Culturally sustainable development: Maya culture, indigenous institutions, and alternative development in Guatemala

Abstract

Recent scholarship has highlighted the ways in which new models of international and community development have been emerging in Latin America. Many of these have been associated with the idea of indigeneity. This article is meant to contribute to the larger attempt to understand this new turn in development thinking by studying one such model—enacted on a community level under the moniker of “culturally sustainable development” by a Maya organization in Guatemala. The case study and institutional ethnography exemplify the ways in which community development can be culturally situated, yet broadly informed. It also illuminates how the post-Washington consensus development policy environment provides opportunities for alternative indigenous development models at the same time as it imposes potentially debilitating constraints. Finally, it is argued that indigenous organizations often act in ways that are transmodern as opposed to anti-modern and that this transmodern positioning has allowed for some success in asserting alternative concepts of development and shaking free some of the snares of the global post-Washington consensus development policy climate.