• “a successor to imperialism and colonialism” (Blaser et al.)

Designs for the Pluriverse

Designs for the Pluriverse index:

• 6–7, 95, 177, 224, 245n7;
• agriculture and, 66;
• alternatives to, 90, 96, 147–48, 154, 161–62, 205–9;
• autonomy and, 167, 172–73, 184;
• in Bolivia, 254n17;
• in Cauca Valley, 190–201;
• coloniality and, 31, 94;
• critics of, 242n8, 246n12, 250n17;
• defuturing projects and, 190–91;
• design in, 59–62, 65, 184–88, 187;
• globalization and, 65, 83, 141, 172;
• governmentality and, 60;
• heteronomous, 32, 173;
• Life Plans and, 73–75, 173, 251n23;
• technological, 18, 31–32, 116, 231n8.
• See also degrowth; sustainability

DFTP - Introduction 6-7

From “Development” to the Pluriverse At the dawn of the development age, a group of reputable United Nations experts characterized the project to come as follows: “There is a sense in which rapid economic progress is impossible without painful adjustments. Ancient philosophies have to be scrapped; old social institutions have to disintegrate; bonds of caste, creed, and race have to burst; and large numbers of persons who cannot keep up with progress have to have their expectations of a comfortable life frustrated. Very few communities are willing to pay the full price of economic progress”== (United Nations, Department of Social and Economic Affairs 1951, 15). In hindsight, we can consider this pronouncement as a daring, albeit utterly arrogant, design vision. The notion of underdevelopment was just being concocted, and the “Third World” had not yet been born. A new design dream was overtaking the world; we are still engulfed by it, even though, for many, as for the Earth itself, the dream has increasingly turned into a nightmare. What the United Nations envisioned was a sweeping “elimination design” (Fry 2011) of its own, aimed literally at scrapping the vernacular design and endogenous practices that for centuries had nourished, for better or worse, the lives of millions throughout the centuries. Almost overnight, a diverse range of rich and vibrant traditions were reduced to being worth, literally, nothing: nondescript manifestations of an allegedly indubitable fact, “underdevelopment.” Yet this dream made perfect sense to millions and was embraced by elites almost worldwide. Such was the power of this design imagination. Not only that, the discourse still holds sway today, as witnessed by the newest round of self-serving debates and policy maneuvers set in place in 2015, and for the next fifteen years, under the rubric of the post-2015 development agenda and the scuffle over a new set of sustainable development indicators. As Fry puts it, ==“the world of the South has in large part been an ontological designing consequence of the Eurocentric world of the North” (2017, 49). Thus, it is necessary to liberate design from this imagination in order to relocate it within the multiple onto-epistemic formations of the South, so as to redefine design questions, problems, and practices in ways more appropriate to the South’s contexts. Today, faced with the realities of a world transformed by a changing climate, humans are confronted with the irrefutable need to confront the design disaster that development is, and hence to engage in another type of elimination design, this time of the structures of unsustainability that maintain the dominant ontology of devastation.

In the Background of Our Culture - Rationalism, Ontological Dualism, and Relationality 94-95

Australian feminist and environmental philosopher Val Plumwood has drawn out the implications of dualist thinking in terms of what she calls the ecological crisis of reason. For her, the ecological crisis is a crisis “of what the dominant culture has made of reason” (2002, 5). This form of rationality, which claims mastery over nature, relies on multiple “centrisms” (anthropocentrism, self-centrism, Eurocentrism, androcentrism) and has produced, in the age of global markets, “ratiogenic monsters.” Blind to our ecological embeddness, this reason-centered culture supports elite forms of power, strengthens the illusion of the autonomous individual, and idolizes an economic rationalism that ingrains masculinity and invisibilizes the agency of nonhumans and subordinated groups. Rather than relying on ==“the same elite culture and developmentalist rationality that led us into the mess”== (16) in the first place—in other words, rather than intensifying the same reason-centered culture, as solutions such as the purported green economy do— her advocacy is for a form of nondualist, noncolonialist rationality that resituates human practice within ecology, and nonhumans within an ethics of respect and responsibility (see also Leff 2002, 2015, for a related argument and proposal).

Autonomous Design and the Politics of Relationality and the Communal 177

“comunalidad is a neologism that names a mode of being and living among the peoples of the Sierra Norte of Oaxaca, plus other regions in this state of southeastern Mexico. It expresses ==a stubborn resistance to all forms of development that have arrived to the area, which has had to accept diverse accommodations as well as a contemporary type of life that incorporates what arrives from afar, yet without allowing it to destroy or dissolve what is one’s own (lo propio)==… . Communality is the verbal predicate of the We. It names its action and not its ontology. Incarnated verbs: eat, speak, learn … These are collectively created in specific places. It only exists in its execution… . We open ourselves to all beings and forces, because even if the We comes about in the actions of concrete women, men and children, in that same movement, all that is visible and invisible below and on the Land also participates, following the principle of complementarity among all that is different. The communal is not a set of things, but an integral fluidity.”

• (Arturo Guerrero, forthcoming, 1)

[[autonomy]] and developmentalism

Autonomous Design and the Politics of Relationality and the Communal 166

[on autonomous movements and territorial defence struggles] It should be mentioned at the outset that many, if not most, of these experiences are, despite their commitment, inevitably undermined by the antagonistic contexts in which they take place; in their search for autonomy, some slide back into developmentalism, others are subverted from within by their own leaders, still others reinscribe older forms of oppression or create new ones, and not infrequently the mobilizations peter out under the incredible weight of the pressures of the day, or owing to outright repression.

In the Way of Development

“Development as a practice and discourse embodies the European Enlightenment’s implicit project of making specific local world-views and values, those broadly described as modern and Western European, into universals. As a successor to imperialism and colonialism, development has extended the reach of those local world-views and values far beyond the place in which they took shape.”

• In the Way of Development - Indigenous Peoples, Life Projects and Globalization p.26 chapter 2 “Life Projects: Indigenous Peoples’ Agency and Development” Mario Blaser