ABSTRACT
This chapter considers the significance of Latin-American debates regarding “Buen Vivir/Good Living” and to what extent they pose genuine alternatives to traditional economic growth models while contributing to a novel opening of the Social Sciences. It is argued that the institutionalization of the social sciences and the multiple Eurocentric perspectives it created in the modern university system cannot be separated from what occurred economically in the modern world system. Focusing on recent debates in Latin America, along with subsequent policy proposals and legal reforms, and decentering traditional Eurocentric values in Bolivia as well as Ecuador, it is argued that a different way of life as well as a new way of understanding the world calls into question traditional models focused on economic growth and development.
