The Commons as Colonisation – The Well‐Intentioned Appropriation of Buen Vivir

The discussions on alternatives to capitalism led to an interest in other cultures with different ways of managing property. Concepts such as Buen Vivir are (re‐)discovered and integrated into discourses run mainly by the Global North. This implies an invisibilisation and colonisation of movements, organisations, and people as political actors. This will be traced with the case of Buen Vivir ( Sumak Kawsay ) in Ecuador, a political concept of indigenous organisations in the Amazon that was taken over by ecologist intellectuals and introduced in discussions on commons and degrowth. Thus, the concept was essentialised and the actors and their fights were invisibilised