Ecuador’s experiment in living well: Sumak kawsay, Spinoza and the inadequacy of ideas

Abstract

In April 2017 Ecuador halted the continental drift to the conservative right in Latin America by electing leftist Lenín Moreno to the Presidency. Attention has turned, therefore, to the legacy of outgoing President Rafael Correa's decade in power. To that end, this paper examines one of Correa's signature programmes, 'Buen Vivir' (Living Well), a strategic plan for development underscored by the indigenous Kichwa cosmology of 'sumak kawsay'. Sumak kawsay is a notion that has been co-opted into policy mechanisms in an attempt to both challenge neoliberal modes of governance, and to disrupt the ontological bifurcation of nature and society. Given the emphasis placed on ecological sensibility in sumak kawsay and Buen Vivir, critics have been quick to highlight the contradictory relations between Ecuador's mode of environmental governance and its extractivist agenda. Such critiques are as staid as they are well rehearsed. Acknowledging the precarious composition of sumak kawsay, the paper questions the extent to which the ethos of experimentalism in politics can be sustained, eliding stymied technocratic forms of the political. It turns, therefore, to Baruch Spinoza's treatise on adequate and inadequate ideas. In so doing, the paper examines how one can critique an idea without perpetuating a moral economy in judgment. Consequently, the paper considers the way in which Spinoza's thought can be charged to recuperate imperilled political ideas.

Alternative Global Entanglements: ‘Detachment from Knowledge’ and the Limits of Decolonial Emancipation

“…148 In light of the discussed cosmological orientation that the notion pacha entails (time-and-space), what gets lost in such intellectual translation is that such anthropomorphised depiction gets trapped in a troublesome linguistic equivalence game. 149 In fact, as Lajo cautions, 'the false content that some people give to the word Pachamama as simply Nature, can work with a Western logic and reintroduce it in the Andean world, like a Trojan Horse'. 150 Moreover, given the Andean philosophical principle of complementary duality (yanantin) through which opposites are inextricably complementary rather than subsumed into teleological interpretations 151 -and which further justifies the argument's reliance on a relational both-and logic -even the gendered (i.e.…”

Equador E Bolívia: Modelos Para Construir O Estado De Direito Ecológico Do Brasil?

“…O Bem Viver do Estado equatoriano "não é um novo paradigma de desenvolvimento, mas uma alternativa que propõe outras prioridades para organização social diferentes do mero crescimento econômico implícito no paradigma tradicional de desenvolvimento" (tradução nossa) 58 .Ao analisar as correntes de interpretação do Bem Viver equatoriano compiladas por Suárez, é possível identificar a presença do fator cultural em todas elas 59 .…”

Sumak Kawsay

“…Una cuarta forma de interpretar el concepto del SK (relacionada con la anterior) ha sido como un experimento (Gerlach, 2017), específicamente como un experimento de la planificación e implementación de políticas públicas en Ecuador entre 2008 y 2017. Al considerar al SK como sinónimo de BV, también se ha interpretado al SK como la manifestación del accionar del gobierno ecuatoriano.…”