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Introduction
The future of the Peoples of the world is uncertain. The future of their happiness and the sustainability of their livelihoods are conditioned by turbulences created by changes in the relations of production and power, livelihoods and culture, dominant in industrialism. Among paradigmatic ruptures and emergencies, typical of an epochal change (Foster 2013 and Silva 2018), humanity witnesses the decline of the development paradigm conceived in the North (Sachs 1996) and the dawn of the Living Well paradigm that emerges in the South (Acosta 2015), a challenge to the mandate of innovation institutions. Innovation institutions are at a historic crossroads. Given the civilization crisis conditioning the collapse of development, either those institutions continue reproducing "innovation for development", to the detriment of human and non-human life, or they build modes of innovation committed to the Living Well of the Peoples, an emerging paradigm alternative to the development paradigm. For institutions aspiring to contribute to the construction of rural Good Living - happy rural communities with sustainable livelihoods - we contribute with: (a) a conceptual framework on the vulnerability-sustainability of rural livelihoods in Latin America, (b) decolonizing questions of the thinking that reproduces the development paradigm; (c) emancipatory premises to inspire women and men willing to build rural Good Living in Latin America; and (d) a methodological path for the collective construction of Community Life Projects incorporating seeds of Good Living. The conclusion is an ethical invitation to build the 'day after development'.
The vulnerability - sustainability of rural livelihoods
Why would a rural community need to revise its livelihood? The modern livelihood, imposed by the modus operandi of the capitalist industrial society, ordered the world for progress, since the nineteenth century, and reordered it for development, after the Second World War (Silva 2017). In the name of progress, during colonization, and in the name of development, during globalization, this hegemonic livelihood promised prosperity, happiness and peace for all Peoples who adopted western scientific, technological, social, cultural, political, economic, institutional, innovations (Goldsmith 1996). This livelihood conditioned the nature and dynamics of the livelihoods peoples from different geographies, religions and ideologies. Without fulfilling the promises of Western civilization, the capitalist livelihood -patriarchal, racial, genocidal, ethnocidal, epistemicidal, ecocidal- of "developed societies" is not capable of ensuring the sustainability of life on Earth (Ornelas 2017). That is why we are all vulnerable from the citizen to the Planet and threatened with extinction.
Everything is in crisis (Silva 2018). The western civilization and its capitalist industrial society, modern institutions, classical scientific paradigm, intellectual frameworks derived from the idea of progress/ development, premises (truths) that still reproduce the western development paradigm. But if everything is in crisis, how can we think of a way to overcome a crisis if the dominant way of thinking is also in crisis? How to think about life from life (Guevara Aristizábal and Eschenhagen 2017), and not from progress/ development? The decolonization of the hegemonic thinking is critical for our participation in processes of decolonization of history, economy, education, agriculture, cooperation, in short, of the mode of "innovation for development" that does neither build happy societies/communities nor sustainable livelihoods, not even in the countryside. At the moment of initiating the decolonization of the thinking subordinated to the knowledge authorized by the "developed" of the North, we need to perceive that in Latin America it emerges one of the last hopes of humanity, the Sumak Kawsay or the Living Well paradigm.
With this paradigm, the region is illuminated by another horizon of utopian meaning to inspire the construction of happy communities with sustainable livelihoods (Silva 2018). The crisis of development and the emergence of Living Well are sources of criteria for reinterpreting the past, evaluating the present and exploring the future of a rural livelihood. A rural livelihood is a philosophy of collective life, a communitarian way of being and feeling, thinking and acting, producing and consuming, communicating and relating with each other and with nature, which conditions the mode of innovation - mode of interpretation + mode of intervention of families constituting a rural community (Silva 2017). This community shares a worldview, that is, a set of cultural/historical premises truths that explain to these families what reality is and how it works at the community and society levels. Thus, to transform the reality of a territory it is critical to transform the current perception the communities of the territory hold about that reality, which in Latin America is marked by family farming. Given the interdependence between all living beings, the sustainability of human and nonhuman life in a territory is an emergent property of the solidarity interaction between all forms of life in that territory.
Family farming prevails in the Latin American rural landscape. Therefore, the vulnerability-sustainability of rural livelihoods is associated with the vulnerability-sustainability of the family farming constitutive of those livelihoods, whose vulnerability-sustainability is associated with the vulnerability-sustainability of the local agrobiodiversity that sustains this agriculture. If today agriculture is ordered for development, then rural livelihoods are also under the combined impacts of the same global/local changes in the relations of production and power, livelihoods and culture, which already affect the transformation of global agriculture and national and local agro-food systems (Amin 2013). Therefore, for Latin-American rural communities, nothing is wiser than examining the past, present and future of the state of vulnerability- sustainability of their collective livelihoods. In this effort, in a transversal way, families need to discuss the degree of unhappiness-happiness of the community and the degree of vulnerability-sustainability of their collective livelihood, historically in the past, critically in the present and prospectively in the future, to gain awareness about the factors that contribute most to their collective happiness and to the sustainability of their community livelihood.
The problematization of development: Decolonizing questions
To understand the world we have to problematize it. This is how Paulo Freire thought, when he conceived the Pedagogy of the Question, and also Jean-Claude Michéa, when he reflected on the Ignorance School, both to help us to understand the order of the global/local world that we live in and at what moment the revolt against that order becomes an ethical necessity. In the current civilization crisis (Ornelas 2013), to problematize the world is to problematize development: to problematize capitalism hidden in the idea of progress, during the imperial colonialism, in the era of colonization, and in the idea of development, in the actual imperialism without colonies, in the ongoing era of globalization.
Thus, the decolonization process of the hegemonic thinking, which holds us hostage to premises conditioning the capitalist nature of the mode of "innovation for development", in force in the neoliberal globalization, begins with the problematization of the western paradigm of development (Silva 2018): (1) Who (political subjects) conceived the premises-truths-that legitimize the universal goal, "be civilized" (during colonization), "be developed" (during globalization), and reproduce the mode of innovation of the -North-centric- paradigm of progress / development promoted as the only valid way to reach this goal?; (2) From what geographic location did these political subjects enunciated their truths? (3) At what historical moment did that happen? (4) With what political intention did those political subjects create those truths? (5) What institutional processes transferred/imposed these truths to/on us in the global South? and (6) What global/regional/national/local institutions still reproduce these truths among us today?
The answers to these questions, built by those interested in emancipating themselves from the thinking subordinated to the western paradigm of development, create criteria for one to decide to divorce themselves from false or irrelevant premises conceived far from their reality, without their participation and without commitment to their future. These criteria also serve to inspire the construction of premises committed to the happiness of a rural community and to the sustainability of their collective livelihoods. Other decolonizing questions are: (a) Why, after centuries of the idea of progress and decades of the idea of development, is humanity more unequal and the Planet more vulnerable?; (b) Why, after centuries being "civilized" by European empires and decades being "developed" by the United States, is Latin America today the most unequal region in the world in terms of land and income distribution ?; (c) Why the United States, the "developed" country to be emulated, with just 5 % of the world's population: (i) cultivate an unsustainable livelihood, by consuming 40 % of the total natural resources consumed in the world; (ii) it does not create prosperity for everyone even in its own territory, since it is the most unequal country among its "developed" peers;(iii) it is unable to make happy its society, which is the world champion of drug consumption, for it does not find meaning for its existence as a consumer society; and (iv) it does not contribute to world peace, since 65 % of its economy depends more on war than on peace? Those who investigate these questions construct answers that converge towards the conclusion that progress = development = capitalism (Silva 2018). The emerging capitalism was so unjust, so unfair to the majority in any society, that it could not be presented by its proper name; there was the risk of being rejected. What government/leader would accept to establish locally a system whose only objective is the infinite creation of material wealth through unlimited economic growth under the criterion of maximum shortterm profit and at any cost? Which government/leader would accept to make locally viable the modus operandi of a system in which accumulation always occurs with concentration, by dispossession and without distribution? What government/leader would accept a system whose insatiable hunger locally devours captive markets, abundant raw material, cheap labor, obedient minds and disciplined bodies, while unscrupulously violates the human, the social, the cultural, the ecological, the spiritual, the ethical?
To hide the abominable monster, Western empires invented the "idea of progress", with its seductive promises of prosperity, happiness and peace for all Peoples, to make viable the uncontrollable expansion of emerging capitalism (Silva 2018).
That was the idea that galvanized the minds and conquered the hearts of governments and leaders from all geographies, ideologies and religions. After the Second World War, the United States replaced the idea of progress, worn out by the participation of modern science and technology in abominable events, such as the Holocaust and the Atomic Bomb dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, by the "idea of development", recycling in the neoliberal globalization the promises made in the name of progress, maintaining the modus operandi of the superior-inferior dichotomy created from the notion of race. Assuming that there are superior and inferior races, with the white race on the top of the list (Dussel 1994), western empires established the "right of the strongest", which is the right to domination, while the weaker has the obligation of obedience. From that dichotomy, those empires made the social classification of humanity (Quijano 2000), civilized primitive in colonization, and developedunderdeveloped in globalization, that is, capitalistsnot capitalists.
From Rural development to rural Living Well: Emancipatory Premises
False premises inspire false promises and inadequate solutions. At present, urban and rural communities are hostages to cultural premises-truths-derived from the idea of development, which are expressed through alternative models of development, as if the solution for “underdevelopment problems” (hunger, poverty) were "more development", that is, more capitalism. However, if development = capitalism, development has no solution for problems derived from the inequalities created by the contradictions of its modus operandi. Therefore, the development paradigm is the dominant source of inspiration for the conception of development alternatives. However, Latin America is pregnant with Living Well paradigm, the emerging source of inspiration for the conception of alternatives to development, non-capitalist alternatives.
Some premises, of a contextual-interactive-ethical nature, holding the potential to emancipate innovation institutions and rural communities, from the seductive alternatives of development, including rural development, freeing them for the construction of rural Living Well (Silva 2018), are : (1) nothing is neither previous nor superior to life, which is the origin, center and end of all human thinking and acting; (2) ; capitalism is incom-patible with Living Well, because it threatens life with extinction on Earth; (3) the sustainability of life in a rural territory implies cultivating relationships, meaning and practices that generate life, sustain life and give meaning to human and non-human existence in that territory. Given the interdependence between all living beings, the sustainability of life is an emergent property of the solidary interaction between all forms of life and all livelihoods, amongst human and nonhuman beings; (4) it is not true that 'the relevant' always exists in certain languages, it is always created by certain subjects and it always comes to us from certain places, which never coincide with our languages, subjects and places; (5) it is wiser to learn by inventing from local experiences than to perish by imitating from global models; (6) there is neither a superior livelihood, development, that a community should aspire and achieve it, nor an inferior livelihood, underdevelopment, that a community must reject and overcome, because we all were, are and will always be different; (7) the end to a community is not "to be developed", but to be happy cultivating a sustainable livelihood; (8) community happiness also includes the autonomy of the community to influence aspects of the future that interest the families that make it up; (9) significant knowledge is interactively generated (experience exchange) and socially appropriate (knowledge dialogue) in the context of its application (practical dimension) and implications (ethical dimension); (10) relevant innovation emerges from processes of social interaction (experience exchange) with participation (knowledge dialogue) of those who need it (practical dimension) and will be impacted (ethical dimension) by it; (11) the vulnerabilitysustainability of rural livelihoods in Latin America is strongly associated with the vulnerability-sustainability of family farming constitutive of those livelihoods, and the vulnerabilitysustainability of family farming in the region is strongly associated to the vulnerability-sustainability of the agrobiodiversity locally adapted to sustain local family farming; and (12) in the rural Living Well paradigm, food sovereignty emerges from the paradigmatic transition, from a conventional family farming to an agroecological family farming.
Pedagogy of the question. Building Community Life Projects
What frees us is the question, not the answer. With his Pedagogy of the Question, Paulo Freire demonstrated that the Pedagogy of the Answer makes us prisoners of truths (answers) built by foreign actors to answer their own questions, conceived far from our contexts and without commitment to our happiness nor to the sustainability of our livelihoods. Thus, we cannot transform a reality with existing answers, but with new questions. Already existing answers about a reality are constitutive of the same reality we want to understand in order to transform it. The transformation of the future of Latin American rural communities requires them to imagine new questions and to construct new answers about the past, present and future of their collective reality.
A methodological social experiment, carried out under the leadership of rural communities from the Brazilian Semiarid Region, validated a methodological path to the collective construction of Community Life Projects pregnant with seeds of rural Living Well (Silva 2017). Between 2015 and 2017, the Agroecology Team of an agricultural research center, belonging to the Brazilian Public Agricultural Research Corporation (Embrapa), in Campina Grande, Paraíba State, Northeast of Brazil, inspired by a Master Thesis (Pazmino and Quintana 2016) performed a social experiment to develop and validate a methodological path to the social construction of Living Well in rural communities. Under the guidance of Facilitators of the process, trained by Embrapa’s Agroecology Team, the communities developed a contextual, interactive and ethical methodology that in May, 2017 was validated by them, together for the first time in a workshop. Representatives of each community shared their particular experience and, together, they consolidated their convergent experiences into a general/flexible methodological pathway for the benefit of other rural communities interested in exercising their autonomy to build their own Community Life Projects pregnant with seeds of rural Living Well.
The Pedagogy of the Question (Freire and Faúndez 1985) was the inspiration source for the methodological framework of the social experiment, followed by the scientists of the Agroecology Team and by the Facilitators (from the community and partner institutions) of the process. Divided into twelve methodological moments, the process invites the families of a rural community to answer certain questions, collectively, so that they are committed to the answers they participated in their construction. These moments organize a historicalprospective evaluation of the communitarian happiness and of the sustainability of the collective livelihood of a rural community. A synthesis of the process is written in the form of a Community Life Project, which functions as a navigation chart-source of inspiration, orientation, (re) planning, monitoring, evaluation of the community, and as a source of negotiation to obtain different types of support from different partner institutions. The nature and dynamics of each of these moments are conditioned by guiding questions (Silva 2018) that the Facilitators culturally adapt, if necessary, for a better understanding by each community, which gather to build its answers at its own pace, usually some hours each weekend:
Moment-1 - The need for a Community Life Project: What are the social and political histories of the community? Do you consider yourself a happy community? Why? Why do you consider yourself a community and how does that community live collectively? What current aspects of the community dynamics are vulnerable and could compromise the sustainability of its collective livelihood in the future? How will the community be in ten or twenty years ahead if it does not build a Community Life Project to allow it to reorient its current collective actions and inspire other collective actions, all aiming at building the community happiness and the future sustainability of its collective livelihood? Once these questions have been answered, the community decides whether or not it wants to build its own Community Life Project.
Moment-2 - Historical representation of the community past: When and how was the community born? What was the situation of production, agrobiodiversity, food, health, education, transportation (human mobility), water, infrastructure, services, culture / sport / entertainment, in the first decades of its existence, and what public policies existed to strengthen rural communities?
Moment-3 - Critical representation of the community present: How is the community politically organized? What is the state of vulnerability-sustainability of production, agrobiodiversity, food, health, education, transportation (human mobility), water, infrastructure, services, culture, sports, entertainment, and what public policies exist to strengthen rural communities?
Moment-4 - Prospective representation of the community future in 2030: What should be the community political organization in 2030? What should be the sustainable situation of production, agrobiodiversity, food, health, education, transportation (human mobility), water, infrastructure, services, culture, sports, entertainment, and what public policies should exist to strengthen rural communities?
Moment-5 - Transformative historical processes of community reality: What processes (example: deforestation, livestock expansion) occurred, from which resulted the negative transformations, of the community reality? What groups of actors drove forward these processes and what groups resisted to them, and why?
Moment-6 - Transformative processes and principles of the community future: What processes must occur to make viable the desired future situation for political organization, production, agrobiodiversity, food, health, education, transportation (human mobility), water, infrastructure, services, culture, sports, entertainment of the community, and to make viable community strengthening public policies? Which principles should prevail (examples: solidarity, reciprocity, complementarity, care for the other) in the construction of the community future, and why?
Moment-7 - Potentialities to make viable the Community Life Project: What potentialities (human, natural, historical/cultural, social, economic) does the community already have to construct certain aspects (which ones?) of its Community Life Project? What potentialities does the community not have, but will need, to construct certain aspects (which ones?) of its Community Life Project?
Moment-8 - Difficulties to make viable the Community Life Project: Which are the local problems/ obstacles that can prevent the community from constructing certain aspects (which) of its Community Life Project?
Moment-9 - Institutional matrix implicated in the Community Life Project: What national/provincial/ municipal institutions hold an institutional mandate favorable to support the implementation of the Community Life Project?
Moment-10 - Division of responsibilities in the community: Who assumes the leadership to implement each action to make viable the future of the political organization, production, agrobiodiversity, food, health, education, transport (human mobility), water, infrastructure, services, culture, sports, entertainment of the community, and the existence of public policies for strengthening rural communities?
Moment-11 - Strategies to implement the Community Life Project: Indicate and develop specific strategies for the implementation of each proposed action to make viable certain aspects of the Community Life Project, under the leadership of community members selected at the previous moment.
Moment-12 - Implementation of the Community Life Project. The process of implement-ing the short, medium and long-term actions begins to make viable all aspects of the Community Life Project. This process is flexible and the community can and should evaluate its advances annually and reorient its strategies.
Where do we come from as a community/people, society? Who are we as a community/people/ society? Where are we going as a community/people/society? When uncertainty about collective future is very high, these millenary questions continue to be relevant for communities/peoples/societies. For example, if we reinterpret our past we will discover that we never were, we are not and we will never be "superior-inferior", because that dichotomy is a political, ideological, epistemological creation, for the domination of some peoples by others to exploit them. We may then discover that we have been, are and will always be simply different, finally concluding that we are free to dream about a future different from then one imposed by neoliberal globalization, free to dream about being happy and cultivating sustainable livelihoods.
Conclusion
What is more important than life? Nothing. However, the world was ordered for progress, during colonization, and reordered for development, during globalization. Since 1492, with the invasion/ occupation of Abya Yala, with the intention of domination for exploitation, ancient and modern empires of the North have imposed, on Peoples of the Global South, values, ideas, concepts, theories, paradigms, models, all of a North-centric nature, that we must adopt without questioning them, because supposedly all that will "help" us to become civilized/developed like those empires. But, after five centuries of progress and six decades of development, humanity is becoming even more unequal, the Planet is becoming even more vulnerable, and Latin America is the most unequal region in the world. Enough! No more capitalism disguised as development!
The time has come to write an epitaph to the "idea of development", which is noting more than a disguise for capitalism that threatens of extinction life on Earth. Let us review our livelihoods, urban and rural, from a historical and prospective perspective. In the effort, we will diagnose that these livelihoods have been ordered to serve capital. It will be critical to decolonize the dominant thinking in the cities and in the countryside, because this thinking has been ordered to reproduce "progress/development". With the current civilization crisis, modern myths -progress, development- fall at the same time as hope is reborn in the form of the Sumak Kawsay paradigm, that is, Latin America is pregnant with another utopia: the Buen Vivir (Living Well). We need to reorient our thinking and actions for life. In practice, we need to build the 'day after development' (Silva 2011, 2018), rejecting its indicators and the semantic matrix that nurtures the conception of development alternatives, that is, capitalist alternatives. We need to decolonize development in order to reenchant life: to dialogue with life from life (Guevara et al. 2017), learning from life, in life, with life and for life.
After the Second World War, starting with the Alliance for Progress, institutionalized by President JFK in 1961, Latin American rural communities have been victims of “community development projects” (Ammann 1982), conceived by professionals of the agrarian sciences, “useful innocents” specialized in how to develop the underdeveloped ones from the rural world. Without autonomy to influence aspects of the future that interests them, these communities seemed to have no other choice but accepting the uni-versal goal defined for them: "to be developed". However, from the womb of the Andean Region is emerging to the whole world an utopia radically different from those that nurture the modern myths of progress and development. This emerging utopia privileges the happiness of all Peoples and the sustainability of their livelihoods: the Buen Vivir. For the countryside, the possibility of the rural Living Well is born. That utopia holds the potential to emancipate rural communities to become political subjects, co-constructors of their own future.
We have shared 'smoke signals' displayed in a solidary manner by rural communities from the Brazilian Semiarid Region which, exercising their newly conquered collective autonomy, validated a methodological path for the collective construction of Communi-ty Life Projects. If that cry of freedom does not find an echo in other rural communities in Latin America, the future of many rural communities will continue being conditioned by a handful of transnational corporations that control global agribusiness in a way that is hostile to the happiness of rural communities and undermines the sustainability of their collective livelihoods. Until when? At what cost?
