternatives

Let us not beat around the proverbial bush: Development has failed in colossal terms at what it was trying to achieve. One must only look at the series of measures that development has introduced and the failure to meet their own objectives.

Like a towering lighthouse guiding sailors towards the coast, “development” stood as THE idea which oriented emerging nations in their journey through post-war history… Today, the lighthouse shows cracks and is starting to crumble. The idea of development stands like a ruin on the intellectual landscape. Delusion and disappointment, failures and crimes have been steady companions of development and they tell a common story: it did not work.

(Rahnema & Sachs 1992)

Yet pro-growth supporters have actively sought alternative development models that still uphold their ideals of growth and progress, including Another Development (What Now – The 1975 Dag Hammarskjöld Report on Development and International Cooperation 1975); Human Development (UNDP); Community Development; and Sustainable Development. García-Álvarez (2013a) calls this the “development concept crisis.”

A critique of the economic growth approach led to the introduction of the Human Development paradigm. Human Development is the basis of the UN’s Human Development Report which assesses countries on a people-based policy approach – emphasising capabilities over economic growth (Human development index). Human Development was born primarily out of the work on human capabilities and functionings of Nobel laureate and economist Amartya Sen. Martha Nussbaum later built upon this capabilities framework, linking capabilities to her work on human rights (Nussbaum 2009).

Where Human Development is problematic is that it prioritises individual capabilities over collective capabilities (Tortosa 2011; Unceta 2013). Indeed Stewart (2013) argues that an approach to capabilities must go beyond the individual, and states, “individuals are so bound up with others that it can be difficult to disentangle them and treat them as separate” (Stewart 2013).

Human wellbeing is emphasised under the HD paradigm but as with all alternative development approaches, it has a “strong anthropocentric bias” (Gale 2018) and as such the wellbeing of the environment is not considered with enough weight (Monni & Pallottino 2015). While Nussbaum’s core capabilities do consider the need to live with other species in harmony, it prioritises human needs above all else (Pepper 2017).

Development alternatives have also failed to effect the kind of transformative change needed for Socio-Eco Wellbeing. The problem is that the principles underlying the development alternatives were never questioned; they were just reframed (Acosta 2012). Sustainable Development exemplifies that logic – where economic growth and a decoupling of the environment from society are the foundations, and a clear legacy from the development era. Instead, what we should be doing is decoupling the environment and society from economic growth.

The Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) were the attempt in development to address its own failures, but those too were futile in meeting targets by 2015 (UNDP 2014). Now, the “countries of the world,” heavily pushed by those in the core, have reformulated those goals into the Sustainable Development Goals, which build on the MDGs post-2015 but apply to all countries, albeit with the same capitalist and neoliberal mechanisms being used to achieve them.

That goes to show just how persuasive and persistent “development” is as a concept (Gardner & Lewis 1996). Despite numerous failures through the various development alternatives including Sustainable Development, the world is still using development as a tool (however reformulated and revolutionised) to tackle “underdevelopment” and global poverty, rather than analysing the root cause. Let us now take a closer look at Sustainable Development.

Sustaining growth: The emergence of Sustainable Development, critiques, and limits

Sustainability and Sustainable Development seem to be used interchangeably these days, despite not being one and the same. Sustainability refers to the maintenance of all ecosystems and humanity in the long term (Tesoriero & Ife 2010).

Sustainability is not a new idea, and indeed some version of sustainability can be traced back to as early as the 1960s. Some argue that Rachel Carson’s book The Silent Spring (1962), warning of the environmental problems we were to face, was the beginning of the global environmental movement. Since then, however, the term “sustainability” has evolved into new and complex meanings.

Tesoriero and Ife (2010) rightly argue that the term is in danger of losing its substantive meaning. In fact, true sustainability requires a radical transformation of the global system, moving away from unbridled growth and consumption (Tesoriero & Ife 2010), but the term’s downfall is that it has fallen victim t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of tables
• Preface
• Introduction
• PART I
• PART II
• Index