Ecuador's Good Living: Crises, Discourse, and Law

Abstract

Good Living was included in Ecuador's 2008 Constitution as a result of a long-period of crises that reshaped the country's political realm, altering centuries of citizenship regimes and the legal institutions that made them viable. Novel in character, Good Living, Sumak Kawsay or Buen Vivir would catalyze debates in various academic and civil society circles that longed for a political, social and economic alternative to the tumultuous years that proceeded the enactment of the 2008 Constitution. Through inductive theory-guided process tracing, this thesis analyses current strains of what has been labelled as statist, Indigenist and post-developmental Good Living in order to examine its origins and develop a more nuanced theoretical approach titled "critical Good Living". Unlike its previous theoretical counterparts, Critical Good Living unites the converging forces of a retreating state, changing citizenship regimes, politicized ethnic cleavages, discursive democracy and the emergence of an empty signifier to craft a new theory from which Buen Vivir may be depicted. Contextual in nature, a product of its time and the forces that forged it, Good Living would be the end-result of a striving indigenous movement, international NGOs, a retreating state and new forms of transnational governmentality uniting to displace radical forms of civil society cohesion.

This new form of biopolitics, would create microfoundations of power that would leverage on indigenous demands of autonomy and collective rights to promote market-orientated assets that could remedy staggering levels of poverty throughout the 1990s and early 2000s. Good Living, as an empty signifier, would wield power in new ways, pacifying social protest as it catered to many and satisfied none. However, this thesis also presents the power of its introduction as a constitutional principle, as its harbours the possibility of developing legal instruments of law that are both local, regional and international. This possibility is the central contribution this thesis makes. Show more