Social innovation: A decolonial interpretive framework in Colombian rurality

This article weaves together a critique and explanation, from a decolonial interpretive framework, of how and why rural communities in the Colombian countryside have persisted despite the imposition of the colonizing model and the breakdown of traditional forms of peasant agriculture trapped by modern Western rationality, which brought with it the hegemonic discourse of development in the 20th century and innovation as a fundamental element in linking peasant production to the capitalist economic system. This paper arises from the essence of Colombian peasant communities, which despite the imposition of ‘modernization’ based on scientific epistemology and economic growth have resisted and persisted through social movements, self-organizing processes and spaces for the reorientation of development, as well as the political construction of the thinking-feeling of the territories that has triggered social processes of the other innovation, the participatory action to provide solutions to technological, economic and social issues of the communities. Finally, it reflects on the social process of innovation in its decolonial, ontological and territorial character, as a commitment to redefine good living, territorial life projects and local economies.