Globalized Andes? Livelihoods, Landscapes and Development

Abstract

Contemporary globalization in the Andes challenges the sustainability and quality of rural livelihoods. However, it is also the case that rural people have often addressed these destructive dimensions of economic globalization through a progressively deeper engagement in other types of globalized relationship. They have done this by organizing, through engagements with networks linking them to international actors, and through participation in new product and labor markets. While such global entanglements do not guarantee local development and empowerment, they offer one of the few ways to confront the demise of rural localities. This paper discusses such sets of globalized relationships in four localities in Bolivia, Ecuador and Peru. Particular attention is paid to the ways in which the emergence and activities of local organizations and social movements have been affected by the nature of their relationships with wider transnational development networks, and the constraints and possibilities that come with these relationships. The cases demonstrate how forms of global entanglement vary greatly across sites, and so suggest that the effects of globalization on livelihoods and landscapes are not easy to judge normatively or ex ante. Instead they imply that rather than speaking of globalization generically, it is important to consider the types and sequences of globalized relationships in which people and places have been enmeshed. This suggests the need for historically situated studies of ‘glocalization’ in order to understand both the actual processes of livelihood change under conditions of globalization, and the conditions under which more sustainable and locally governed rural livelihoods and landscapes might be built.