Int. J. Environmental Policy and Decision Making, Vol. 1, No. 3, 2015 181 Copyright © 2015 Inderscience Enterprises Ltd. Editorial: Buen Vivir: a new toolbox for an alternative to neo-liberal dominance? Salvatore Monni* Department of Economics, Roma Tre University, Rome, Italy Email: salvatore.monni@uniroma3.it *Corresponding author Massimo Pallottino Interdisciplinary Center for Peace Studies, Pisa University, Pisa, Italy Email: massimo.pallottino@cisp.unipi.it Interest in the cosmovisions of the Andean indigenous peoples, which are collectively referred to as buen vivir, has given origin in recent years to a lively debate on their implications in terms of social, political and economic models. These debates have generated arguments in the context of the so-called ‘turn to left’ of Latino American politics and have contributed to building up an understanding of society that is opposed to the neo-liberal mainstream. The cornerstones of this perspective are the processes through which (ethno-linguistic) communities seek their full recognition and where the rights of ‘mother earth’ (pacha mama) can be put at the basis of a renewed approach to natural resources management and exploitation: all this is part of a reconfiguration of political spaces, implying new opportunities for social groups that had long been marginalised. Based on a heated critique of the neo-liberal global order and mainstream development paradigms, buen vivir has thus become a powerful call for social movements in search of alternatives to current mainstream approaches, as well as the basis for processes of constitutionalisation and institutionalisation, namely in countries such as Ecuador and Bolivia, and has been further translated into attempts to create a new ‘plurinational’ state model. Concrete policies have also been inspired by the same principles and have substantiated in a sort of ‘buen vivir-based’ state and development. The space between the cultural roots of the different forms of indigenous cosmovisions (in which many different Andean indigenous peoples can be recognised) deserves to be understood and questioned: how are the ideological foundations of the political programme based on (or recalling) buen vivir actually based on their claimed roots? To what extent can this translation be seen as a sort of ‘betrayal’ of those roots? To what extent have the concrete policies that claim that origin been able to retain their principles (community, rights of ‘mother earth’, harmonic coexistence of all living beings in nature)? The context in which the debate on buen vivir has flourished has been undergoing rapid changes over the last two years. Recent elections in Argentina and Venezuela have