Cosmological limits to growth, affective abundance, and Rights of Nature: Insights from Buen Vivir/sumak kawsay for the cultural politics of degrowth

Abstract

This article creates an inter-epistemic dialogue between degrowth and Buen Vivir/sumak kawsay based on qualitative research conducted in Ecuador. It builds on degrowth scholarship that considers cultural change an integral part of sustainability transformations. The article envisions what that change could look like by developing non-anthropocentric and de-individualised visions of sustainability transformations. It thereby advances recently reignited debates around limits to growth and artificial scarcity. Buen Vivir/sumak kawsay is an Andean-Amazonian indigenous conceptualisation of Good Living. An engagement with the reciprocal practices, behaviours and rituals of its protagonists yields three insights for the cultural politics of degrowth. First, cosmological limits to growth are normative constraints to harming the Living World and arise from relational ontologies that embed the human into the natural world. Second, the political economy of Buen Vivir/sumak kawsay produces affective abundance via reciprocity with the non-human world. This offers a de-individualised understanding of abundance for degrowth, beyond enjoyment and provision of universal basic services. Third, these ideas can be implemented in practice through Rights of Nature, put forward here as a viable policy option because of its potential to impute relational worldviews into materialist understandings of nature. These pluriverse avenues can enact cultural change towards sustainability transformations.