ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses a number of issues associated with the concept of Buen Vivir which lies at the heart of radical proposals advanced in Bolivia and Ecuador to move beyond the mainstream vision of development in the direction of constructing ‘another world’. The author’s main argument is that an alternative social order such as Buen Vivir (utopia), needs to be reconstructed on the ucronia of a different temporal order (‘ucronia’ understood as a hypothetical alternative universe). It is argued that the utopia of ‘living well’ in social solidarity and harmony with nature needs to be constructed in terms of an ucronia in which time is recovered as life—not any kind of life, but life understood as living well. To this purpose, the chapter proposes an alternative index for measuring time for living well. This index, based on the concept of the quality of time, puts at the heart of the debate not the accumulation of money but the flourishing of life. Thus, the chapter introduces what could be called a political socioecology of time, a set of theoretical and methodological tools that facilitate analysis and proposes action alternatives to advance the construction of a new type of society.
