Peoples and Development: other knowledges and other models to achieve sustainability

Abstract

The following article is a reflection on the process of development from a critical perspective, which by departing from the Latin American cultural diversity, recaptures a multiplicity of criteria that tran-scend the shortsightedness of economic studies. It focuses on the knowledge of the native cultures of the Americas, whose worldview and ways of life have led us to consider alternative methods based on sustainability and ecological equity criteria. While the imposition and reproduction of a single way of looking at development as linked to production, growth, and consumption has shut out other worldviews and ways of life to legitimize the implementation of a politics of silence, exclusion, and extermination of the indigenous peoples, the latter, in turn, have managed to sustain a harmonious relationship with nature and to survive thanks to the sustainability of a non-accumulation economy based on distribution and equity. The full dimension of life, the environment, and the world, and the consequent historic and daily struggle of these peoples to preserve the biological and cultural diversity and community relation-ships ended up by building the culture of sustainability, in a natural way. In this light, it is critical to recuperate these worldviews, particularly at a time in which it has been clearly demonstrated that the imposition of a single way of looking at and managing development and, in a broader sense, the world, has led – and still does – to disastrous environmental outcomes in their several dimensions, that is, ecological, economical, socio-cultural, and political.