Ecuador’s “Good Living”

Ecuador’s “Good Living”: Crises, Discourse, and Law by Gallegos Anda, presents a critical approach towards the concept of Buen Vivir that was included in Ecuador’s 2008 Constitution. Due to its apparent legal novelty, this normative formula received much praise from multiple civil society and academic circles by forging what some argued to be a new development paradigm based on Andean epistemologies. Gallegos Anda theorizes this important phenomenon through an inductive analysis of context and power relations. Through a masterful navigation through epistemological fields, the author offers a critical theory of Buen Vivir that focuses on changing citizenship regimes, a retreating state, politicised ethnic cleavages, discursive democracy and the emergence of an empty signifier. Gallegos-Anda is the first to situate Buen Vivir in a theoretical context grounded in international human rights law.