This essay tries to shed light on six open debates about sumak kawsay, its meaning, translation, origin, cultural referent, relation with development, and destination. Such debates are analyzed from the premise that the authors who participate in them do so from different cultural paradigms (Andean worldview, modernism, or post-modernism) and from different schools of thought (socialist and statist, indigenist and pachamamista, or ecologist and post-developmentalist).
