Gustavo Esteva

Gustavo Esteva is an independent writer and grassroots activist. He works both independently and in conjunction with a variety of Mexican and international NGOs, grassroots organizations and communities. He has been a key figure in founding several Mexican, Latin American and international NGOs and networks. He prefers to call such groups “hammocks” rather than networks or coalitions, because they seek to accommodate themselves to the shape of their members’ initiatives rather than imposing requirements for collaboration. In 1989 he settled in a small Indigenous village in Oaxaca, in the south of Mexico. He participates in the activities of the Centro de Encuentros y Diálogos Interculturales and the Universidad de la Tierra en Oaxaca, which he helped design and create. In recent years, his activism has widened and deepened in communities and organizations. In 1996 he was an advisor to the Zapatistas in their negotiations with the government and he is still participating in their initiatives. He is currently involved in the movement associated with the Popular Assembly of the Peoples of Oaxaca. In his early career, Gustavo held senior positions in both private business and government and was destined for a distinguished career within México’s establishment. He decided, however, that solutions to the people’s problems could come only from the people themselves and has since dedicated himself to their service. Though not an economist by training, Gustavo received Mexico’s National Príze for Economics for his contributions to the theory of inflation, and though not a sociologist was President of the 5th World Rural Sociology Congress. He is a well known writer, with thirty books (like Grassroots Postmodernism and Escaping Education, with Madhu Prakash) and more than 500 essays published around the world in several languages. He contributes regular columns to leading Mexican newspapers and seeks to make accessible to a wider audience of intellectuals and opinion leaders the views and perspectives of the poor with whom he is associated. Gustavo is an active voice within the “deprofessionalized” segment of the Southern intellectual community. He rejects both the terminology and constructs of development in all their forms as inherently destructive of the human processes by which the common people work to recreate community as a creative expression of their culture and aspirations. Gustavo argues that even the “alternative” development prescriptions lead inexorably to depriving the people of control over their own lives and shifting this control to bureaucrats, technocrats, and educators. Rather than presume that human progress fits some predetermined mould leading toward the increasing homogenization of cultures and lifestyles, he prefers a ‘radical pluralism’ that honors and nurtures distinctive cultural variety and enables many paths to the realization of self-defined aspirations.

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