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From the Bottom-up: New institutional arrangements in Latin America

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Abstract

Gustavo Esteva describes new institutional arrangements in Latin America, created from the bottom-up by social movements. He argues that there is an interesting new set of processes emerging as peasants’ struggle for land as territorial defence is generating sovereign practices and autonomous areas. The reclaiming and regenerating of old commons is creating new commons and reorganizing society from the bottom-up. This is leading to a radical pluralism, avoiding both conventional universalism and cultural relativism beyond the political horizon of the nation-state. In this way the struggle to improve representative democracy and promote participatory democracy is shifting to radical democracy and to a redefinition of the good life, the buen vivir, through new institutional arrangements beyond development itself.

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Notes

  1. If Christ came here and Judas had the vote of any party, he would have called him to negotiate a coalition’, said President Lula to Folha de São Paulo on 22/10/09 (La Jornada 23/10/09, p. 25).

  2. The Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra (MST), a very important movement in Brazil and a leading force in Latin America, has been in continual tension with the government, in a country where 1 percent of the population own 46 percent of the arable land. In October 2009 the powerful agribusiness sector forced the creation of a Congressional commission to investigate MST.

  3. (http://www.oaxacalibre.org/.../ind.php?, accessed 28 October 2009).

  4. (http://www.viacampesina.org/.../index.php?, accessed 28 October 2009).

  5. Ejido, from the Latin exitum (exit), designated in Spain, in the 16th century, the land at the exit of the villages used in common by the peasants.

  6. (yorecomiendo.wordpress.com/.../el-miedo-global-de-eduardo-galeano-la-gran-orquesta-republicana/, accessed 28 October 2009).

  7. (viacampesina.org/main_en/index.php?option=cum_content&task=view&id=47&Itemid=27, accessed 28 October 2009).

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Describes how buen vivir has led to new institutional arrangements beyond mainstream development

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Esteva, G. From the Bottom-up: New institutional arrangements in Latin America. Development 53, 64–69 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1057/dev.2009.80

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/dev.2009.80

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