2018 Conference

Individual Paper Presentation

Across Latin America, countries have rejected the Washington Consensus, neoliberalism, and associated discourses of ‘sustainable development’, by seeking new pathways of development that emphasize decolonization (Radcliffe, 2012), environmental protection, livelihoods of citizens, and inclusive politics (Ruttenberg, 2013).  ‘Buen Vivir’, or ‘the Good Way of Living’, is one such pathway that is heralded as an ‘ontological turn’ (González, P., & Vázquez, 2015) away from interventionist policies of resource extraction, human rights violations, and environmental devastation. Indeed, Ecuador is a country that has been razed by structural adjustment and oil extraction.  In 2008, however, then-president Rafael Correa etched ‘buen vivir’ into the national constitution, and promised the Ecuadorian people a new chapter in their development history, that would be marked by rights of the environment, political inclusion, and massive social investment. A decade later, policies that support large-scale resource extraction, (oil extraction largely replaced by mining), remain a distinctive and prominent part of Ecuador’s development plan.  Despite the Ecuadorian government’s attempt to cast mining projects as ‘responsible’ (Warnaars, 2012), they bear the hallmarks of neo-liberal projects and cooptation of ‘sustainable development’.  In the shadow of Buen Vivir, this paper examines actual environmental and developmental trajectories in Ecuador, and argues that this new pathway may be better understood as a continuation of a neoliberal framework of sustainable development, albeit with new actors (Caria & Dominguez, 2016).  Does the era of Buen Vivir signal a more legitimate approach to sustainability than in the past?  Or is it just ‘more’ of a more familiar ‘sustainable development’?