Decolonising Neo-Liberal Innovation: Using the Andean Philosophy of ‘Buen Vivir’ to Reimagine Innovation Hubs

Abstract

Innovation is increasingly portrayed as central to social and economic development. Models of innovation from the global North are often applied uncritically in the global South. Doing so may unwittingly silence indigenous knowledge, ways of knowing, and cultural values. Santos (2014) has argued that this form of epistemic violence is committed when actors from the global North are insufficiently mindful of 'Epistemologies of the South'. Neither Santos nor the authors of this paper believe that there is nothing of value to be learned from the global North -only that there is as much to be learned from the global South -and everything to be gained from a skillful combination of different ways of knowing. This theoretical paper proposes a future line of research to examine in what ways Epistemologies of the South might inform innovation processes to produce different outcomes. We use the example of innovation hubs and although we might have used the philosophies of Ubuntu from Southern Africa or Swaraj from India, in this paper we use the lens of Buen Vivir (living well) from Andean and Amazonian communities in South America to suggest that another innovation is possible.

Digital identity as a platform for improving refugee management

“…With an increasing presence of digital identity platforms among leading humanitarian organisations, there is the need to mitigate against the tendency for 'colonisation' by institutional categories. For digital platforms to generate value in line with development and humanitarian goals and to respond to the needs and realities of people in diverse contexts, socio-technical systems should be developed in partnership with and reflect the insight, innovation and epistemologies of both Global South and North (Jimenez & Roberts, 2019).…”

Should we still be doing ICT4D research?

“…Now, ICT4D has itself historically suffered from a paucity of theories from the South. Recent works that take an explicit decolonial stance, such as Jimenez and Roberts (2019), Mawere and van Stam (2019) and van Stam (2019), make the point clearly: failing to learn from context‐specific theories causes a lack of learning in the field, and may fail people in indigenous settings as Western theories do not necessarily apply to them. In failing them, Western bias (arguably inherited from the field of IS) fails the originally stated purpose of the field, if interpreted with Walsham (2001) in terms of the ethical value of studying ICTs in disadvantaged contexts.…”

Decolonizing Philosophy of Technology: Learning from Bottom-Up and Top-Down Approaches to Decolonial Technical Design

“…Since technology and technical design do have politics (Winner, 1986) being, to a certain extent, shaped by society (i.e., by the ethical-political values and interests of the strongest stakeholders present in the design process) and, conversely, shaping society (Feenberg, 2010(Feenberg, , 2017, they can arguably be colonial or decolonial. One example of the colonial approach to technical development can be found in the innovation movement articulated around initiatives like innovation hubs (Jimenez & Roberts, 2019). More generally, though, whenever technology and design do not challenge the technocratic, disempowering, socially unfair, environmentally nonsustainable, etc.…”

“…Coloniality is a concept created by Anibal Quijano in the late 1980s and early 1990s (Quijano, 1992;Mignolo, 2012, p. 2) that is fundamental to the decolonial reflection he inaugurated, systematized, or actualized. Since then, such reflection was vastly advanced, being also deployed and improved outside Latin America and the peripheral countries (Maldonado-Torres, 2008), and being incorporated into different academic areas, from design and innovation (Ansari, 2019;Cruz, 2021a;Jimenez & Roberts, 2019;Keshavarz, 2020;Mohamed et al, 2020;Schultz et al, 2018) to philosophy (Ansari, 2018;Dussel, 2012;Estermann, 2014;Hui, 2016;Cruz, 2021b, forthcoming).…”