Fertile grounds: Co-creating agroecological knowledge in a pluriverse

As environmental and climate-related catastrophes accelerate, it becomes increasingly difficult—although evidently not impossible—for everyone, from policymakers, corporations, and institutions to the general public, to ignore the need for action. Due to its heavy contributions to greenhouse gas emissions and other forms of environmental degradation, the agrifood system has received a lot of scrutiny (e.g., Burch and Lawrence, 2009; Holt-Giménez and Shattuck, 2011; Frison, 2016; Food and Agriculture Organization [FAO] et al., 2019; Global Commission on Climate Adaptation, 2019; Metelerkamp, 2020; World Bank, 2021; Gliessman et al., 2022; Sustainable Markets Initiative, 2023). Proposals intended to feed the world’s growing population are plentiful, virtually all drawing on some version of “sustainability.” Agroecology is embroiled in these efforts to make a course correction, with frictions between whether agroecology is used principally for its technical elements to reform and update the agrifood system or whether it is mobilized as a multidimensional approach oriented toward a radical paradigm shift (Holt-Giménez and Shattuck, 2011; Holt-Giménez and Altieri, 2013; Levidow et al., 2014; Giraldo and Rosset, 2017; Gonzalez, 2017; Pimbert, 2017; Friends of the Earth International et al., 2020; La Via Campesina, 2021). When conceived of as a transformative paradigm that can address myriad ecological and social crises, agroecology is part of visions to remake the world (La Via Campesina, 2015; Toledo, 2016; Montenegro de Wit, 2021).

As actors working in the civil society space to support community-based organizing for agroecological transformations, we were intrigued by the editors’ call for contributions for this special issue to address an understudied terrain in agroecology, namely, how ways of knowing and being lie at the heart of food systems change. Drawing upon our personal experiences in the context of a collaboration between 2 nonprofit organizations and a community-based network of rural women across Bangladesh, in this article we bring to the foreground epistemic and ontological questions that inhabit our work. Particularly, we are concerned with these questions in relation to efforts to co-create agroecological knowledge among all the actors involved.

This article is not a case study; details of activities are scant. Instead, working from a framing device of short personal narratives of a few of the nonprofit participants, presented in the form of vignettes, we share a variety of sentiments and explore frictions and contradictions in efforts to build alliances and advance agroecological transformations. The vignettes set the stage for some critical reflection and analysis.

We begin with a vignette musing on the life of soil, planting us directly in a field of questions about any capacity to find a common ground for action for food systems change emerging from ways of knowing and being so divergent as to be incommensurable (de la Cadena and Blaser, 2018; de la Cadena, 2020). These questions stay with us as we turn to landscapes of Bangladesh. A vignette that explores an author’s memories of his grandmother’s gardens leads us into a discussion about knowledge grounded in relationships and the implications of this for revisioning local markets as realms of “thick ties.” The narrative also orients us toward the theme of our collaboration to empower rural Bangladeshi women who are seeking to stake a claim for safe and nutritious foods, and healthy and resilient lives.

A short vignette introducing the use of artworks in our collaboration gives way to an account of the not-so-straightforward task to find a way to say “agroecology” in Bangla. Reflecting on this process of translation, we consider the importance of stretching capacities for meaning-making and consider how the linear, often sedimented, narratives of the agrifood regime may be refracted through a medium of dialogic and dialectic engagements (de Schutter, 2014; Iles and Montenegro, 2014). Specifically, we introduce a processual, participatory tool called a Value Web, created to help mobilize both material and immaterial domains of agroecology (Martínez-Torres and Rosset, 2014; Giraldo and Rosset, 2017) as these emerge from locally contingent frames articulated “by a set of collective actors at a particular time” (Anderson et al., 2019, p. 16). The value web activity helps facilitate the expression and use of agroecological knowledge and practice within particular and unique local contexts. As a form of serious play involving the crafting of figured worlds, it presents possibilities for revitalizing lost narratives and practices, creating new ones, and deepening networks for social actions, that all together may lead to more autonomous, heterogenous worlds.

To amplify the polyvocal intent in our commentary as well as visual and poetic aspects of ways of knowing and being in agroecology, artwork created by a member of our larger team is shared throughout the article. These vibrant and rich illustrations have been used widely in our community engagements and the themes and images represented have stimulated many dynamic discussions.

Finally, we situate our efforts in wider debates concerning the nonprofit sector and its capacities to fuel social transformation. This positions us to explore how the subject–object dichotomy gets reproduced in the production of knowledge, maintaining the status quo. Such questions give shape and challenge to constituting new forms of allyship. We propose that when one centers questions of ways of knowing and being at the heart of food systems change, it warrants attending to solidarity “in edgy ways” (Gaztambide-Fernandez, 2012, p. 46). It challenges us to dwell within the discomforting yet electrifying modes of relationality that hinge on radical differences and incommensurable interdependency (Gaztambide-Fernandez, 2012, p. 46). Such alliances depend upon problematizing a one-world world and pursuing a practice that makes way for a world of many worlds, what some call a pluriverse (Kothari et al., 2019).

Among constructs we hope to make apparent in this article is the value of resisting surrender to presumptions of ready-made problems with ready-made solutions, with their implicit homogeneity. Williams (1977) reflected on such human tendencies to project endings onto the always moving substance of past and present and to fix relationships into “formed wholes, rather than forming and formative processes” (pp. 128–129). If agroecology is indeed a Transdisciplinary, Participatory, and Action-Oriented Approach (Méndez et al., 2013), then we argue it unfolds precisely through these forming and formative, peculiarly dialogic processes as manifested in lived relationships.

Co-creation of knowledge has emerged as a central theme and concern in agroecological work and is included as one of the FAO’s 10 Elements of Agroecology which all together constitute a framework to serve diverse stakeholders and to support diverse paths for agriculture and food systems transformation (FAO, 2018; Loconto and Fouilleux, 2019; Barrios et al., 2020; Utter et al., 2021). Like agroecology itself, the concept and approaches of knowledge co-creation are subject to debate. Utter and colleagues (2021, p. 1) summarize it as “a collaborative process involving 2 or more actors, who are intentionally integrating their knowledge and learning, resulting in the development of insights and solutions that would not otherwise be reached independently.” Widely understood as a social process embedded in power dynamics (Wakeford et al., 2016), knowledge co-creation is recognized as drawing from a plurality of existing knowledgeS: scientific, traditional, Indigenous, farmers’, and women’s, to name a few. As Victor Toledo (2016) summarizes, “Agroecologists do not teach farmers or producers how things are done. They engage in an intercultural dialogue that accepts that science is not the only way of looking at, transforming, and emancipating the world” (p. 19).

This vignette about soil, we suggest, evokes something more tensioned and frictional than these characterizations might be accounting for. Though told from the perspective of only one participant in the encounter, the story opens up a territory of dynamic questions when it comes to making and using knowledge in our engagements with rural women and their communities. In addressing ways to navigate such differences and find potential synergies, Tengö and associates (2014, p. 583) articulate a theory of levels of match and mismatch. These levels may range from close agreement to complete dissonance. Take our story of soil: we can suggest that terms of close agreement may be located in a mutual recognition of the importance of fertile soil; where “mismatch” occurs is in the ways fertile soil is known, ontologically speaking. What is at stake here is not simply a question of whether humans may differ in their knowledge about the world and other material and natural objects, which themselves do not vary; rather, the more disorienting question is whether the object we are referencing itself is the same thing. Here, the soil is not simply “alive” in a scientifically discoverable way; rather, the farmer and soil are relating. The soil has spirit and agency. From this narrative we are challenged to ask, how do we encounter and engage difference in a way that does justice to difference? How do we—the authors of this article—co-create knowledge with conceptions of being that do not make sense within our theoretical or institutional schemas? Isabelle Stengers (2018) refers to this as “the challenge of animism” which threatens the “modern command” for enlightened practitioners “to not regress” (p. 232).

Proponents of the ontological turn in the social sciences argue we must allow difference or alterity to challenge our understandings of the very categories of nature and culture themselves. Therefore, rather than positing a concept of a singular world, this approach to methodology suggests we can conceptualize a pluriverse, or “a world where many worlds fit” (Viveiros de Castro, 1998; Gahman, 2017; Anderson and Springer, 2018; de la Cadena and Blaser, 2018; Kothari et al., 2019; de la Cadena, 2020). That soil speaks to the sleeping farmer may thus be argued to be a territory of ontological difference, opposing a rational belief that nature is mute and immutable and that all prospects for significance and change reside in culture (Barad, 2003). To call relational exchange about soil a “belief” is to both mislabel it and call it mistaken, without overtly saying so. Such actions constitute a reinscription of the nature/culture dualism that characterizes a distinctly Western ontology which would posit that sleeping with soil is “only a belief,” culturally situated and subjective—folk theory—and that soil science is rational, universal, and objective. In other words, a Jhum farmer may be recognized as a steward of nature with vital knowledge, yet simultaneously diminished or discounted for not conforming to a modern norm of what constitutes valid information (Heywood, 2017; Ferrari, 2020).

Writing about indigenous food sovereignty and decolonization, Grey and Patel (2015) argue that “it is precisely this refusal to view foods as spiritually inert, or the cultivation of food as a series of impersonal impositions and extractions, that makes the assertion of Indigenous food sovereignty in White Earth decolonizing in process as well as outcome” (p. 440). In a similar vein, Helen Verran (2013) contends that it is in the effort to refuse a “colonising reduction to a shared category” that we may cultivate a “postcolonial impulse” (p. 144). Verran’s work introduces the notion of “epistemic disconcertment” to describe the unease experienced by participants in knowledge exchange—particularly those operating within a Western ontology of a singular nature—when our taken-for-granted account about how knowledge is constituted is somehow impinged upon. In such instances, many will seek to evade this unease, seeking out various balms that effectively “close down possibilities for generative tensions” (p. 144).

If one takes up the challenge inhabiting the soil story, that it is not only “ways of looking at” (epistemologies) but possibly worlds themselves that may differ (ontologies), the challenges of attending to such radical differences and profound incommensurabilities are perhaps, as de la Cadena (2020) suggests, “oxymoronic.” She goes on to say that alliances across such differences may “house hope for a commons constantly emerging from the uncommons as grounds for political negotiation of what the interest in common—and thus the commons—would be” (p. 41). Rather than an expression of shared relations, de la Cadena continues, this commons might be “the expression of a worlding of many worlds.”

All the authors of this article share that at some point in each of our lives, we lived on or were intimately connected to some farm where close connections to growing food and working the land were highly valued. In our very different contexts, we are familiar not only intellectually but also experientially with impacts of industrial, corporatized agriculture and these experiences fuel our work. Some might argue, and we have debated this among ourselves, that attending to questions of ways of knowing and being is a form of conceptual navel gazing when there is a crisis for rural Bangladeshi women and their families of undernutrition and lack of access to safe, healthy foods. In this section and the next, we will explore ways we strive to connect immaterial to material domains of food system change (Anderson et al., 2019).

As the agro-food regime expanded its grip in the 20th century, it helped entrench the modernist division about what constitutes knowledge and what is merely belief, what Stengers (2018) refers to as a division between “those who know” and “those who believe.” It elevated Western science, industry, and an ontological divide between nature and culture, and marginalized and buried the voices, knowledgeS, practices, and cosmovisions of those outside its purview. Fronting elements of relational ties that are so warmly evoked in Shamim’s story of his grandmother’s garden, and in this illustration of women exchanging farm produce, points to ways agroecological knowledge can be understood to be embedded in a relationship to a particular landscape. Specifically, we might ask, in what ways or to what extent can knowledge be detached from the places and people who produce it and can it be exchanged without reference to them? Or is knowledge situated (Haraway, 2016), evoking myriad connections across soil, seed, food—human and non-human actors alike?

So much of this embedded knowledge has been lost or displaced in Bangladesh. Today, 75% of the total land dedicated to agriculture is planted with rice (Bangladesh Rice Knowledge Bank [BRKB]). According to the BRKB (2023), almost all of the 13 million farm families of the country grow rice, with 80% of those farmers cultivating on roughly a quarter hectare of land (Rapsomanikis, 2015; Timsina and Guilpart, n.d.). Thirty-five million people live below the poverty line (Mavis, 2023; Rabbane and Haque, 2023) and the country has one of the highest rates of malnutrition in Asia, with women and children most affected: 23% of children under the age of 5 are underweight as are a third of married or previously married women (International Centre for Diarrhoeal Disease Research, Bangladesh, 2023). Women play an outsized role in feeding Bangladesh, making up more than half of farm workers, with roughly 77% of the country’s 12 million women workers involved in rural agriculture, fisheries, and forestry (Roy, 2022). That being said, statistics are always value-laden (Zyphur and Pierides, 2020). As in many other parts of the world, family members who farm to produce for their own consumption rather than for markets are not entered in official statistics. Subsistence agriculture, often a responsibility borne by women, forms part of the non-cash “household” economy and thus has not been considered as “productive” activity that contributes to the country’s gross domestic product (de Schutter, 2013; Malapit et al., 2017; Rivera and Álvarez, 2017). It is noteworthy that this may be changing in Bangladesh. In April 2023, Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina announced her intention to incorporate women’s unpaid household works into Bangladesh’s GDP (The Daily Star, 2023).

While the Constitution of Bangladesh guarantees equal participation and rights to women in the public sphere, in the private sphere women are not equal to men. Social, cultural, and structural barriers mean that women face marginalization and discrimination, including when it comes to accessing land, credit, and agricultural services and information (Niewolny and D’Adamo-Damery, 2016; Nazneen, 2017; Biswas et al., 2022; Roy, 2022). Official policy calls for increasing ways to bring women into the agrifood system as it exists in order to address nutrition, livelihood development, and other targets that align with the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (Quisumbing and Kumar, 2011; Croppenstedt et al., 2013; Sraboni et al., 2014; Lee et al., 2022; Roy, 2022).

As Shamim notes in his story, agroecology and food sovereignty as specific concepts might have been unknown to his grandmother, however, the values were not. Today, most people in Bangladesh remain unfamiliar with agroecology and food sovereignty movements, yet many of their aspirations and drive for change echo core values, including freedom from market subjugation, control over seed and crop decisions, healthy foods, clean water, and meaningful livelihoods (Shiva, 1993; Misra, 2017). Since 2016, United Purpose Bangladesh (UPB) has worked toward empowering communities, and particularly rural women farmers and crafters, to identify obstacles as well as solutions to help build social enterprise cooperatives characterized by collective governance (cf. de Schutter, 2014; Mier y Terán Giménez Cacho et al., 2018). Over the past 6 years, the cooperative model has evolved toward a focus on supporting agroecological transitions for women and their communities. Providing capacity building and training is essential in the country given that reliance on commercial inputs has been historically emphasized and supported by the state. In helping launch a new association called Nari Jhuri (Women’s Basket), UPB is helping create networking opportunities for women both locally and regionally to strengthen knowledge, share practices, and design markets as part of mobilizing a women-led movement for agroecology. Agarwal (2014) has noted an additional value of these kinds of cooperative collective actions in that they may provide empowering experiences beyond family structures, offering an important outlet for women who may face obstacles in the domestic sphere.

In alignment with these aspirations and noting abundant frictional challenges of a market initiative as an entry point (Dubb, 2023), the U.S.-based nonprofit Island Reach joined in to explore mobilizing Nari Jhuri’s vision to be a community and trading space “touchstone,” driving creative mapping narratives toward actional and viable alternatives to the industrial food system.

There were several aims in using markets as an entry point for this project. These included: (1) amplifying autonomy and disentangling the women of Nari Jhuri, along with their communities, from marginalization and subjugation to modes of productivity at the heart of agro-industrial model; (2) reducing dependency on large buyers and costly middlemen; and (3) bolstering their distinctive products and “brand identity” in contrast to imported or industrially farmed foods (van der Ploeg, 2009; de Schutter, 2014).

Additionally, markets are not only about what producers sell, but what Nari Jhuri women and other consumers can buy. In Bangladesh as in many parts of the world, small-scale farmers are often net food buyers (Bezner Kerr et al., 2019). Farmers can become caught in a pattern of selling the more nutritious products they produce while purchasing cheaper, often imported “fast-foods” to feed their families. Working toward a model where farmers can both sell and consume their own agroecologically produced foods is vital. With all this in mind, creating market options for agroecology (cf. Rahmanian et al., 2016) requires noting that markets are but one mechanism for acquiring foods; all foods are not nor should be destined for markets. There are other ways of exchanging resources within communities and sustaining people’s rights to eat and enjoy nourishing foods in a sovereign context (Nyéléni Forum on Food Sovereignty, 2007; Rivera and Álvarez, 2017).

Food sovereignty, like agroecology, is a concept subject to different interpretations (Edelman et al., 2014; Dekeyser et al., 2018). Agarwal (2014) cautions that food sovereignty debates may insufficiently address certain paradoxes around questions of choice and objective, so that one must ask that if farmers are truly “free” in a sovereign sense to choose what they grow and how, “will the cooperating farmers choose a path that is in line with the food sovereignty vision or will they follow other paths to fulfill their livelihood needs?” (p. 1249). As she notes, many small-scale farmers she works with in India, both men and women, would like to leave agriculture and most hope their children will find another future. For those who stay, she observes, the familiar appeal of commercially viable crops, the use of some chemicals, and the capacity to connect with a range of marketing outlets, including export, remain appealing. de Schutter (2014) raises a related question, pointing out that there is no reason that women farmers will seek new approaches as an objective if they perceive they may require dedicating more time to growing, or more time to market, and less time to subsistence and feeding their families, thus worsening their time poverty.

These and additional questions may exist as part of agroecological transitions forged by members of Nari Jhuri and could be a concern for another paper. Suffice it to say that amplifying localization and markets based in solidarity and circular economies is seen as a way to both respatialize and resocialize food (Fonte, 2008). How any community navigates a way among such options is their unique path imbued with “thick” relational ties, where not only products are exchanged but also knowledge, values, and cosmovisions of social and environmental well-being. At the same time, we recognize the risk of oversimplifying a notion of markets as socially embedded in this way. As Hinrichs (2000) observed, working to embed markets socially does not mean they remain isolated from the larger workings of the world. For our part, we have wrestled with how markets can be constructed as ancillary rather than bedrock of any such notion of well-being and we have grappled with what strategies can be deployed with partners to realize these visions to evade or reduce “marketness” and “instrumentalist” creep. Generating a sustainable livelihood is essential; what agroecology helps make evident is that the opposite of poverty is not wealth but justice (Stevenson, 2015).

Toward these aspirations and in the context of these sticky questions, our collaboration developed a processual tool that may help operationalize agroecological transformations at a relational scale, making room for the kinds of differences in ways of knowing and being that are more than increased socialness. Emerging from theories about narrative framing and figured worlds (Holland et al., 1998; Clammer et al., 2004), we explore in the next section how such a tool can offer possibilities for mediating agency and allowing people to imagine ways in which “another world is possible.”

One of our early conundrums working together was the task of finding a way to refer to agroecology in Bangla. Given that agroecology has many competing and varying definitions, the task of translation was far from clear right at the outset. Bangla has no commonly recognized word for agroecology, nor does it have one for food sovereignty. The word “translation” derives from the Latin meaning for “carrying across”: just what we were seeking to “carry across” was a subject of some debate. Through this process, members of the team felt that definitions of agroecology as “the new agriculture movement” (UBINIG, 2017) did not fit, nor did attempts to create compound words unifying agriculture with environment or agriculture with community, those both failing to capture more holistic and transformative dimensions of agroecology. In the end, the decision was made to use the English word, and where written, write the word with Bangla characters.

By no means are we intending to suggest here that this decision resolved problems related to “carrying across.” Instead, such processes of translation are expressive of the epistemological and ontological tensions that permeate the work. Introducing a new word or narrative frame is never straightforward or neutral. The idea of “carrying across” depends to a degree on a presumption that entities, such as people, cultures, or disciplines, are perceived as both somewhat homogenous and somewhat different from each other, thus permitting a bridging. Dichotomous concepts of “source” language/culture and “target” language/culture have persisted in the field of translation despite efforts to dialecticize them (Buden et al., 2009; Conway, 2013; Harding, 2021). By understanding translation as something other than a transparent process faithful to a singular original meaning, it opens up the problems of translation intersecting with ways of knowing and being.

In this section, we focus on themes of narrative, discourse, and dialogic as ways to look at how language produces and reproduces knowledge. This is significant when we think of how agroecological narrative frames relate to agricultural practices, recollecting our example of soil earlier and what might constitute knowledge co-creation where ontological differences are incommensurable. The translatability of the word “agroecology” in our exchanges with Nari Jhuri women may ultimately depend upon the extent to which narratives carry across, diverge, and are refigured in the hands of those who may or may not find use for them. It is noteworthy that Sunmoyee’s artwork shared throughout this article, admittedly all interpretations of rural life by the artist, nevertheless have offered alternative ways to communicate and stimulate reflections among all actors.

Anderson and colleagues (2019), writing about ways people use framing in agroecology, suggest that people, “‘simplify and condense’ the complexity of this form of agriculture to emphasize key characteristics that align with their own sensibilities…[and] selectively draw on and interpret agroecology through their own cultural values, beliefs, and ideologies” (p. 15). The authors go on to say that frames reflect ideological positions of the actors that create them, but also that new frames may bring about transformation when they gain acceptance. Discussing their community work in Malawi, Bezner Kerr and fellow authors consider that many agroecological methods are unknown to farmers and require a shift in thinking. In many cases “farmers have to learn and experiment with what might seem like new methods of improving soil fertility, and regain appreciation for indigenous crops, which have been maligned and racially constructed as backwards for many decades” (Bezner Kerr et al., 2019).

We recognize that narratives are often remarkably resistant to efforts to transform them. What Montenegro and Iles (2016) refer to as the “thick legitimacy” of industrial food systems is a means by which alternative frames are inhibited. According to philosopher and linguist George Lakoff (2010), metaphoric frames are deeply tracked not only in discourse but in neural pathways. Iles and Montenegro (2014) talk about a related notion of path dependency in which technological, economic, institutional, behavioral paths lock-in. They contend that these path-dependencies are constituted relationally and while they may creep in, they can “suddenly solidify into a structural constraint” (p. 488). The task, they argue, is to think critically about ways to create alternative pathways to loosen and disrupt these lock-ins.

A value web may be just such a processual tool to serve these purposes. As part of this collaboration, we evolved an interactive dialogic tool to help amplify autonomous community practices and market/trading models for Nari Jhuri collectives. Put forth to support mobilization of agroecological transformations, a value web relates somewhat loosely to the proposition of “domains of transformation,” described by Anderson and colleagues (2019) as “discernible sets of relationships, norms, rules, and activities, where enabling and disabling dynamics emerge from niches in relation to the dominant regime” (p. 6). As a visual template that users can populate with their own narrative content, a value web model borrows from nature, namely the intricate and simultaneously fragile and resilient form of a spider’s web. As an activity, building a value web is initially undertaken with a facilitator and a large piece of paper. A group agrees upon a topic or theme drawn from their own pressing concerns, for example, Nari Jhuri itself, a production method, or a marketing strategy, and centers that on the page. From there, the group spins out radiating arms and then spiraling threads that interweave more and more densely in a multivariate story-building process. Suggested arms or frames are provided with the web model, for example, the environment, cultural stories, innovations, women-led, policy and governance, and more.

The value web model does not escape the problems of translation described above, or more generally, the frictions and contradictions we have been exploring throughout this article. The value web is proffered for negotiation with worlding practices that processually may or may not reflect the terms put forth. To open those possibilities, there are no preset requirements that all frames be populated with content, nor that they be linked together with connective narratives. With these dense stories unfolding, Nari Jhuri women can then trial them in communities and markets where they can be collectively evaluated and adjusted based on applications and responses. In the local marketplace, these narratives can help establish legitimacy and distinction from the mainstream agrifood system (Montenegro and Iles, 2016) and reciprocally, more robust markets may reinforce agroecological practices in communities.

These two value webs explore stories related to foods the women want to bring to market.

To date, the value web activity has been trialed with Nari Jhuri groups in 3 different regions of Bangladesh: Jamalphur, Khulna, and the Chittagong Hill Tracts (CHT) and it will continue to be rolled out as an activity going forward. It is not easily recoverable in this kind of textual presentation just how dynamic and energizing a process web-building can be. Just as an example, as a group of women from the CHT talked animatedly about what makes their hill tract mangoes special, they evoked the flavors, smells, recipes, shade-giving properties of sitting under a tree, and so much more. As facilitators, we were stirred by these stories and excited to be welcomed into the process, even as we recognized that what we were experiencing and what the women were experiencing in building storymaps about mangoes could not be the same. Some of these narrative stories were inevitably opaque to us as “outsiders,” and yet in this energized relational activity, there is a “hope for the commons of agroecology, emerging from the uncommons” (de la Cadena, 2020). From a theoretical perspective, if a web becomes effectively diverse, it consists of numerous frictional contingencies, possibly formerly siloed and sedimented in path-dependency narratives of the dominant agrifood regime and now emerging in the fissures and cracks of those narratives (Spector-Mersel, 2010; Mignolo and Walsh, 2018). While it would be naive to assert that all uses of a value web contribute to such loosenings of fixed narratives, through dialogic debates and group invention, the process is a form of political, distinctly relational praxis (Niewolny and D’Adamo-Damery, 2016) through which new framing narratives may emerge as part of an adaptive and experimental process of trialing, adjusting, and figuring.

Across numerous creative dialogical tools for narrative development, role-play games stand out as both enlivening and dynamically productive. Through these games, women assume roles of producers, consumers, marketers, obstinate neighbors, and other stakeholders in their communities to explore perspectives. From a practical perspective, these collective and processual activities become means for women to support one another and to share practices, ideas, and knowledge through story building, all part of revitalizing, reclaiming, and innovating agroecological narrative framings and actions that are locally defined and context sensitive. Such narratives are not only essential to reshape the marketplace and create new paradigms for exchange and economies favoring solidarity, but they are also vital for arming communities with mobilizing frames “for the immaterial dispute to defend and transform their real territories” (Giraldo and Rosset, 2017, p. 14). The struggle between mainstream corporate actors and social movements to control framing is at the center of defining and practicing agroecology. With a dialectics of recovery and innovation, value webs are compatible with La Via Campesina’s idea of Diálogo de saberes, which refers to a space of encounter where people come together to dialog, debate, analyze, and strategize for collective actions. Particularly, this dialogue is seen as critical for people who have experienced their traditional knowledgeS as buried by the impositions of modernity:

Khasnabish and Haven (2012) refer to such dialogic processual activities in terms of “radical imagination.” These authors argue that pursuing this imagination is a distinctly social act and something people do together.

Similar dialectic and dialogic framing theory that inspired the design for value webs can be located in the writings of Russian theorist Mikhail Bakhtin from the early 20th century (1981) and more recently, works such as Holland et al. (1998) writings on “figured worlds.” Narrative framing, or storylines generated with value webs, are social processes that form figured worlds defined as “socially produced, culturally constituted activities” (pp. 40–41), where people come to conceptually and materially/procedurally produce new self-understandings. Narrative or dialogic activity constitute figured worlds as sites of possibility (in terms of agency), but they are also set within the social realities of power of historical, social, cultural, organizational, discursive, interactional, and psychological circumstances that shape the range of possibilities in any time and place. The value web activity, as a form of serious play involving the crafting of new figured worlds, can enable Nari Jhuri women to engage possibilities of creating new narratives and practices, and deepened networks for social actions, that all together may lead to more autonomous worlds. This capacity of narratives for imagining, mapping, and constructing other worlds, and for trying to make them a reality, is an essential feature of the human capacity to transform our own selves as well as our social contexts. Ingold (2011) considers how one might replace the end-directed conceptions of life processes with recognition of our capacities to continually overtake the destinations that are thrown up in our path (p. 304). The value web presents an opportunity to take multivariate fragments and, in the words and hands of its users, create something unique to that time and place in a sovereign manner that can be trialed across community and market actors and adapted accordingly.

Finally, given ontological considerations above, a powerful and provocative question at the heart of resistance and transformation regard the use of such participatory tools as the value web. Some may argue that value webs remain just one more mapping model among a plethora of participatory tools characteristic of institutional, Western rational thinking and therefore are incapable of eliciting any emancipatory narratives. In her influential 1984 essay, “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House,” Audrey Lorde (2018) asserted that such tools “may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change.” As noted previously, we must question if the value web tool is misaligned with local interests yet can also unsettle any certainty about such propositions by turning to the words of Mignolo and Walsh (2018) who suggest the possibility an alternative new world made by those using both old and new tools to “build houses of their own on more or less generous soil.” They elaborate:

Such aspirations concern the very nature of “activism” as a possible reimagination of terms of power, work, and diverse intimacies explored next in the final section of this article.

In the following discussion, we focus on some historical and critical debates that help locate our subject positions as NGO practitioners working with Nari Jhuri groups and their wider communities. Three decades ago, anthropologist Marilyn Strathern (1992) asserted that “It matters what ideas we use to think other ideas with.” The point to emphasize here is that the knowledge practices we have at hand are conditioned to reinstate themselves at every opportunity.

There has been extensive debate over several decades about the capacity of NGOs, as a sector of civil society, to respond to and advocate for grassroots interests and social movements. Critics of NGOs look to the history of these entities to make their case, pointing to the proliferation of NGOs in the 21st century as an effect of globalization and market-oriented neoliberalism. As governments across the globe were withdrawing funding for policies and initiatives related to social programs, such as public health, education, and rural development, NGOs stepped in to fill the vacuum. In the Global South in particular, structural adjustment programs of international lenders, such as the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, came with requirements for countries to deregulate trade, welcome privatization, and adopt a host of other neoliberal policies (Powell, 2007; Banks et al., 2015; Alexander and Fernandez, 2021; Fong and Naschek, 2021). This set both a vacuum and stage in which NGOs could provide development aid and over time, pressure was exerted upon them to adopt business-like models to maximize efficiency, productivity, and accountability (Alexander and Fernandez, 2021).

Post-development theorists who focus on the Modernist foundations of the development field point to how the poor became marked as subjects of development practice and targets of expert knowledge (Sachs, 1992; Escobar, 1995; Rahnema and Bawtree, 1997). Arundhati Roy argued that in many cases, NGOs have been strategically positioned to defuse resistance, and “dole out as aid or benevolence what people ought to have by right” (2014).

At a structural level, the way funding continues to move in the sector generally makes it difficult to get beyond a benevolent model nested in institutionalism and neoliberal agendas, often underscored by a persistent notion of Enlightenment constructs of progress from “undeveloped” to “developed.” The pressure for NGOs to be accountable “upward” to donors (who may not aspire to transformation) rather than “downward” to communities has been a subject of much debate concerning their capacities to support structural change (Banks et al., 2020; Martin, 2020; Fong and Nascheck, 2021; Contreras and Roudbari, 2022). Funding is just one major constraint that NGOs face as they negotiate access and approaches to working with marginalized groups seeking alternative ways of organizing economy, social relations, and politics. As with academic researchers, such constraints and focus on output measures often mean that engagements labeled as collaborative may be little more than consultative; the shallow nature of such engagements is evidenced by a reduction of complex discourses to easy acronyms such as LEK (local ecological knowledge) or IK (indigenous knowledge) (Coombes et al., 2014). Timelines and project terminations imply limits and bounds to engagements in what is otherwise actually relational experience and lived lives—thus drawing attention to the problematic notion of the use of the word “project.” It is as true for practitioners as it is for researchers that, in the words of Coombes and fellow authors (2014), “funders will not allow a researcher to spend the ‘first year drinking tea’” (p. 849).

We situate our efforts within a larger movement of actors grappling with the legacy of nonprofit institutionality and attempting to invert top-down approaches, move beyond aid and service delivery, and fulfill civil society commitments to engage the public for purposes of empowerment and mobilization (Chambers, 1979, 1983; Freire, 1993; Napier Moore et al., 2017; Edwards, 2020; Silberman, 2020). Paulo Freire’s highly influential work on critical pedagogy has offered much to rethinking ways knowledge is made and used. His work reshaped the terrain of praxis for learning and social change, despite his theories having been critically analyzed for their enlightenment underpinnings of linear progress and individual self-awareness (Bowers, 2005; Lange, 2012). He disrupted simple and linear frameworks of knowledge transmission based on the notion of knowledge as something bestowed from those who consider themselves as knowledgeable upon those whom they consider know nothing (Freire, 1993). His praxis theories continue to inform approaches today among academics, practitioners, and activists.

We are alert to problems with the use of participatory models which began to flourish throughout the 1980s, gaining widespread adoption as the new blueprint for development strategies based on making place for people to engage in decision-making regarding their own circumstances and futures. Yet almost as quickly as such models were adopted, “participation” as a concept and approach became highly contested (Mikkelsen, 2005). Critics contend that such approaches continue to fail at diffusing the intellectual authority of so-called experts (Coombes, 2012; Smith, 2012) and serve as “Trojan Horses,” sneaking in the latest forms of political control and instituting a “tyranny of participation” (Cooke and Kothari, 2001; Williams, 2004; Lange, 2012; Roy, 2014). Giraldo and Rosset (2017) have warned that as NGOs enter the space of agroecology, some NGOs may diffuse social movements as those organizations become “spokespersons and beneficiaries of the economic and political opportunities that arise” (p. 5).

In both the academic and NGO sectors, there remains urgency to draw attention to political ways knowledge is created, contested, negotiated, and promoted (Apgar et al., 2016; Pimbert, 2018). As Reid and colleagues (2021) summarize:

The opening quote to this section evokes profound questions about the nature of support and alliance that we as NGO actors can play in transformative moments and movements. It is evident that NGOs can bring many resources to the table that both communities and social movements are unable to access, yet it requires we engage in critical reflection on the challenges of these boundary-dwelling actions. Where and how do we facilitate change or conform to the status quo? Where and how do we allow difference and alterity to challenge our schemas or where do we impose those schemas on others? One might ask, following Watson’s example, can we account for our unequal yet shared subjugation with communities to the “common sense” hegemonies of our era and from that uncommon ground, find some form of two-way traffic between our organizations and communities and social movements? Tuck and Yang (2012) suggest that such collaborations may only ever be strategic and contingent ones and that lasting solidarity may be elusive and, they argue, perhaps undesirable (p. 28). There are potentially exciting possibilities for those who acknowledge the need to refashion the landscape of social change away from logical and linear models of development to work alongside communities and social movements as allies.

This essay attempts to lay out some of the inescapable entanglements of matters of being, knowing, and doing, or ontology, epistemology, methodology that arise in our work as nonprofit practitioners working to fuel agroecological transformations. In wending our way through these personal narratives, art, contextual framings, and critical theory, we find ourselves as authors holding several threads which are at times both contradictory and intertwined. We might occasionally think of ourselves as being lost in this pursuit.

We have considered paradoxes inhabiting our collaboration where a commons may only emerge from the uncommons (de la Cadena, 2020). We have proposed a market approach even while recognizing the path-dependencies toward marketness and instrumentalism. We have explored a processual tool in the spirit of transgression, amid considering the weightiness of development and research praxis. Perhaps most importantly, we have shared stories, art, and poetry to give homage to the relational scale that is proposed to be at the heart of agroecological transformations (Iles and Montenegro, 2014). It is just such relational elements that Jasimuddin so joyfully evokes in his poem “Invitation!”

In the context of contested tools, wide-ranging theoretical framings, and deep personal histories, each of us as authors (and you readers) must puzzle onward through the muddy, often constitutively contradictory fields of agroecological practice that seek to put ways of knowing and being at the heart of food systems change. In following such threads through each personal connection created through this process, each story told, and the growing body of academic literature, we find ourselves not settled on answers, but rather reflecting upon new questions. We are thus reminded,

Still, with considerations of fluidity and flexibility in mind, we want to hinge our closing on the very high stakes for the women, families, and communities we engage with across Bangladesh. This is about their rights to “healthy and culturally appropriate food produced through ecologically sound and sustainable methods, and their right to define their own food and agriculture systems” (Nyéléni Forum on Food Sovereignty, 2007). We take inspiration in the proposal that agroecology is fundamentally a barrier to commodification. Rather than being a set of guidelines, it is based on principles applied by people in different and uniquely relational ways, in every distinct reality (Anderson et al., 2019, p. 15), in opposition to the current agrifood system’s monocultures of practice and mind (Shiva, 1993). As Montenegro (2015) urges: “Spread the idea that [agroecology] models grounded in solidarity, complexity and interdependence are not only valuable and possible, they are already underfoot.” The dialogic processes of radical imagination are not romantic and strictly rhetorical acts. Invoking poet Jasimuddin, they are invitations to other possible worlds, more just, sustainable, and reverberating.

We thank our many colleagues, particularly Shafiullah Kawsar and Sunmoyee Das for their tremendous efforts in the field. Special thanks also go to Jaber Hassan and Subhagya Mangal Chakma. We particularly wish to express our gratitude to the women of Nari Jhuri, their families, and communities for welcoming us into their lives and sharing their stories and days with us. Artwork: All artwork created by Sunmoyee Das, United Purpose, Dhaka, Bangladesh.

We are not aware of any competing interests in preparing this article. The views and opinions expressed here are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent the views of any affiliated organizations.

Substantial contributions to conception and design: JS, CSM, SG, SH, BM.

Drafting the article or revising it critically for important intellectual content: JS, CSM, SG, SH, BM.

Final approval of the version to be published: JS, CSM, SG, SH, BM.

How to cite this article: Steele, J, Steele-McCutchen, C, Gonchikara, S, Hossain, S, McCutchen, B. 2024. Fertile grounds: Co-creating agroecological knowledge in a pluriverse. Elementa: Science of the Anthropocene 12(1). DOI: https://doi.org/10.1525/elementa.2023.00080

Domain Editor-in-Chief: Alastair Iles, University of California Berkeley, Berkeley, CA, USA

Guest Editor: Colin R. Anderson, University of Vermont, Burlington, VT, USA

Knowledge Domain: Sustainability Transitions

Part of an Elementa Special Feature: Ways of Knowing and Being for Agroecology Transitions