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Neither poststructural nor neoliberal interpretations of development capture the full extent and complexity of rural transformations in the Andes. Poststructural critiques tend to view development as a process of cultural destruction and homogenization, while neoliberal interpretations identify a different development ‘failure’ that inheres in ‘inefficient’ patterns of resource use, and the ‘nonviability’ of large parts of the Andean peasantry. In each case, the state is seen as a problem: as an agent of dominating modernization, or as a brake on market‐led transformation. The paper reviews these positions in the light of the transformations in governance, livelihoods, and landscape that have occurred in the regions of Colta, Guamote, and Otavalo, all centers of indigenous Quichua populations in the Ecuadorian Andes. These transformations question the accuracy of arguments about cultural destruction or nonviability. Instead …