TRANSITION-FRICTION | Transition Friction in the Ecuadorian Amazon: A Green Economy Ethnography

Summary
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.
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More information & hyperlinks
Web resources: https://cordis.europa.eu/project/id/707017
Start date: 01-09-2017
End date: 31-08-2019
Total budget - Public funding: 195 454,80 Euro - 195 454,00 Euro
Cordis data

Original description

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.

Status

CLOSED

Call topic

MSCA-IF-2015-EF

Update Date

28-04-2024
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Horizon 2020
H2020-EU.1. EXCELLENT SCIENCE
H2020-EU.1.3. EXCELLENT SCIENCE - Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA)
H2020-EU.1.3.2. Nurturing excellence by means of cross-border and cross-sector mobility
H2020-MSCA-IF-2015
MSCA-IF-2015-EF Marie Skłodowska-Curie Individual Fellowships (IF-EF)