Text

theses

ETD doctoral

The concept of deliberate transformation draws attention to actions aimed at addressing the drivers and vulnerabilities of climate change, while supporting equitable pathways towards sustainability. While the need for deliberate transformation is widely accepted, many questions remain about the conditions that foster and enable individual and collective engagement in the process. This study explores how deliberate transformation occurs through the adoption of agroecological practices by small-scale farmers, and the solidarity economies that emerge within Alternative Food Networks (AFNs) in the Bogotá-Region of Colombia (Colombian Andes). Relying on ethnographic methods, the study reveals how deliberate transformation manifests through everyday practices and interactions between farmers and their agroecological huertas (home gardens), as well as in the relationships and interaction spaces that emerge within Alternative Food Networks. The findings suggest that the huerta is “ground zero” for emerging agroecological food initiatives among small farmers in the Colombian Andes: it is the place where new openings, new learning, and new interactions begin for farmers, and it is also fertile ground for memories, re-connection, re-engagement with familial and ancestral cultivation practices. Above all, the huerta allows farmers to see their lives and actions from different perspectives, providing the key ‘spark’ for engagement with transformation. By exploring the origin stories of numerous huertas and of the actors behind them, this study illuminates the motivations, emotions, and practices that are inspiring individual and collective engagement with transformation toward a more dignified co-existence and improved life for Andean farmers. Also, the results of the study show, the potential of AFNs to lead the profound political and social changes that local food systems need.

This study demonstrates that everyday spaces of production, distribution and consumption, can reinvigorate micro-politics, as communities of affinity woven networks. As suggested by Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui (2018), micro-politics is below the radar of politics and works on small collectives and their actions, to allow spaces of freedom (or well-being in the case this study) to flourish. Rivera Cusicanqui talks about the importance of re-politicizing everyday life, whether in the kitchen or in the huerta. The latter, to generate spaces where the norms and values of coexistence, redistribution, and collective and individual action are settled (Rivera Cusicanqui, 2018). While there will always be the question of scale, it is nonetheless important to value the potential of “the small” and the plural, which enable actions and solutions that can collectively have a planetary dimension. As such, this study shows possible expressions of transformation towards sustainability from the daily production of agroecological food in the Bogotá-Region.

ETD_11458

doi:10.7282/t3-vmvc-qs41

Ph.D.

Includes bibliographical references

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