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ABSTRACT
Although often framed as an emerging anthropocenic socio-ecological imaginary, the Latin American paradigm of Buen Vivir has provided a broad base of support for tourism development in the region. This article focuses on Nicaragua's Buen Vivir, a national development campaign entitled “Live Clean, Live Healthy, Live Beautiful, Live Well” (called Vivir Bonito, Vivir Bien) The campaign was launched in 2013 as a multi-pronged approach to integrated development in distinct areas including employment, public health, waste management, education, urban aesthetics and national pride. However, it has also had the effect of opening up opportunities for tourism development not only in the capital city of Managua but also alongside other mega-projects such as the planned interoceanic canal. This article draws upon the example of Vivir Bonito, Vivir Bien to illustrate the variety of tourism development strategies currently emerging at the intersection of a left-turn toward Socialism of the 21st Century and Buen Vivir in Latin America, on the one hand, and a post-neoliberal context in which political economic projects of the past continue to leave their mark.
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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1. I use the expansive term tourism development, here, to refer to the plurality of strategies oriented toward cultivating and maintaining the structures necessary for the operation of different kinds of tourism economies, including ecotourism, community-based tourism, sustainable tourism and mainstream tourism.
2. For simplicity, I use the terms buen vivir and vivir bien interchangeably, as they are used in Nicaragua, while acknowledging their cultural and historical specificity in countries like Ecuador, Bolivia and elsewhere.
3. See Thomson (2011) and Gudynas and Acosta (Citation2011) for brief surveys of differences that fall within the the Buen Vivir conceptual framework, broadly speaking, including vivir bien (“living well”), buen convivir (“living well together”), vida armoniosa (“harmonious life”), vida buena (“good life”), tierra sin mal (“Earth without evil”) and camino noble (“the noble way”).
4. “Socialismo del Siglo XXI” was coined by Dietrich, but popularized by Hugo Chávez at his 2005 World Social Forum address.
5. In that sense, following Escobar (Citation2010), the “post” in post-neoliberalism and post-development refers to a process of de-centering and de-naturalizing, that is, highlighting diversity and heterogeneity rather than signaling a pristine future unencumbered by the past.
6. The Morales government codified Buen Vivir first in the 2010 “Law of the Rights of Mother Earth” (Ley de Derechos de la Madre Tierra) and later in 2012 “Framework Law of Mother Earth and Integral Development to Live Well” (Ley Marco de la Madre Tierra y Desarrollo Integral para Vivir Bien).
7. FMLN refers to Frente Farabundo Martí para la Liberación Nacional, or “Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front.”.
8. By semi-private, I mean that these roads, while constructed at public expense, were designed with occasional overhanging bridges that disallowed large public buses at the same time that private cars could pass underneath.
9. In Nicaraguan law, the argument for a cabinet position in Offices of Family, Community and Life was framed as revisions to the 1981 Family Law as well as Citizen Power Councils (CPCs) – partisan, grassroots structures similar to Venezuela's Community Councils (Consejos Comunales). The new Councils of Family, Community, and Life, as Murillo herself put it, sought to better reflect “Christian values, socialist ideals and solidarity practices” and to encourage “a community to reflect and work together, promoting family values and unity, self-esteem and dignity, responsibility, rights and duties, communication, co-existence, understanding and a spirit of community so as to achieve coherence of being, thinking and action” (quoted in Equipo Envío, Citation2013).
10. Perhaps the most publicized offender to date was the Organization of American States (OAS), headquartered in Washington DC, which was discovered to be disposing of their garbage in a local ravine. However, informal sector waste and recycling collectors have also felt the sting. Police issue them fines that they will never be able to pay or, in many cases, confiscate their collection carts.
11. HKND (Hong Kong Nicaragua Canal Development) Group is formally based in Hong Kong but registered in the Cayman Islands. It was founded in 2012 with the sole purpose of building the Nicaraguan canal. Wang Jing, HKND's controlling member, famously lost $10 billion (or 85% of his network) in the stock market in 2015, which led many Nicaraguan scholars that I talked to speculate that the project was better understood as having the backing of the Chinese state.
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Josh Fisher
Josh Fisher is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Western Washington University in Bellingham, Washington. He is the author of numerous publications on environmental and economic anthropology, focusing specifically on the politics of alternative development in Latin America. With Alex Nading (Brown University) and Chantelle Falconer (University of Toronto), he is conducting a three-year study of Ciudad Sandino, Nicaragua, funded by the National Science Foundation (#1648667), about the intersection of different forms of value in urban political ecologies.