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群体对土著人民的声音在可持续发展议程中被忽视的持续可能性表示关切，尽管他们希望具有包容性（UNIPMG，2015）。该研究网络的目的是通过探讨土著人对可持续性的看法和使用创造性手段表达替代办法，挑战这些倾向。“Sumak kawsay”是一个Kichwa词，意思是“美好生活”。近年来，它在拉丁美洲变得非常突出，分别自2008年和2009年以来，厄瓜多尔和玻利维亚的宪法都有这一规定。其基本原则包括关注环境、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表达的可持续发展的论述非常一致，但从土著社区的角度来看，sumak kawsay不应等同于“发展”的概念，无论如何可持续。相反，它为人类文明和愿望提供了一种非殖民化的、后发展主义的替代方法。正如一位杰出的思想家所言，“[sumak kawsay]帮助我们看到当前发展模式的局限性，并让我们梦想着替代方案”（古德尼亚斯）。在拉丁美洲，土著社区往往感到，土著社区被篡夺了权利，并被用作将发展强加于他们的一种方式，使其听起来像是在国家论坛上听到了他们的声音。也不能假定所有土著社区都理解sumak kawsay的意思是一样的，也不能假定土著社区理解的sumak kawsay会自动预示着一种完全和谐与平等的状态，这里提议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，重点研究这些问题;这些社区显然希望解决这些问题。它通过超越厄瓜多尔和玻利维亚将这一概念纳入主流的情况，并通过超越sumak kawsay与可持续发展的辩论，寻求替代办法，填补了关于这一问题的现有研究中的一个空白。我们打算通过跨学术/非学术鸿沟的研究网络来实现这一目标，以汇集关键资源，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，这是一个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，微妙，多声音的方式来表达的想法，从网络。它不是要固定、界定或挪用某种文化或其世界观，而是要允许通过任何似乎最适当的媒体表达各种关系和多种观点。我们将努力定位这个数字资源作为一个参考点，为其他土著和边缘化社区在拉丁美洲和英语世界。研究网络的活动是围绕正在进行的社区活动由项目协调员在巴西和哥伦比亚，和两个主要的社区研讨会弥合学术/非学术研究鸿沟。作为补充，将在巴西、哥伦比亚和英国的参与大学举办三次国际研讨会，并向所有网络成员开放。该提案对社区内工作的总体强调是为了确保网络中的土著参与者仍然是该项目的智力支柱。该网络还将在一份著名的同行评审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.