Colombia ha vivido grandes crisis a través de los años; crisis que permiten, gracias al aprendizaje que ésta genera, el desarrollo humano y la esperanza espiritual para lograr una reflexión en la convivencia. El problema de pasar de una economía cafetera a una economía minera ha ocasionado, por ejemplo, que los recursos naturales sean hoy la base del mal llamado "desarrollo", "progreso" y "crecimiento". El texto, resultado del proceso de investigación de la tesis doctoral "El estado colombiano y el buen vivir, un proyecto político-educativo", muestra que el problema social de esta crisis civilizatoria es el camino para conscientizar las generaciones presentes, en la búsqueda de incrementar el índice de Felicidad y el Buen Vivir y, con ello, generar espacios que motiven una relación amigable entre el ser humano y la naturaleza. Este texto constituye su cuarto libro después de: "La vida y sus encrucijadas", "Rehenes del miedo" y "Colombia: política, encanto, amor y odio".

This book presents the work of a group of Peruvian development specialists of peasant background. The book explains how development itself is the problem because its epistemologies and practices are alien to the indigenous peasantry of the Andes.

This book explores diverse contemporary paradigms of educational praxis and learning in Latin America, both formal and non-formal. Each contributor offers a unique perspective on the factors which lead to the production of paradigms rooted in ‘other’ logics, cosmologies, and realities, and how these factors may renegotiate and redefine concepts of education, learning, and knowledge. The various chapters provide a road map for scholars, activists, artists, students, organizations, and social movements to help begin to construct learning spaces that seek to engage with a new more horizontal form of participatory democracy.

In Dilemmas of Difference Sarah A. Radcliffe explores the relationship of rural indigenous women in Ecuador to the development policies and actors that are ostensibly there to help ameliorate social and economic inequality. Radcliffe finds that development policies’s inability to recognize and reckon with the legacies of colonialism reinforces long-standing social hierarchies, thereby reproducing the very poverty and disempowerment they are there to solve. This ineffectiveness results from failures to acknowledge the local population's diversity and a lack of accounting for the complex intersections of gender, race, ethnicity, class, and geography. As a result, projects often fail to match beneficiaries' needs, certain groups are made invisible, and indigenous women become excluded from positions of authority. Drawing from a mix of ethnographic fieldwork and postcolonial and social theory, Radcliffe centers the perspectives of indigenous women to show how they craft practices and epistemologies that critique ineffective development methods, inform their political agendas, and shape their strategic interventions in public policy debates.

Presenting an ethnographic account of the emergence and application of critical political alternatives in the Global South, this book analyses the opportunities and challenges of decolonizing and transforming a modern, hierarchical and globally-immersed nation-state on the basis of indigenous terminologies. Alternative development paradigms that represent values including justice, pluralism, democracy and a sustainable relationship to nature tend to emerge in response to – and often opposed to – the neoliberal globalization. Through a focus on the empirical case of the notion of Vivir Bien (‘Living Well’) as a critical cultural and ecological paradigm, Ranta demonstrates how indigeneity – indigenous peoples’ discourses, cultural ideas and worldviews – has become such a denominator in the construction of local political and policy alternatives. More widely, the author seeks to map conditions for, and the challenges of, radical political projects that aim to counteract neoliberal globalization and Western hegemony in defining development. This book will appeal to critical academic scholars, development practitioners and social activists aiming to come to grips with the complexity of processes of progressive social change in our contemporary global world.