TRANSITION-FRICTION · Transition Friction in the Ecuadorian Amazon: A Green Economy Ethnography
Horizon 2020 — Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions
- Duration
- 2017-09-01 → 2019-08-31
- EU contribution
- €195,455
- Participants
- 1
- Scheme
- MSCA-IF-EF-CAR
Lines connect the coordinator with its partners.
Results in brief
Transition Friction in the Ecuadorian Amazon: A Green Economy Ethnography
This project investigates the lived reality of the social and environmental changes which are being brought about by the pursuit of ‘sustainability’ and the building of a ‘green economy’. Policy imperatives and funding priorities increasingly generate initiatives for economic transitions to ‘green’ production and consumption patterns, at different scales, and all over the world. Because there are many (sometimes contradictory) visions of ‘sustainability’ underpinning these kinds of initiatives and because they produce a whole variety of (not always desirable) social and ecological effects, they urgently need to be analysed with a focus on questions of social justice. This project aims to do just that by focusing in particular on a case study in the Ecuadorian Amazon, where a recently founded university is meant to catalyze economic change and contribute to the country’s transition to sustainability. By using ethnographic research methods, the project is able to collect rich qualitative data on the complexities of people’s experience of the changes underway and the intricacies of the ways in which the university development affects their lives and changes or reproduces social inequalities. This data will highlight important challenges of sustainability transitions in one of the world’s economically most disadvantaged, biologically most diverse regions with a large and varied indigenous population. The conclusions are being shared with stakeholders in Ecuador, contributing to continuing discussions on which development pathways lead to what kind of sustainability, and how to open these up in socially just ways. Aiming to compare the findings with other case studies, the project carries relevance well beyond the particular situation in the Ecuadorian Amazon, and will contribute to internationally important debates on how to create a just and sustainable world.
Data: CORDIS, © European Union
Project objective
The dominant framing of humanity’s current predicament emphasizes ‘planetary limits’ and impending environmental collapse, with ‘green economy’ strategies as a necessary response. Initiatives for transitions to ‘green’ production and consumption patterns are emerging and multiplying, at different scales and all over the world. The visions of ‘sustainability’ underpinning these initiatives are diverse, and their heterogeneous socio-ecological effects raise urgent questions of justice. With a focus on the power dynamics and inequalities of green transition initiatives, TRANSITION-FRICTION will cross-fertilise three literatures – political ecology, transition studies and ethnographies of global connections.Using ethnographic methods and discourse analysis, the project will study a novel university in the Amazon rainforest in Ecuador, explicitly conceived as a catalyst for the country’s transition away from extraction and export of oil and other sub-soil resources, towards a ‘green and sustainable economy’. With its 93,000 hectare ‘living laboratory’, Ikiam University is a site of ‘friction’: between the forest and the urban, between indigenous and industrial science, between conservation and extractivism, between commons and the market. Such friction is not only conflictual, it is also ‘interconnection across difference’, productive of new relations and interactions. In analysing these new socio-ecological relations and interactions in one of the world’s poorest, most biodiverse regions, the project will develop an original conceptual framework and methodological approach for the analysis of green economy transition initiatives and their uneven effects in the Amazon and elsewhere.
Original text from CORDIS.
Participants
- THE UNIVERSITY OF MANCHESTER · ManchesterCoordinatorUnited Kingdom
Links
Data: CORDIS, © European Union