By Lauryn Bissett
Lauryn is a student on our MSc Environmental Change and International Development programme. You can follow her on Twitter and LinkedIn.
Climate change is often regarded as the biggest challenge of the 21st century, to tackle this alternative development approaches are fast becoming vital rivals for traditional western discourse. Concepts such as Buen Vivir, degrowth, and ecological swaraj could all offer important solutions and alternatives which have the potential to improve environmental sustainability, also helping to tackle climate change in the future.
Buen Vivir offers a progressive and dynamic alternative to these traditional top-down visions; instead offering the potential of ‘an era of great social change’, opening up development studies to an alternative future of social and environmental wellbeing.
The concept originates in Latin America with roots in indigenous cosmology and can be loosely translated to mean ‘good living’ or ‘living well’.
The belief that ‘good-living is possible throughout the community entails the harmonious living of nature, humans, animals, plants, and the earth. It prioritises collective wellbeing above that of the individual shifting to a collective sense of inclusion and equity.
Buen Vivir extends itself to become more than just a way of life, having become legally inscribed in Ecuador and Bolivia’s constitution to establish a set of rights for its people, including health, environmental protection, education, social and gender equality, etc, which all promote a good way of living.
With a focus directly relating to climate change, Buen Vivir rejects prominent anthropocentric development models instead promoting a biocentric view of human relationships with nature, similar to that of indigenous communities globally. This viewpoint acknowledges the inherent value of nature and situates humans ethically and morally at one with nature, establishing the issue of climate change and environmental protection at the core of its ethos.
There is no emphasis on the individual as there is with anthropocentric development which prioritises humans first over the environment. Instead, a biocentric view deems all life to matter equally therefore engaging humans in a close relationship with nature for survival, wellbeing, and protection.
Ecuador is making great strides to fulfil Buen Vivir through positive climate goals that focus on limiting environmental degradation and in turn intertwining this biocentric view through everyday spaces in nature. However, debates surrounding neo-extractivism highlights the shortcomings of the government in their implementation and commitment to the principles of Buen Vivir.
By rethinking nature and therefore climate protection through a decolonial lens, Buen Vivir rejects popular framing of nature as a commodity. A decolonial stance is essential throughout development studies and allows for a reflexive acknowledgement of colonial powers from the West which affect society today.
Development approaches situated in the West such as Sustainable Development still centre around highly capitalist systems, as seen with the emersion of the Green Economy, putting ‘economic growth as a driver for wellbeing’ (Chassagne, 2019, p2). This narrative is all too familiar in dominant development approaches that prioritise high rates of economic growth above all else (see Kothari et al, 2015).
The holistic nature of Buen Vivir and the principles surrounding it calls for transformation beyond this capitalist system to provide an alternative development from a bottom-up approach focusing on equity at all levels (also see degrowth).
Buen Vivir opens our eyes to a transformation of a more socially and ecologically unified future with climate change at the heart of its principles. This allows us to rethink climate change in a progressive and responsible way.
Reference:
- Chassagne, N., 2019. Sustaining the ‘Good Life’: Buen Vivir as an alternative to sustainable development. Community development journal, 54(3), pp.482–500.
- Kothari, Ashish, Demaria, Federico & Acosta, Alberto, 2015. Buen Vivir, Degrowth and Ecological Swaraj: Alternatives to sustainable development and the Green Economy. Development (Society for International Development), 57(3-4), pp.362–375.
