Few books are the cumulative result of decades of ethnographic research and at the same time an empirically grounded critique of development policy and practices. Radcliffe's contribution is one of them, and also has the virtue of providing a significant theoretical reflection from the point of view of the paradigms of intersectionality and decolonialism. The book presents a historical analysis of development interventions in Ecuador, where indigenous women have been targeted as objects of policies for some time. The author also looks at how indigenous women constitute themselves as subjects of their own individual and collective trajectories in relation to the state, NGOs and their communities. Radcliffe is an expert on Andean women, gender and ethnicity, and as a social geographer she has built a solid body of work on social exclusion, discrimination, poverty, and agency. This book reads as the cumulative product of different projects carried out over a long time span, as it would be very difficult to carry out what was needed to produce such a rich and self-reflective contribution within one single research study.

The book is structured around different social problems that have emerged in the construction of the Ecuadorian state and in relation to the implementation of transnational development programmes. These problems share the fact that indigenous women have been framed as one of their causes, and/or as a key component of efficient recipes to overcome them. At their heart reside the many facets of racism, sexism, exclusion, and coloniality. The language of progress and development that shapes the policies elaborated by dominant actors confronts those sought by indigenous women themselves: autonomy, dignity, citizenship. The social positionality produced by colonialism reproduces itself but is constantly confronted in the postcolonial politics of social difference.

The methodology of Radcliffe's book uses the insights of a number of indigenous women that she has met over the years and with whom, in many cases, she has become friends. This perspective ‘from the inside’ is accompanied by the critical analytical eye of the author, who provides the context to interpret and select the ideas and stories that were shared with her. As one reads the book, one goes through a kind of historical chronology of the development paradigms that have successively determined the relations between different policy-makers, bureaucrats, women leaders, and common citizens. Social problems such as reproductive health, political participation and interculturalism gave way to specific policy interventions that attempted to reverse centuries of exclusion and poverty, and that inadvertently – in the majority of cases – reproduced the hierarchies involved in knowledge production, decision-making and resource distribution.

Yet Radcliffe's argument also signals the relative improvement in the terms of postcolonial politics, notably in what is thought of as the causes and consequences of social difference. The emergence and empowerment of indigenous movement organisations, and women's role in them, has been a key transformative process that has gradually allowed more space to indigenous women in the public sphere, and granted more ownership of political processes. In that regard, the book is prudently optimistic.

In the last chapter, Radcliffe addresses the challenge brought by the recognition of the ‘more-than-human’ agents – or earth-beings – in the politics of Ecuador. Radcliffe's account of her informants’ worldview is refreshing, as it treats ontological difference from the perspective of another layer of complexity in decolonial politics, one that calls for more intellectual openness on the part of non-indigenous researchers. She shows that even on that terrain, the Ecuadorian state and progressive-minded elites attempted to recuperate indigenous political language through the adoption of an official discourse on ‘Buen Vivir’ (living well). What seems most attuned to the spirit of decolonialisation ends up reproducing the colonial hierarchy of state imposition and the deviation of meanings to foreground the purposes of elite development goals.

Against that, ‘indígenas’ (as Radcliffe calls indigenous women subjects in her book) emphasise the Sumak Kawsay (‘Buen Vivir’ in Kichwa) as their own political vocabulary and project. As the new horizon of radical indigenous struggle, the Sumak Kawsay is always potentially a source of problems for ‘indígenas’, because it must be constructed in a world built in opposition to it. Radcliffe's book closes on the open-ended dialogue that needs to be furthered on the multi-dimensional consequences of this project. This leaves the reader interested in looking for the same qualities that she deploys in showing respect, commitment and perseverance in developing meaningful knowledge about a social group, informed by history and fine theoretical elaboration.