An empirical assessment of the indigenous Sumak Kawsay (living well): the importance of nature and relationships

Carmen Amelia Coral-Guerrero, Jorge Guardiola and Fernando Garc'a-Quero

Chapter 21 in Handbook on Wellbeing, Happiness and the Environment, 2020, pp 385-398 from Edward Elgar Publishing

Abstract: The Andean indigenous way of life Sumak Kawsay (‘living well’, in Kichwa) is related to reciprocity, solidarity, collective participation, social justice, and harmony with nature and with the community. This chapter uses a representative national sample in Ecuador to assess how certain features of Sumak Kawsay relate to subjective well-being. In this vein, the authors propose several variables associated with this particular way of life: collective participation activities (mingas), enjoying a piece of land (chakra), living in a rural area and indigenous identity. The results indicate that most Sumak Kawsay features are positively related to life and environmental satisfaction. An important exception is indigenous identity, which is negatively related to life satisfaction and not significant for environmental satisfaction. The authors suggest that Sumak Kawsay is important for subjective well-being in Ecuador, but indigenous people’s subjective well-being would benefit if their needs were better taken into account in the political arena.

Keywords: Economics and Finance (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.elgaronline.com/view/edcoll/9781788119337/9781788119337.00029.xml (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 503 Service Temporarily Unavailable

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:elg:eechap:18339_21

Ordering information: This item can be ordered from
http://www.e-elgar.com

Access Statistics for this chapter

More chapters in Chapters from Edward Elgar Publishing
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Darrel McCalla ().