California Accepted Papers Paper:
Rethinking Development: A Non-Western Conception from Mexico's Indigenous Groups.
*Names in bold indicate Presenter
Fernando David Márquez Duarte, University of California, Riverside
One of the most pressing issues currently in our society is the devastating precariousness that thousands of million people suffer around the world. The current idea of how the socioeconomic system is conceived and how development is conceived hasn't solved the problems of inequality, poverty, environment destruction, violence, low levels of health, education, of social and political participation. Furthermore, the current conception of development and how it should be have increased the mentioned problems, perpetuating an oppressive system that further increases precariousness in thousands of millions of lives, especially in the developing world. In order to address this pressing situation, it is necessary to recalibrate, to rethink development. Thus, the objective of this essay is to analyze past and current conceptions of development to reach an alternative conception; a proposal for rethinking development.
The debate of what is development and how to achieve it has been present in the last few decades, currently the international measure of development that is more accepted is the human development index. I consider that this measure and other attempts to rethink development aren’t adequate to different societies and different realities and have been imposed from “developed” to “developing” countries. In this essay I will discuss the most relevant conceptions of development that have been used or proposed and analyze them to propose an alternative way of thinking development, using the ideas of nahuas cosmovision, reaching a more inclusive conception of development that is more adequate to oppressed and non-western realities.
