Ecuador y Políticas Sociales: Hacia La Sociedad del Buen Vivir

In Ecuador today, social policies are articulated around the proposal of Good Living, as set forth in the Political Constitution (2008) and in the National Plan for Good Living (2009-2013). enunciated in the Political Constitution (2008) and in the National Plan for Good Living (2009-2013), which implies that such policies should be oriented to the promotion and strengthening of a new proposal for society, conceptualized as the Good Living society. This generates an important tension in terms of the role, status and scope of social policies, since it implies moving from a dominant approach whose focus is on the management of such policies, which lose centrality in the public sphere, being considered as social policies without politics; to a new approach, in which they acquire an ethical and political orientation that proposes ways to transform reality, being considered as social policies with politics, that is, as a mechanism for the transformation of a system of domination that sustains relations of domination. From the perspective of Good Living, social policies are oriented to the search for a common place and the recovery of the public sphere, associated to common spaces for citizens to meet, that is, they are oriented to reduce gaps and promote inclusion and social cohesion, taking the collectivity as the articulating axis. It is proposed to problematize this general development proposal as well as the specific social policies derived from it, from a triple perspective: the governmental proposal, the vision of the indigenous nationalities and the opinion of the general population. For this purpose, a mixed study was carried out with the general population of the city of Quito (n=1014), as well as a documentary analysis of the government proposal and the indigenous proposals, all of which allowed triangulating the visions regarding the social policies in force in the country. Among the main conclusions, the gap between the State's proposals and the concrete policies derived from them stands out, as well as the mismatch between these proposals and the discourses of the indigenous nationalities, which results in the perceptions that the citizenry is building on the social action of the State. the perceptions that the citizenry is building on the social action of the State.