Scaling up Buen Vivir: Globalizing Local Environmental Governance from Ecuador

Abstract

��� • How does the population of a small Ecuadorian province inouence the development strategies pursued nationally and consequently push the global conversation toward an alternative model of sustainable development? This article explores watershed management reform in Tungurahua, Ecuador, to analyze how local communities challenged the dominant international model of sustainable development and drew on indigenous norms to offer an alternative. These communities resisted proposals by a transnational network advocating watershed management reforms that coupled conservation with markets for ecosystem services. Community members, however, did not reject the idea of reforming watershed management, and they negotiated with transnational advocates to create an alternative program rooted in indigenous norms. Tungurahua’s indigenous communities labeled their effort Mushuk Yuyay (Quichua for “new ideas”) to emphasize their departure from the development approach favored internationally. Their approach sought to realize the Quichua concept sumak kawsay (buen vivir in Spanish or wellbeing in English), which refers to living in harmony with nature, rather than dominating nature or removing human presence through conservation. In this study of Tungurahua’s watershed management reform, we show how the emerging ideal of sumak kawsay was institutionalized and put into practice. The Tungurahua case demonstrates the signiacance of historically marginalized indigenous communities in political processes and the inouence of indigenous norms on the global discourse regarding how to organize society around practices that harmonize human relationships with nature. 1 This article explains how the Tungurahuan peoples’ operationalization and institutionalization of the indigenous concepts mushuk yuyay and sumak kawsay through Tungurahua’s “new governance model” for sustainable watershed management provided a model for Ecuador’s National Plan for Wellbeing. This plan guides Ecuador’s development strategy, which has become part of a greater international campaign for the rights of nature and alternative paths of sustainable development—a global movement for buen vivir. It has inouenced the global