In recent years the relationship of the capability approach (CA) to non-Western, especially indigenous, theories has ignited a growing literature. This offers a unique space to expand considerations of environmental justice, to frame intercultural public policies on issues of self-determination or valuations of the natural world and to study the CAs philosophical foundations. This chapter contributes to the literature, engaging current trends in Latin America and focusing on discussions around the idea of buen vivir (BV) and the contributions these make to exploring collective and environmental issues. The BV framework emerges from the regions indigenous philosophies and focuses on a harmonic understanding of the life cycle. The chapter uses two further indigenous notions, ayllu (community) and Pachamama (Mother Earth), that highlight the relational ontology underpinning BV. Through analysis of this epistemological framework, the chapter revisits some of the normative foundational challenges in the CA, reminding us of the importance of providing social and collective spaces to reflect on the ethical value that non-human others and nature have for discussions of development.

In this chapter, I focus on a specific attempt to replace the national feature of the “nation state” by indigenous people’s movements in some Latin American countries in the first decade of the twenty-first century. When indigenous movements, both in the Latin American subcontinent and in the world at large, fly the flag of the refoundation of the state they target the feature of the modern state form that made them invisible and caused so much destruction and unjust suffering for so long, namely the supposedly national character of the nation state derived from the capitalist, colonialist state. Their experience is painful evidence of the difficult task of refounding the state. Due to its long history, the modern state form is much more than an institutional conglomerate. It is a cultural artefact. Rather than a political struggle in the strict sense, the struggle for the refoundation of the state is a social, economic, and cultural struggle, a struggle for symbols, mentalities, habitus, and subjectivities. In this chapter, I describe the political processes in Bolivia and Ecuador, the two countries in which efforts to refound the state were most credible in the first decade of the millennium highlighting the main features of the projected refounded state as laid out in the new constitutions.

This chapter looks at guardianship of nature in three traditions of the Global South: from Latin American Buen Vivir (Good Living) derived from Native American traditions to Asian Buddhism in gross national happiness (GNH), and African ubuntu (collective) thought. Buen Vivir and Mother Earth as chief principle of the law, in the Ecuadorian constitution and policies, lead to rights of nature and a modest biocentric jurisprudence. Buddhist Happiness functions as chief principle of the law in the Bhutanese Constitution, with as yet no jurisprudence. This includes guardianship of nature as constitutional duty, whereby citizens can seek redress in court if the state neglects this duty. The rights of future generations in the South African Constitution, are part of the ‘people’ concept in Ubuntu, in which ‘mutual aid’ (in the community of life) functions as chief principle of the law. GNH and ubuntu are in between bio and anthropocentric with the potential of giving rights to nature.

Bolivia inherited arrangements that dispossessed its indigenous peoples, and this system persisted through decades of military rule and discord until a civilian government sought decentralisation in the mid-1990s. This attracted Danish support through Danida and, as it involved indigenous peoples to whom restoration of land rights was of critical concern, Danish efforts to secure these rights became a key theme. This grew into a community land-titling process that matched the aims of a movement which swept indigenous leader Evo Morales and the Movement Towards Socialism to power in 2006. Denmark’s support for community land titling was a central priority of the new government, and the effect of its 1995–2010 programme was to transform the map of Bolivia in favour of Indigenous peoples. Their forest territories largely survived the later onslaught of plantation development, preventing the release of billions of tonnes of carbon while saving immeasurable biodiversity and ecological and cultural resources. Danida may not have fully appreciated its contribution and it left the community land sector prematurely, but Bolivia is now in a much stronger position than before to resist climate chaos, with a viable plurinational constitution and many relatively safe territorial forests and empowered Indigenous peoples.