ABSTRACT
In this chapter, we present the concept of ‘transmodern transdevelopment’; understood as a paradigm of welfare that goes beyond premodern subsistence, modern development, and postmodern postdevelopment. Transmodern transdevelopment pursues the satisfaction of material and immaterial needs of people through a participation process in which they decide – according to principles of environmental sustainability, social equity, and personal satisfaction – what those needs are, and what resources should be used to satisfy them. This paradigm is part of ‘transmodernity’ which is a worldview shared by the alternative social movements that have emerged from the World Social Forum, and seeks to interpret all spheres of life through intersubjective consensus and the participatory construction of projects to enable people’s expectations. Thus, transdevelopment has appeared as a response to the current global ecosociocultural crisis as a proposal to overcome the state of maldevelopment suffered by the world socioeconomic system of the 21st century which is characterized by environmental unsustainability, social inequality, and personal alienation. The paradigm of transdevelopment instead proposes the construction of local, national or state-wide, and global socioeconomic systems based on the principles of biocentrism, postcapitalism and decoloniality, depatriarchality, and the deheteronormativity of power, knowledge, and being.
