What Does Wellbeing Mean in Different Cultural and Religious Contexts? An Analysis of the Conceptualizations of Wellbeing in Development Assistance aimed at Indigenous Peoples in the Andes

Abstract

A central motivation for engaging in humanitarian development assistance, nongovernmental as well as governmental, is to facilitate wellbeing of people considered poor and needy. During the last decades, there has been a debate about a more comprehensive understanding of development and wellbeing. Wellbeing has become a main concept in humanitarian aid targeting needy people in the global south. This article focuses on how the concept of wellbeing is understood in varying traditions and contexts that meet in development cooperation: by Andean indigenous peoples, by Western aid workers based in evangelical Faith-based organizations working in the Andes, and by the Capability Approach ‘CA’, which has influenced development cooperation considerably the last decades. How will differences in understanding wellbeing by the actors affect the performance and the results of development cooperation? What consequences may it have for the cooperation if the aid worker is not aware of the differences?

Keywords:

• wellbeing
• development cooperation
• Andean
• indigenous
• worldview
• Capability Approach

ORCID

Live Danbolt Drange http://orcid.org/0000-0003-4569-3915

Notes on contributor

Professor emerita Live Danbolt Drange has been working at NLA University College, Intercultural Studies in Bergen, Norway, a private institution based in the Norwegian lay Christian movement. She has published several articles on intercultural education, literacy, and subjects related to indigenous cosmology and conversion from Catholicism to evangelical churches. Research interests include development assistance, effects of indigenous migration, religion and educational themes in the Andean area, especially Bolivia and Ecuador.

Notes

1 The 2007 Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples define indigenous peoples as groups who have distinct economic, social, legal and cultural practices from the nation-states in which they live and who seek to be collectively recognized as such, see http://www.un.org/esa/socdev/unpfii/documents/DRIPS_en.pdf.

2 Andean indigenous peoples are Aymara in Bolivia (about one million) and Kichwa/Quechua in Bolivia and Ecuador. Kichwa or Quechua is used as a collective term for all speakers of the language and is the name of the language. Kichwa is the standardized spelling in Ecuador and used in this article. According to Marzal, there is a fundamental uniformity in the Andean area that permits us to speak of a rural Kichwa religion in the Andean Trapezoid (Marzal, 1996, p. 69)

3 http://www.un.org/esa/socdev/unpfii/documents/DRIPS_en.pdf.

4 Spirits of the mountain, spirits of the ancestors, supernatural beings mainly male that live in all geological formations of some size; achachila / apu / wak’a / uywinris are regarded as protectors of the territory (Spedding, 2008, p. 110).

5 http://hdr.undp.org/en/content/human-development-index-hdi.

6 In Spanish: https://bolivia.infoleyes.com/norma/2689/ley-de-derechos-de-la-madre-tierra-071; in English: http://www.worldfuturefund.org/Projects/Indicators/motherearthbolivia.html

7 http://www.americasquarterly.org/node/473, http://democracyctr.org/blog/2009/03/mob-attacks-home-of-former-vice.html (accessed 30 August 2014).