Ethnodevelopment: Social Movements, Creating Experts and Professionalising Indigenous Knowledge in Ecuador

Abstract

Indigenous social movements have become important development actors in recent years. As the targets of “socially inclusive” neoliberal policies and protagonists in global anti-capitalist movements, the position of these social movements in mainstream development is often ambivalent. This ambivalence reflects contradictions between economic neoliberalism and goals of social development as well as different understandings and practices in development-with-identity. We explore the relationship between the institutionalisation of ethnodevelopment and the creation of indigenous experts through indigenous social movements’ engagement in popular training that emphasises indigenous knowledge. Drawing on Michael Watt's notion of governable spaces of indigeneity, we examine how institutionalisation is occurring in a range of ways that establish new alliances and cut across scales. Analysing the politics occurring at the development policy interface, we focus on the processes of representation, negotiation and embodiment involved in indigenous professionalisation, as activism shapes “scaled up” policy making.