Levels of Legal Pluralism in Abya Yala. Decolonizing Constitutional Narratives in the New Latin American Constitutionalism

Contemporary legal systems are faced with the challenges brought about by increasing cultural, ethnic, and religious diversity. These entail an urgent need to establish mechanisms for the inclusion and protection of diversity. In this context, legal anthropologists have developed the concept of legal pluralism to represent this coexistence of rules, sanctions and justice bodies, operating in the same public sphere. Starting from this theoretical framework, this project aims to explore the role of legal pluralism as a potential lingua franca for countries in the Global South, and as a powerfully decolonizing constitutional narrative.In this sense Abya Yala, Latin America in its ancestral name in the Kuna language, has garnered growing interest as a living laboratory for legal pluralism and Intercultural Constitutional Engineering. These innovations stem from the need to depart from the Western legal tradition and seek a more efficient response to the demands of indigenous peoples, made more urgent by the climate crisis, and introducing pioneering innovative measures that align with ecological ethnicity. Such measures are aimed at supplanting the legal frameworks of colonial heritage, safeguarding the traditional modus vivendi of indigenous communities, and offering a counterbalance to the pervasive effects of neoliberal globalization.
However, it is precisely in relation to the necessary responses to the identity demands of indigenous peoples that these constitutional systems fall into a legal and political short-circuit: these demands find acceptance at the constitutional level, but their concrete implementation has encountered considerable difficulties, undermining the circulation of a transformative Andean constitutional model, as exemplified by the failure of the Chilean constitutional revision project.
Two examples of this are Bolivia and Colombia, whose constitutional systems have embraced two different forms of formal egalitarian legal pluralism, making these countries two particularly interesting case studies.

An unbiased exploration of these paradoxes is essential for a comprehensive understanding of how legal pluralism can be successfully integrated within the constitutional frameworks of the Global South in general, and of Latin America in particular. It is, indeed, urgent to investigate the possibility of defining an institutional framework capable of providing concrete guarantees of sustainability, decolonisation of constitutional discourse and implementation of egalitarian legal pluralism in response to the demands of indigenous peoples.
To this end, this project intends to adopt a problematic and comparative perspective, analysing three different levels of legal pluralism related to the decolonial, identity and sustainability demands of indigenous peoples in the constitutional systems of Bolivia and Colombia: political pluralism, legal pluralism, eco-ethical pluralism. The objective of the Project is:
-to assess the efficiency of the constitutional mechanisms used to translate the described levels of pluralism;
-to identify constitutional measures that can replace the legal system of colonial origin with a constitutional grammar that guarantees the values of Andean culture, the identity of indigenous peoples and the corresponding cosmovision of the relationship between human beings and nature;
-to elaborate an alternative model of sustainable development and diversity governance.