ABSTRACT
This chapter proposes a strategy for postdevelopment politics, growing organically from ‘a world confluence of alternatives’. It reaches for a pluriverse. In the ‘development’ era, people believed that the culture of capitalist modernity would bring universal progress and material abundance. However, the eurocentric political model has resulted in a global crisis so severe that Life-on-Earth now faces extinction. The reality of development is oil wars, land grabs for mining, deforestation, extractivist agroindustry, and toxic industrial emissions. It rests on labor exploitation, gendered violence, loss of community livelihoods, and ecological entropy. Global agencies and states respond with top-down technocratic market-based policy reforms. The 2015 United Nations Sustainable Development Goals provide no structural analysis of how poverty and unsustainability are grounded historically in corporate monopolies, neo-colonialism, and patriarchal attitudes. The political line between Right and Left is unclear when it comes to productivist development. Marxism needs complementing with ecological depth, imaginations from the Global South, and feminist consciousness. The ancient logic of eurocentric dualism placed Man over Nature; often classed Indigenous peoples as non-human; while economic development alienated their experiential knowledge of natural processes. Today, colonized peoples resist all such objectification, even asserting that mountains and rivers are not mere resources but beings with ‘rights’ of their own. Similarly, as the productive sector undercuts its material base in the ‘reproductive sector’, women from every continent challenge the development hegemony with a life-affirming ‘politics of care’. Women’s everyday labors teach a logic that is not controlling and instrumental but ‘relational’ as ecological processes are. Parallel visions are practiced as buen vivir, ‘a culture of life’ found in South America; ubuntu, emphasizing the African value of mutuality; swaraj from India, centred on self-reliance. Other inspirational sources are kyosei, minobimaatisiiwin, nayakrishi, critically reflective spiritual traditions, as well a ‘a world where many worlds fit’, as the Zapatistas of Chiapas say. s newer models like eco-socialism and deep ecology. The paths to an Earth Democracy encompass values such as diversity, autonomy, commoning, rights of nature, enoughness, justice, non-hierarchy, responsibility, and non-violence. This living, pre-figurative politics implies consistency of means and ends. A pluriversal world will be open, horizontal, and accountable to citizens, built upon local decision-making by communities face-to-face. Differences, tensions, even contradictions, can serve as a basis for constructive exchange. A postdevelopment politics imagines ‘a world where many worlds fit’, as the Zapatistas of Chiapas say.
