Access to schooling and higher education are considered as primary means to empower marginalized groups and enhance sustainable development in the Global South. In Ecuador the intercultural bilingual education programme that affirmed the fundamental importance of integrating diverse local languages knowledges and pedagogical practices in education was established already in and later amended based on the community-centric ecologically-balanced and culturally-sensitive philosophy of sumakkawsay (buenvivir). However the programme is still only partially applied and thus education typically follows homogenized standards and fails to include specific cultural realities.

The aim of my research is to understand what is it exactly that defines how corporate legitimacy is created. The research engages in the following research questions: What is the role of stakeholder dialogue in the creation of corporate legitimacy? How is legitimacy upheld in the public sphere through media representations? And how can companies and locals, learn to work side-by-side before costly and damaging conflicts emerge? Legitimacy is looked at from three different perspectives: first, the organizational legitimacy or "the generalized perception or assumption that the actions are desirable within a socially constructed system of norms, values, beliefs, and definitions" (Suchman 1995:574); second, the democratic legitimacy ("consent of the governed") in terms of stakeholders giving their consent to the corporations to be present in their communities; and third, legitimacy as the outcome of a place-bound social imaginary (Taylor, 2002) and the capacity of an organization to sustain and maintain the reproduction of life (Dussel, 2013) within that particular imaginary and place.