Buen Vivir: an Opportunity to Re-think the Development and Sustainability Model

As written in 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, the unsustainability of the current development model, not only on the environmental level but also on the economic and social one, is leading critical theory to deeply revise these models theorized by Western modernity. If prominent authors have already extensively questioned the risks of advanced modernity (Beck 1986 Bauman 1991; Quijano 1992; Santos 2002; Escobar 2011;), nowadays becomes necessary to extend and integrate the debate with a counterhegemonic literature. Sustainability could be considered as a central topic to understand how to reorientate the relation between nature and society, but also to become aware of the diversity of social experience in the world in this field. The case of Ecuadorian and Bolivian Constitution is remarkable in that, for the first time in a constitution, they attribute rights to nature, overcoming the western-centric way of knowing according to which nature is a considered merely as a natural resource. According to Indigenous Cosmovisions, Mother Earth is a living entity that does not belong to us, rather human beings belong to her. Over the last few years, the idea of buen vivir seems to be a valid alternative to expand the gaze on the debate on sustainability, proposing a non- anthropocentric, but rather biocentric, perspective (Monni, Pallottino 2015), without any distinction between nature and culture. Investigating the above-mentioned concepts of sustainability and buen vivir as alternative visions of society and experiences of struggle and resistance for the preservation of harmony between nature and community, through the framework of Epistemologies of the South’s literature, can allow for the realization of “the sociology of the possible” (Pellegrino, Ricotta 2020a), a sociology where a divergent vision can emerge.