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ARTURO ESCOBAR
Arturo Escobar is a Kenan Distinguished Professor in the Department
of Anthropology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
and associate editor of Development. His research interests are
related to political ecology; the anthropology of development, social
movements; Latin American development and politics. Escobar0 s
research uses critical techniques in his provocative analysis of
development discourse and practice in general. He also explores
possibilities for alternative visions for a post-development era. He is a
major figure in the post-development academic discourse, and a
serious critic of development practices championed by western
industrialized societies.
KEYWORDS transition; development; unsustainability; buen vivir
Introduction
The world has changed immensely since the Earth Summit in Rio of 1992. China has taken on a tremendous role in the global economy; a realignment in global geopolitics came after September 11 2001; the
Washington Consensus came to an end in Latin America with the wave of democratically progressive
governments; the dismantling of really existing socialism became irreversible in the 1990s. And now we
have the popular insurrections in North Africa and the Middle East. These changes point in contradictory
directions ^ some reinforcing, some challenging conventional sustainable development views and agendas. More than ever, it is imperative to go forward, but how? How to make sustainability less illusory and
more tangible? Some current narratives of transition give us some clues; they involve radical proposals
for moving towards a pluriverse.We can also apply novel ideas of design to think about a transition to a
truly sustainable planet.
Sustainable development (SD) was riddled with tensions and contradictions from the outset.
Many pointed out the impossibility of harmonizing the goals of development with the needs of nature
within any known economic framework, as the Brundtland report and Agenda 21 ^ bravely perhaps
but implausibly ^ purported to do. At present, it is clear that SD amounts to no more than reducing
unsustainability (Ehrenfeld, 2008). Flawed from the start, the SD movement can be said to have arrived
to its natural end.
Development (2011) 54(2), 137 140. doi:10.1057/dev.2011.28
Toward a pluriverse
Some of the changes envisioned in TDs are under
way in some fashion. The 2008 Ecuadorian and
Bolivian constitutions have garnered welldeserved international attention because of their
pioneering treatments of development and nature.
The Constitutions introduced a novel notion of
development centred on the concept of sumak
kawsay (in Quechua), suma qamana (in Aymara)
or buen vivir (in Spanish), or living well. These
notions entail a rupture with the conceptions of
development of the previous six decades. They
grew out of decades of indigenous struggles as
they articulated with manifold social change
agendas by peasants, Afro-descendants, environmentalists, students, women, and youth. The buen
vivir upholds a different philosophy of life into
the vision of society, one that subordinates economic objectives to ecological criteria, human dignity, and social justice. These arguments apply to
another prominent idea of the Ecuadorian Constitution, that of the rights of Nature, or the Pachamama; it represents an unprecedented biocentric
turn, away from the anthropocentrism of modernity. This biocentric turn represents a concrete
example of the civilizational transformation imagined by the TDs.
Rather than in terms of globalization, the evolving pluriverse might be described as a process of
planetarization articulated around a vision of the
Earth as a living whole that is always emerging
out of the manifold biophysical, human, and spiritual elements and relations that make it up. Many
of the features envisioned in theTDs ^ from strategies of re-localization to the rise of an ecological
civilization ^ will find a more auspicious home in
this notion. We need to stop burdening the Earth
with the dualisms of the past centuries, and
acknowledge the radical interrelatedness, openness, and plurality that inhabit it. To accomplish
this goal, we need to start thinking about human
practice in terms of ontological design, or the
design of other worlds and knowledges. Design
would no longer involve the instrumental taming
of the world for human purposes, but building
worlds in which humans and the Earth can coexist
and flourish (see essay by Kathryn Cox-Shrader
in this issue for some ecological design principles
and references).
Pluriversal studies cannot be defined in opposition to globalization studies, nor as its complement, but needs to be outlined as an altogether
different intellectual and political project. No
single notion of the world, the human, civilization,
the future, or even the natural can fully occupy
the space of pluriversal studies. Even if partly
building on the critical traditions of the modern
natural, human and social sciences, pluriversal
studies will travel its own paths as it discovers
worlds and knowledges that the sciences have
effaced or only gleaned obliquely. This, it seems
to me, might constitute the basis for conceptions
of sustainability that go beyond the business as
usual understanding of sustainable development.
This notion of sustainability would be one capable
of inspiring the popular and scientific imaginations alike to take steps that are at once pragmatic
and transformative in the path towards more ethical and ecological words.
References
Berry, Thomas (1999) The GreatWork: OurWay into the Future, NewYork: Bell Tower.
Ehrenfeld, John (2008) Sustainability by Design, New Haven: Yale University Press.
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