Suchergebnisse

This article examines the connections between Buen Vivir, a radical approach to socially inclusive development in Latin America, and equality policies developed by the Ministry of Defence for the Ecuadorian armed forces. Drawing on extensive qualitative research on the Ecuadorian military, this article explores and compares the implementation of policies on crosscutting themes such as gender, interculturality and class. This article adds to the existing literature on the question of whether Buen Vivir has fostered equality, taking a closer look at specific Ecuadorian national policies of social inclusion. The research suggests that for the Ecuadorian military, this entails a militarisation of equality through gender equity policies and an intercultural focus.

This article critically explores tensions concerning development from contemporary feminist thought and praxis in Latin America. In Ecuador, development is seen as an outdated and irrelevant theoretical framework from a variety of feminist perspectives, including feminist political ecology and decolonial feminisms. Nevertheless, development discourse and practices persist and are central to public policy with a gender focus throughout the country. This results in tensions between governmental and autonomous feminist perspectives that are present in local spaces, such as the province of Esmeraldas in Northern Ecuador. Drawing on research conducted with Afro-Ecuadorian peer researchers, including interviews, oral histories and social-cartography methods, this article will demonstrate how Afro-Ecuadorian women are challenging dominant ideas and practices of development from the emerging ideas of Black feminism in Ecuador and moving towards a Black feminist political ecology in the Americas.

Afro-descendant women in Esmeraldas, Ecuador, are amongst the most marginalized groups in the country. Living in a region severely affected by environmental degradation due to multiple and overlapping forms of resource extraction, they also face the impacts of drug-trafficking conflicts crossing the Colombian border, as well as institutional and everyday racism. Many of these conditions are rooted in a long history of colonialism. In this article, we highlight the relative absence of Afro-Ecuadorian women's voices, histories and experiences from research on resource extraction and argue that Black feminist theoretical approaches provide an essential tool for understanding intersections of gender, race and activism, as well as (alternatives to) development, and the impacts of natural resource extraction in Ecuador. In so doing, the article proposes a theoretical framework to open up spaces that situate Afro-Ecuadorian women's knowledge at the centre of efforts to resist marginalization and extractivism.