Entre bien común y buen vivir. Afinidades a distancia

The current work seeks to identify affinities and dissonance between buen vivir (good living) –to which legal and political priority was given in recent constitutional reforms in Ecuador and Bolivia– and common good, which in a parallel manner is flourishing in public debate in Italy and in Europe in general, given several concrete experiences in defending and re-appropriating resources identified as “commons.” Such a comparative perspective has brought about two possible interpretations of the relationship between the concepts in question: We can consider the common good as a general concept from which buen vivir would be a local specificity or we can consider it as a constitutive element of the paradigm of buen vivir.