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Paper short abstract

This article examines Kichwa Kañaris women from Ecuador, focusing on how they experience and negotiate hegemonic development discourses. From an intersectional, decolonial view, it highlights their agency, resistance, and proposals for a self-defined and collective definition of development.

Paper long abstract

This article investigates the situation of Kichwa Kañaris women from the Quilloac community (Cañar province, Ecuador) and how they experience, negotiate, and re-signify normative and dominant discourses, particularly the paradigm of “hegemonic development.” The analysis is framed within a critical perspective grounded in an intersectional and decolonial approach, which understands development as a discourse of power from which women—especially racialized women—have been historically and systematically excluded.

Drawing on a conceptual framework informed by critical development studies, decolonial feminism, and intersectionality, the chapter analyzes the dynamics of power, gender, ethnicity, and knowledge that shape how Kañaris women understand, define, dispute, and inhabit “development.” The Quilloac community is presented as a complex and heterogeneous space where multiple elements converge, including transnational migration, the ancestral Andean worldview, and the influences of Western modernity. These overlapping forces produce identities and practices that are often contradictory, yet coexist in everyday life.

Through qualitative ethnographic research, the chapter explores the participation and agency of Kichwa Kañaris women across diverse spheres such as education, community leadership, traditional medicine, commerce, and the family economy. Their practices reveal strategies of negotiation and resistance, as well as the construction of alternatives rooted in their own meanings of development.

Finally, the chapter gathers the visions and proposals articulated by these women, centered on collective well-being, cultural reivindication, equality, and the sustainability of community and life. These perspectives point toward a notion of “self-defined development” that directly challenges the dominant hegemonic model.