Buen vivir as a territorial practice. Building a more just and sustainable life through interculturality

Buen vivir is one of the alternatives to modern development brought forward by pluriverse literature, especially for Latin America. This article focuses on buen vivir as a territorial, bottom-up process of transformation based on indigenous worldviews. The text explores empirically how in the Ecuadorian Andes, plurinational and intercultural municipal politics have reshaped a territory. It analyzes achievements and challenges of a process of co-government and shared authority between municipal institutions and a variety of social organizations under the first indigenous mayor of Cayambe County. It explores how, through an ecology of practices and knowledges, transformation encompasses a series of interconnected dimensions such as social justice and redistribution, gender relations, societal nature relations, cognitive justice, intercultural justice and the transformation of local relations of production and consumption toward the sustainability of life. It shows how, in order to achieve transformation, ancestral knowledge and the principles of sumak kawsay are combined with selective dimensions or institutions of modernity in a self-determined way.