Sumak Kawsay and the Sustainable Development Agenda: Critical Debates and Creative Responses from a Latin American Indigenous Perspective

联合国土著人民主要小组对土著人民的声音在可持续发展议程中被忽视的可能性表示关切，尽管该议程希望具有包容性（联合国土著人民监测组，2015年）。这个研究网络的目的是通过探索可持续性的本土观点和使用创造性的手段来表达替代方案来挑战这些趋势。“Sumak kawsay”是一个Kichwa词，意思是“美好的生活”。近年来，它在拉丁美洲变得非常突出，分别在2008年和2009年在厄瓜多尔和玻利维亚的宪法中占有重要地位。它的基本原则包括关心环境、和平的社区生活和减少经济和社会不平等。虽然这些原则似乎与可持续发展目标中所表达的可持续发展话语非常一致，但从土著社区的角度来看，sumak kawsay不应等同于“发展”概念，无论它多么可持续。相反，它为人类文明和愿望提供了一种非殖民化、后发展主义的替代方法。正如一位杰出的思想家所说，“（sumak kawsay）帮助我们看到了当前发展模式的局限性，并允许我们梦想替代方案”（Gudnyas）。但sumak kawsay也不是全球性的万灵药。在拉丁美洲主流化的地方，土著社区往往觉得它被篡夺了，并被用作一种强迫他们发展的方式，让他们的声音听起来像是在国家论坛上被听到了。也不能假设所有的土著社区都理解sumak kawsay的意思是一样的，也不能假设土著社区理解的sumak kawsay会自动预示着一种完美和谐和平等的状态。这里提出的研究网络将与巴西东北部和哥伦比亚西南部的土著社区合作，重点关注这些问题；有明显意愿解决这些问题的社区。它通过超越厄瓜多尔和玻利维亚对这一概念的主流化，并通过寻求超越关于sumak kawsay与可持续发展的辩论的替代方案，解决了现有研究中关于这一主题的空白。我们打算通过跨学术/非学术的研究网络来汇集关键资源，使这一过程以多语言“情感制图”的形式表现出来。这将包括一个网站，它是研究与艺术和行动主义（艺术主义）的结合，并寻求找到一个更平等的，微妙的，多声音的方式来表达来自网络的想法。它不是关于固定，定义或挪用给定的文化或其世界观，而是允许通过任何看起来最合适的媒体表达关系和多种观点。我们将努力将这一数字资源定位为拉丁美洲和英语世界其他土著和边缘化社区的参考点。研究网络的活动是围绕由巴西和哥伦比亚的项目协调员主持的正在进行的社区内活动以及两个主要的社区内讲习班建立的，这些讲习班弥合了学术/非学术研究的鸿沟。此外，还将在巴西、哥伦比亚和英国的参与大学举行三次国际专题讨论会，并向所有网络成员开放。建议中对社区内工作的总体强调力求确保网络中的土著参与者仍然是项目的智力支点。该网络还将在一份著名的同行评议期刊的特刊上发表其研究结果，并通过一个项目网站记录其活动。

The United Nations Indigenous Peoples Major Group has expressed concerns regarding the ongoing potential for indigenous people's voices to be overlooked in the Sustainable Development Agenda, despite its aspirations to be inclusive (UNIPMG, 2015). The aim of this research network is to challenge these tendencies through an exploration of indigenous perspectives on sustainability and the use of creative means to express alternatives.'Sumak kawsay' is a Kichwa word meaning 'good living'. It has become hugely prominent in Latin America in recent years, featuring in the Ecuadorean and Bolivian constitutions since 2008 and 2009 respectively. Its basic principles include concern for the environment, peaceful communal living and the reduction of inequalities, both economic and social. While these principles might seem to align well with the discourse of sustainable development as expressed in the Sustainable Development Goals, from the perspective of indigenous communities, sumak kawsay should not be equated with the concept 'development', however sustainable. Instead, it offers a decolonial, post-developmentalist alternative approach to human civilisation and aspirations. As one prominent thinker has put it, '[sumak kawsay] helps us see the limits of current development models and it allows us to dream of alternatives' (Gudnyas).But sumak kawsay is not a global panacea either. Where it has been mainstreamed in Latin America, indigenous communities tend to feel that it has been usurped and used as a way to foist development upon them by making it sound like their voices are being heard in national fora. It also cannot be assumed that all indigenous communities understand sumak kawsay to mean the same thing, nor that sumak kawsay as understood by indigenous communities will automatically herald a state of perfect harmony and equality.The research network proposed here will focus on these issues in collaboration with indigenous communities in the Northeast of Brazil and the Southwest of Colombia; communities where there is a manifest appetite to address them. It addresses a gap in extant research on the subject by looking beyond Ecuador and Bolivia's mainstreaming of the concept and by seeking to dream of alternatives beyond the debates about sumak kawsay versus sustainable development. We intend to do this by networking our research across the academic/non-academic divide to pool critical resources, making this process manifest in the form of a multilingual 'affective cartography'. This will consist of a website that is a combination of research with art and activism (artivism) and that seeks to find a more egalitarian, subtle, multi-voiced way for the ideas that come out of the network to be expressed. It is not about fixing, defining or appropriating a given culture or its worldview, but about allowing for the expression of relationships and multiple perspectives, through whatever media seem most appropriate. We will seek to position this digital resource as a point of reference for other indigenous and marginalised communities across Latin America and the Anglophone world.The activities of the research network are built around on-going in-community events run by project coordinators in Brazil and Colombia, and two main in-community workshops bridging the academic/non-academic research divide. This will be complemented by three international symposia to be held at participating universities in Brazil, Colombia and the UK and open to all network members. The overall emphasis in the proposal on in-community work seeks to ensure that indigenous participants in the network remain the intellectual fulcrum of the project. The network will also publish its findings in a special issue of a prestigious peer-reviewed journal and keep a log of its activities through a project website.