South-North Synergies for a "civilizational transition" toward sustainability: Dialogue of knowledges among buen vivir, degrowth, and human development

Abstract

On the basis of the thesis of civilizational crisis, the article aims to show the need for complementarity or cross-fertilization among "transition discourses" from the global South and North and the ideational matrix of development, in order to make viable a socio-ecological transition toward sustainability. The experience of buen vivir as a State project of social transformation in Ecuador and Bolivia has evinced the fallacy of providing soloist responses to a crisis that confirms, more than ever, the fact of global interdependencies. The article provides an analysis of the potentials and limits of a discursive articulation that focuses on these interdependencies, on the basis of buen vivir, degrowth, and human development, as emblematic discourses of transition in the global South and North, and of the political liberal mainstream, respectively. The argument is built on the basis of the main contributions and structural limitations of each one of those discourses fostering a civilizational transition toward a path of global, socio-ecologically sustainable (post)development. Despite the failure of buen vivir as a political program for a "Great Transition", the analysis highlights the potential for cultural transformation, implicit in the tenets and practice of alternative eco-convivial worlds at a macro-social scale. The blind spots of the discourse of buen vivir -that is, the geo-economic interdependencies deriving from a globalized matrix of production and consumption that cannot be generalized- constitute the main concern of degrowth discourses. The latter however, lack the political and cultural pull to implement the changes envisaged. Thus, the synergic circle closes with the analysis of the fertilization potential of buen vivir and degrowth on the political- cultural idea of human development, as formulated by the United Nations Development Program (undp), drawing on Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum, to shift political discourse as the precondition for a fundamental transformation of political practice. With this analysis of potential intercultural discursive synergies, the article aims at providing new perspectives for a sociology committed to critique and to a socio-ecological transition toward sustainability in these times of global environmental crisis.