ABSTRACT
This chapter reviews the historical trajectory, current content, challenges, and relevance of buen vivir (“good living”), as well of its key pillar: rights of nature. Buen vivir/vivir bien is perhaps the most far-reaching and promising discursive alternative to traditional utilitarian and mainstream development today. However, its top-down implementation attempts in Bolivia and Ecuador have been riddled with contradictions and difficulties posed by their intense resource-extracting economies. In this sense, Buen vivir became co-opted by governments and voided of its spiritual contents and biocentric values, which in turn contributed to a weakening of indigenous and ecological movements.
This is why rights of nature, inserted within Western legal frameworks, can present a timely corrective imaginary. This chapter reviews their intellectual history and attempts to put them into practice in Latin America and beyond, showing that they increasingly serve as an important source to tackle traditional development – typically based on the externalization of social and ecological costs – in particular at subnational levels. The chapter concludes with the argument that more effort is required to fully analyze and develop an ethical, legal and political practice that serves the diverse entanglements of nature, human, ecosystems and particular species.
