The Revolutionary Socialist Network, Workers
Putting well-being and respect of the environment foster successful movements – Ecuador proves
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Putting well-being and respect of the environment foster successful movements – Ecuador provesPadilla ’21 [Luis-Alberto; 2021; president of the board of the Guatemalan International Relations & Peace Research Institute (IRIPAZ), member of the International Peace Research Association (IPRA), former Secretary General of the Latin American Council on Peace Research (CLAIP), Director of the Diplomatic Academy, Former Vice Minister, former ambassador in Chile, former permanent representative to the United Nations at the Vienna International Centre, former ambassador to Austria, former ambassador to the Russian Federation, former ambassador to the Netherlands, permanent representative to the UN in Geneva, and professor of the Seminar of World Geopolitics at the Faculty of Political Sciences of the Catholic University Rafael Landivar (URL) of Guatemala; Sustainable Development in the Anthropocene, “The New Constitutionalism of Bolivia and Ecuador,” Ch. 4.7, p. 188] SPark In the new Ecuadorian constitution, good living has different connotations, Barié points out, although it appears in the context of the re-founding of the State: “We, the sovereign people of Ecuador […] decided to build a new form of citizen coexistence, in diversity and harmony with nature, to achieve good living, sumak kawsay” (Barié 2017: 59). The concept of good living is also associated with popular wisdom and the ancestral cosmovision. Incidentally, sumac kawsay has been part of the historical claims of the Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador (CONAIE) since its foundation, and has also been proposed by CONAIE as a criticism of capital accumulation because, as Barié argues, “the objective and the principles of the economy should not be about profitability, but human well-being, living well: the sumak kawsay. The economy is only a tool at the service of the community” (Barié 2017: 61). For this reason, the Constituent Assembly proposed the concept of sumac kawsay as an ethical principle, based on reciprocity and promoted by indigenous communities so that the ‘rights of good living’ are located within economic, social and cultural rights, such as the right to water, food, education, physical culture, work, social security, healthy environments and others that support good living. It should be noted that the emphasis on good living in the Ecuadorian Constitution is broader than the Bolivian, since it includes two complete chapters on inclusion and equity as well as on biodiversity and natural resources, both divided into sections on different topics. Another aspect of the Ecuadorian constitution highlighted by Barié is that, following criticism of the predominance of the market typical of neoliberal ‘mainstream economics’, one of the main axes of this concept of good living is, according to the CONAIE, the creation of a Social and Solidarity Economy that can to a large extent be compared with the same concept proposed by the Chilean-American academic Howard Richards, which I will examine in the next chapter. This system recognizes the human being as the subject and end of the economy, its main goal being to guarantee the production and reproduction of the material and immaterial conditions that make good living possible (Barié 2017: 64). The constitution also establishes different forms of organization of production, favouring State forms and modalities that “ensure the good living of the population”, including public debt and the environment. Development is defined as the whole sustainable dynamic of economic, political, socio-cultural and environmental systems in order to achieve good living, with the State having the obligation to plan development at a national level and in a sustainable manner, as well as to organize the redistribution of resources for access to good living. Consequently, within the framework of a government that promotes development, natural wealth must benefit people, including all communities and ethnic groups, so that they can live in a good manner and simultaneously respect the right to a healthy environment that must be ecologically balanced in order to ensure good living (Barié 2017: 60). Download 2.09 Mb. Share with your friends:
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