Enacting just and plural ecologies through emancipatory political ecology pedagogies

Abstract

Introduction

Political ecology is still grappling with epistemological and pedagogical issues: How do we do political ecology without a standardized methodology? How do we teach, learn, and research political ecology if it is praxis and a radical pedagogy? And how do we reconcile different approaches to political ecology pedagogy in the Global North and South? (Batterbury & Rodríguez 2023, Jarosz 2004, Sultana 2023). This commentary does not offer answers to all of these debates, but as a pedagogue and political ecologist committed to knowledge decolonization–who learned political ecology by engaging with resistance movements and grassroots organizations, I argue there is much we can learn from the transformational pedagogies practiced by these movements toward enacting the just and plural ecologies we are concerned with.

Learning with and from transformational pedagogies in the South

In my PhD fieldwork, I investigated the ecological distribution conflict caused by the Ecuadorian governmental strategy to fund post extractive futures through deepening resource extraction, and associated expansion of the mining frontier into fragile socio-ecosystems, such as the páramo (wetlands socio-ecosystem) (Rodriguez 2019). For communities resisting the impending transformation of their socio-natural territories driven by such development strategies, there is no question that these issues are ecological and political. They could easily debate with Robbins (2020) and Walker (2005, 2007) and contest apolitical ecologies, but this is not that easy for my masters’ students in Australia, grappling with Harvey’s (1993) argument about the inherent ecological and political nature of such projects. While my students learn political ecology in a classroom, the communities above experience it in their everyday struggles.

Furthermore–something I needed to learn but was natural for the communities I worked with–engagement with knowledge production is an integral part of resistance processes (Pérez 2012). Communities, supported by community and grassroots organizations, tend to incorporate a reciprocal education dimension in their resistance repertoire. On the one hand, community leaders constantly organized workshops with diverse experts and the population to exchange technical and experiential knowledge to contest the common practice of excluding communities from scientific and technical debates. As expressed by Yaku Pérez, community leader and former presidential candidate,

We are willing also to debate and to demonstrate through the occidental or colonial science and technique that not even in that [fields] they are right. We are willing to debate in any field and show them how wrong and perverse is the extractive policy. To claim that [extractivism] is a mere technical matter is a confession of hypocrisy; or are they intending to insult our intelligence? Or disparaging the communities with their colonial understanding that we do not know and that we cannot participate? (Pérez, June 8, 2016, personal communication)

On the other hand, because resistance is not just understood as protest, communities resist by living and sharing knowledge about the alternatives they propose–in this case post extractive alternatives–and the rights of the communities. To accompany this process, Escuela de Agroecologia Kimsakocha (Agroecology School of Kimsakocha) was created with the support of a grassroots organization.[2] I participated in various workshops, and I experienced it as a transformational pedagogy practice (see Figure 1). Participants, mostly women and one young man who saw farming as key to guarantee his future,[3] learned by reflecting on and doing, that food sovereignty, demands of political participation in environmental governance, traditional medicine, agroecological practices, spirituality, recentring and reweaving community ties and more, are all necessary elements of holistic alternatives to extractivism and radical pedagogies in practice (McCune & Sánchez 2019). There is no compartmentalization of ‘the political’, ‘the ecological’, ‘the scientific/technical’, ‘the traditional’, and it becomes irrelevant, when enacting just and plural futures beyond the ‘extractive imperative’ (Arsel et al 2016). I was also pleased to recently learn that diálogo de saberes (dialogue of knowledges) persist among different schools created after the Agroecology school, such is the case of Escuela Comunitaria de Derechos Kimsakocha [4] (Community School of Rights Kimsakocha). It also works on community resistance through alternatives to extractive economies, with a focus on different rights including the right to food and food sovereignty.

Conclusion: Emancipatory political ecology pedagogies engaged with epistemologies of the South

Emancipatory political ecology pedagogies are built through diálogo de saberes with these transformational pedagogies emerging from processes of resistance to the socio-ecological conflicts we work with (McLaren & Houston 2004, Santos 2008, 2016, 2018, Tapia 2016). Diálogo de saberes is founded on intercultural reciprocal exchanges without hierarchies or processes of knowledge appropriation; of course, there is nothing apolitical in these transdisciplinary processes of knowledge production (Rodríguez 2022). If political ecology aims at overcoming its epistemological and pedagogical challenges, and also play a pivotal role in knowledge decolonization, a potential pathway is engaging with these epistemologies of the South (Santos 2008, 2016, 2018, Tapia 2016)

Figure 1 The ‘students’ of Escuela de Agroecologia Kimsakocha proudly showing the group their chakra (Chakra is not only the land of the family-run garden/farm but also an ancestral agricultural system defining which crops, when and where they are planted). Photos taken by the author, March 2016.

Notes

[1]University of Melbourne
[2] The school was initiated by Graciela Calle (†) from Fundación Savia Roja.
[3] And after the COVID-19 pandemic he was proven right. Sadly us, urban dwellers, needed this experience to revalue the role that farmers play in feeding the world.
[4] Supported by the Federation of Indigenous and Peasant Organisations of Azuay (FOA) and the FoodFirst Information and Action Network (FIAN).

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