Buen Vivir
The Bolivian concept of 'Living Well'
Image: Painting depicting buen vivir as the renewal of Kichwa society, by Juan César Umajinga of Quilotoa, from the personal collection of Joe Quick
I am very interested in the ways of life that already exist around the world that are aligned with the concept of degrowth. These ways of living show us that we are not in the Anthropocene, but rather the Capitalocene: humans have known how to live sustainably on this planet for thousands of years, and billions of people still live sustainably. But our current economic system and the forces that make it dominant have changed the way we live so dramatically - in the space of a few hundred years - that we’ve changed the Earth’s climate and entered the sixth mass extinction. Buen Vivir, the Bolivian concept of ‘Living Well’, is one such example of a degrowth aligned way of life.
Buen Vivir: to live well, not better
Incorporated into the Bolivian constitution in 2009, the term ‘Buen Vivir’ translates to ‘Living Well’:
In the words of the President of the Republic of Bolivia, Evo Morales Ayma, Living Well means living within a community, a brotherhood, and particularly completing each other, without exploiters or exploited, without people being excluded or people who exclude, without people being segregated or people who segregate.
Buen Vivir cannot be directly translated into western definitions of ‘the good life’, a highly individual and materialistic concept based in consumerism and acquisition. Buen Vivir is also specifically not about ‘living better’ in which doing so implies that someone else is ‘living worse’. It associates ‘living better’ with current development throughout the world, starting with the church, and perpetuated by governments and international agencies.
The concept of Buen Vivir seeks to “lead to a fundamental change in the way societies operate, and how we live, as communities, families and individuals.”
Building an ancestral future
Based as much in political philosophy and feminist and environmental critiques of capitalism as it is in indigenous worldviews, Buen Vivir is not a return to pre-colonial days, but does seek to build on ancestral knowledge:
The call is to construct common ancestral futures, where different knowledges come together, not only under the directive of Western rationality.
A key concept of Buen Vivir is unity and allowing a multitude of voices to be heard so that we can move away from the modern-day notions of development.
Neither capitalist, nor socialist
Buen Vivir challenges the concentration of wealth and power that comes with capitalist, industrial development. It is also critical of the notion of sustainable development, inviting us to critique modern concepts of growth, commodification of nature and progress.
Whilst Buen Vivir is anti-capitalist, it is not socialist either. Where profit is at the heart of capitalism, it sees humans at the heart of socialism and perceives both to be harmful. It asks us to put life at the heart of our systems: we are nature, and other species are our kin. In this way, Buen Vivir should be considered a socio-bio-centric vision.
Community matters most
Buen Vivir is rooted in the significance of community, rather than the individual, and encourages that relationships in communities:
… are not restricted to market exchanges or utilitarian links; instead, they incorporate reciprocity, complementarity, communalism, redistribution, and so on.
The concept of Buen Vivir rejects consumerism, free-markets and private accumulation in favour of community wellbeing.
We are not separate to nature
Buen Vivir is not human-centric and challenges the modern notion of a separation between humans and nature. It emphasises harmony with, and respect for nature, with humans neither dominating, nor conserving nature, but rather recognising that:
… mother nature has inherent rights to exist on the Earth in an undiminished healthy condition.
It seeks to find the source of our ecological crises (our separation from nature), rather than treat the symptoms.
Living locally, sufficiency, sovereignty
Buen Vivir encourages sufficiency, the avoidance of waste and ‘powering down’ so that we are once again living with the means of the planet. It rejects of large-scale energy systems designed to prolong the industrial growth system, in favour of local production for local consumption, which will be necessary in a post-carbon era:
This means encouraging regional and local self-sufficiency, sustainability and control; economic localization and community sovereignty, local production for local consumption, local ownership using local labor and materials.
The concept of Buen Vivir promotes local sovereignty over health, learning, communication, and seeds. It promotes small scale production, appropriate technologies, grass-roots empowerment, decentralised decision making and solidarity economies.
Ensemble of South American perspectives
Far from Bolivians being alone in promoting the concept of living well, Buen Vivir is analogous to:
the Aymara’s suma qamaña, the Bolivian Guarani’s ñande reko, sumak kawsay, the Ecuadorian Kichwa’s allin kawsay, and the Peruvian Quechua’s allin kawsay. The Ecuadorian/Peruvian shür waras and the Chilean Mapuche’s küme morgen.
These concepts and ways of living show us that other worlds and futures are indeed possible. There is a great deal the Global North can learn from the Peoples of the Global South.
We need to relearn how to live in harmony with nature once more, while concurrently fighting the forces that insist on prioritising profit and growth and in the process destroying those very ways of life that enable us to exist in harmony with nature. We need a new system, one that reigns in the most harmful of natural human tendencies, not rewards them. Only then can we reach true sustainability. Concepts like Buen Vivir can lead us in the right direction.
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To read what ‘Buen Vivir’ means directly from those who have developed the concept and instilled it into their constitution, here is what the Bolivian delegation shared on the topic of Buen Vivir with the U.N. in April 2010.