Just Transformations

Front matter

(Er SN 5 E / a : fev m”

EDITED EV

A hugely important book, setting a radical agenda for societal transformation.

Part I: Our Approaches And Methods For Engaging With Transformations

1. Co-production of Knowledge for Environmental Justice: Key Lessons, Challenges and Approaches in the ACKnowl-EJ Project

Lena Weber, Mariana Walter, Leah Temper and lokine Rodríguez 2. A Conversation on Radical Transformation Frameworks:

From Conflicts to Alternatives

Arpita Lulla, Iokifie Rodríguez, Mirna Inturias and Ashish Kothari

Part Ii: Analysing Transformations From And With Environmental Justice Movements

Section 1: Double Movements Against State and Market 3. “Mirror, Mirror on the Wall’: A Reflection on Engaged Just

Transformations Research under Turkey's Authoritarian Populist Regime Begüm Özkaynak, Ethemcan Turhan and Cem İskender Aydın 4. Gamers of Power in Conflicts over Extractivism in Canaima National Park, Venezuela lokine Rodriguez and Vladimir Aguilar 5. Lebanon and the “Trash Revolution: Constraints, Challenges and Opportunities to Transformation: 2015 Onwards

Rania Masri

Section 2: From Individual to Institutional Transformations

6. Free the Keelbeek from the Prison! A Deep Analysis of Individual and Collective Empowerment Within the Resistance Movement Against the Brussels Mega-prison Project Jéróme Pelenc vi

Contents

Raika Women Speak Meenal Tatpati and Shruti Ajit

Transformative Environmental Conflicts: The Case of Struggles against Large-scale Mining in Argentina

Mariana Walter and Lucrecia Wagner

Section 3: Enacting Counter-hegemonic Alternative Politics

Economics and Worldviews The Monkoxi from Lomerío, Bolivia: On the Road to Freedom Through Nuxiaká Uxia Nosibóriki Mirna Inturias, lokine Rodríguez, Miguel Aragón, Elmar Masay and Anacleto Pefia On the Cusp: Reframing Democracy and Well-being in Korchi Neema Pathak Broome, Shrishtee Bajpai and Mukesh Shende Transformative Strategies Forged on the Frontlines of

Environmental Justice and Indigenous Land Defence Struggles in So-called Canada

Jen Gobby and Leah Temper

Sandhani: Transformation Among Handloom Weavers of Kachchh, India

Kalpavriksh and Khamir

Part Iii: Lessons From Ground-up Transformations

Ashish Kothari, Leah Temper, Iokifie Rodríguez, Mariana Walter, Begüm Özkaynak, Rania Masri, Mirna Inturias, Adrian Martin, Ethemcan Turhan, Neema Pathak Broome, Shrishtee Bajpai,

Jen Gobby, Jéróme Pelenc, Meenal Tatpati and Shruti Ajit Takeaways for Environmental Justice Movements

Leah Temper, Mariana Walter and lokiñe Rodríguez

Notes on Contributors Index

341 345 lokine Rodríguez, Mariana Walter and Leah Temper

Transition and transformation are buzzwords on everybodys lips in today's climate crisis-ridden world. If we are to save humanity and other species, something big must change. This has led to a wealth of literature aimed at understanding, managing and guiding society towards the needed transformation. Much of this has focused on the potential contribution of markets (the green economy), the state (green technocracy) and technology (the eco-modernist utopia/dystopia, depending on your perspective). Yet surprisingly absent from this conversation are activists, communities and movements on the ground who have been struggling and building social transformations, crafting alternatives and recreating their worlds from the ground up, as well as engaged activist academics who are working with movements in trying to make this change happen. This book seeks to contribute to this necessary conversation.

Environmental justice movements may not use terms like transformation, sustainability or environment, but they have a lot to teach about how just transformations happen. Such lessons become particularly relevant nowadays, when climate and pandemic crises are fostering accelerated top-down technocratic and authoritarian paths that are making invisible and sometimes disabling ongoing bottom-up transformative processes.

However, little is still known about how bottom-up just transformations to sustainability are taking place, what makes them possible and what sustains them over time. Understanding this is not merely of academic interest. Resistance movements and communities are also often interested in reflecting about this, and learning with others about how to make their strategies stronger or understand better what might be preventing them from achieving their objectives. Yet the urgency of their struggles often leaves little time for reflection, let alone for developing the methods for joint or cross-learning.

This book offers a window into learning from just transformation to sustainability through the lens of locally led processes, by sharing the results of a three-year international research project (ACKnowl-EJ: Academic-Activist Co-produced Knowledge for Environmental Justice) in which academics and resistance movements across the world worked together, analysing and learning from citizen-led transformations. We draw on a variety of case studies in Argentina, Belgium, Bolivia, Canada, India, Lebanon, Turkey and Venezuela (see Figure 0.1),

(zz0z inf) nemag A pasa dey yue |EJn]eN :821n0$ peipnjs saruno nn Seipmjs ase] e where resistance movements have been taking the lead, with different degrees of success and failure, in bringing about just sustainability transformations. These case studies range from resistance to the fossil fuel rush (Turkey), Indigenous peoples’ struggles against extractivism (Venezuela), urban mobilizations around waste management (Lebanon) and against the building of a mega-prison (Belgium), to the search for alternative transformations such as new forms of political governance for managing commons (Lomerío in Bolivia, Korchi in India), the articulation of womens pastoralist vision for the future (the Raika in India) or a revival of communal and family-based economies (Kachchh in India). This book also draws out lessons from country-wide transformations against mining and for the defence of Indigenous lands (Argentina and Canada respectively) from a global atlas of resistances (the EJAtlas: www.ejatlas.org).

This book is also a toolkit for how to do engaged transformations research, which we hope will be of use both to environmental justice academics and activists. We share the ACKnowl-EJ approach to co-production of knowledge and for doing ‘politically rigorous research with activists on just transformations to sustainability. We also present two frameworks that we developed to assess how progress towards transformation is taking place, which communities, activists and academics can use to examine and learn from specific transformative processes. We do this, however, recognizing the immense challenges within engaged environmental justice research. Across the book we reflect both on the internal ethical, relational and epistemological challenges that we faced as a research collective in doing this type of research, and on the external political challenges we confronted arising from a world that is turning ever more violent towards environmental justice movements and activist scholars. This book shows, however, that despite these challenges, engaged research has an important role to play in supporting bottom-up just transformations to sustainability.

Finally, based on the lessons drawn from the case studies and from cross-country analysis from the EJAtlas, this book contributes towards the development of a theory of just transformations to sustainability from the perspectives of those fighting on the ground to achieve it. We hope this will help rethink how transformations to sustainability are currently being conceptualized, and inform a conversation between and across resistance movements about the changes they are trying to bring about for a more just and sustainable world.

This introductory chapter develops as follows. In the following second section we situate the ACKnowl-E] project and ourselves, explaining how this work draws from several grounded and grassroots initiatives and aims to co-produce knowledge with and for communities and social movements. The third section discuss some key concepts that have guided this process: radical transformations, conflicts and alternatives. The fourth section lays out the conceptual framework that we developed to jointly study just transformations to sustainability with a focus on power relations, dimensions and scales of change. A framework that is multidimensional and intersectional, balancing ecological concerns with social, economic, cultural and democratic spheres. We conclude with a detailed description of the content of the book chapter by chapter.

The ACKnowl-EJ Project: Who Are We and What Brought Us Together?

ACKnowl-EJ was a three-year project funded by UNESCOS International Social Science Council as one of three Transformative Knowledge Networks within their Transformations to Sustainability programme and a broader Future Earth Science programme. ACKnowl-EJ aimed to engage in action and collaborative analysis of the transformative potential of community responses to environmental and social injustices, particularly those framed as extractivism, and alternatives born from resistance. The project was an experiment in co-producing knowledge that could answer the needs of social groups, advocates, citizens and social movements, while supporting communities and movements in their push for change. The network was made up of activist-scholars and activists with ties to academic institutions, non-governmental organizations, communities and social movements (see Figure 0.2), and drew on work that members were carrying out in India, Turkey, Bolivia, Canada, Belgium, Lebanon, Venezuela and Argentina. In all cases the research involved some degree of activist research, either through researchers: 1) being activists in the struggles themselves, 2) having a double role as researcher/activist or 3) developing action-research teams with communities or movements to document the case studies.

While most case studies were developed between 2016 and 2019, during the ACKnowl-EJ project, two cases (Turkey and Bolivia) are published with updated

Figure 0.2 Academic and community co-partners from the ACKnowl-EJ project, India 2018 perspectives since significant changes took place over these last two years, which we considered important to include.

This group of scholar-activists shared an interest in 1) understanding and supporting social transformation and resistance to extractive activities and imposed development, 2) creating linkages between academia and activists, and 3) helping to give visibility to communities, movements and initiatives that are putting transformative alternatives into practice. Thus, we came together to create a space for reflection and action on questions such as:

e What role do resistance movements against 'extractivism play in shaping local and global transformations for sustainability from the ground up, and in dealing with the global environmental and social crisis?

e How are resistance strategies and the creation of development alternatives carried out?

e What is transformed in this process?

e What determines the success of resistance movements and of transformations over time?

In other words, we wanted to contribute to a better understanding of ‘what needs to be transformed' for more sustainable futures from the perspective of resistance movements, as well as how it can be transformed’ and ‘what truly transformative alternatives are. In this sense, ACKnovvl-E) subscribes to a “right here, right now” approach for transformations and aims for its research to be transformative and to affect change that empowers others (Moser 2016, Temper and Del Bene 2016).

This ACKnowl-EJ project is grounded in three initiatives that aim to co-produce knowledge with and for communities - the EJAtlas, the Grupo Confluencias network and Vikalp Sangam, described below. All three initiatives are dedicated to capacities for action and practice-based research with co-production of knowledge, learning/teaching processes, reflexivity, and the creation of research outputs that answer to the scientific rigour of academia and to the political rigour of actors in environmental struggles. This transformative environmental justice (EJ) research agenda stresses the importance of engagement with critical scholars, scholar-activists and activists as well as the recognition of the epistemologies and ontologies of marginalized voices, for a co-production and reproduction of plural knowledges.

The EJAtlas

Research as part of the Environmental Justice Atlas (www.ejatlas.org) project over the past ten years has focused on producing bottom-up documentation and mapping of the numerous extraction conflicts taking place throughout the world, and has helped make visible the violence perpetrated by states and corporations against resisting populations (Temper et al. 2015). The EJAtlass 3,880 cases (as of June 2023) provide a repository of diverse, radically challenging and overtly political agonistic forms of contestation of environmental inequality by subaltern social movements. It offers an opportunity to tune into the plurality of grassroots voices opposing specific economies, institutions, infrastructures and cultures that are at the root of the ecological crisis. It demonstrates the diversity in these movements as well as the commonalities that join them under a global and globalizing movement for environmental justice (Martinez-Alier et al. 2016).

While the EJAtlas was originally designed to emphasize, make visible and dissect processes of environmental injustice, in the ACKnowl-EJ project it was used as an empirical base for examining what EJ looks like in practice and for understanding the multiple and creative agency of EJ groups as ‘altering’ forces of the status quo. In many cases these struggles propose and put forward their own visions of transformations. The cases illuminate how and when democratic and transformative processes that arise in response to extractive processes move from the individual to the community level and then disseminate outwards.

Grupo Confluencias — conflict transformation practitioners in Latin America

Grupo Confluencias, a group of Latin American socio-environmental conflict transformation practitioners and researchers, have been working since 2005 as a platform for deliberation, joint research and capacity-building on this topic. Members of this network play a combination of roles in the transformation of socio-environmental conflicts: dialogue facilitation, peace-building, advice and capacity-building for Indigenous peoples and urban/rural communities, policy advice on environmental and sustainable development issues and action-research in their respective countries. The countries include Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Ecuador, Costa Rica, Guatemala, Peru and Venezuela.

After years of deliberation around what a truly transformative process entails, one of the most important outcomes of the work of Grupo Confluencias was a framework to help assess if processes being developed on the ground to transform environmental conflicts were effectively contributing to reducing violence and increasing justice. The group merged conflict transformation theory (a concept that originated in peace studies in post-war scenarios) with decolonial thought, power theory and political ecology, and developed a Socio-environmental Conflict Transformation (SCT) Framework that seeks to guide conflict transformation work for greater environmental justice in the region.

The framework was largely informed by the work the group carries out supporting Indigenous peoples in environmental justice struggles. Because of this it places the development of intercultural relations (Walsh 2005a, 2005b) (construcción de interculturalidad in Spanish) at the core of the conflict transformation process. Two other key features of this framework are the attention paid to understanding the role that power dynamics and culture play in environmental conflicts and their transformation, and the development of indicators to help assess if the strategies used are effectively contributing to the reduction of violence, greater justice and ultimately the development of interculturality (Rodríguez et al. 2019, Rodríguez and Inturias 2018).

Although the framework was widely discussed among conflict transformation practitioners and Indigenous leaders in capacity-building meetings and workshops in Latin America, the ACKnowl-EJ project offered the first opportunity to apply it in case studies.

Vikalp Sangam (Alternatives Confluence), India

Vikalp Sangam (Alternatives Confluence) (https://vikalpsangam.org/) is an Indian platform for networking between groups and individuals working on alternatives to the currently dominant model of development and governance, in various spheres of life (see Daga 2014, Kothari 2016, Thekaekara 2015). Its major activity is the convening of regional and thematic confluences across India (Kothari 2016), whereby people exchange experiences and ideas emerging from practice and thinking in a whole range of endeavours including sustainable agriculture and pastoralism, renewable energy, decentralized governance, community health, craft and art revival, multiple sexualities, inclusion of the differently abled, alternative learning and education, community-based conservation, decentralized water management, urban sustainability, gender and caste equality, and more.

Beyond the sharing of practical experiences and the documentation and dissemination of stories of transformation hosted on the website, one of the most important outputs of the Vikalp Sangam process is a conceptual framework of transformative alternatives. This framework aims to dissect the different spheres of transformation involved in radical alternatives. It is important to realize that while this framework has significant elements of 'ideology' in it, it is not based on or emanating from Marxist, Gandhian, Ambedkarite or other radical ideologies to which movements in India relate, but rather on the wisdom and concepts emerging from grassroots communities and groups (see Kothari 2016 for linkages between the concepts in the framework and actual alternative initiatives in India). It is constantly evolving, after discussions at each Sangam. Several hundred people from the range of sectors mentioned above have debated the various aspects of this framework.

The ACKnowl-EJ project offered the opportunity for these three networks to come together to conceptualize what an approach for analysing radical transformations to sustainability could look like. Before introducing the framework that we developed to analyse just transformations to sustainability, we discuss three core ideas that grounded our analysis: the need for radical transformations, conflicts as catalysts of change, and alternatives as concrete materializations of the needed changes.

Grounding Just Transformations to Sustainability

ACKnowl-EJ adopted an understanding of social transformation towards sustainability that focuses on the following three considerations:

e Social transformation towards more sustainable futures often occurs as a result of conflict. Oppositional consciousness and resistance to hegemonic structures are a key element in the creation of alternative ways of being and doing.

e A perspective of conflict as productive, rather than something to be avoided, suggests the usefulness of a conflict transformation approach that can address the root issues of ecological conflicts as a path towards transformations to sustainability.

e Radical alternatives are a form of resistance that advances a vision of what sustainable transformative processes could look like.

We now turn to examining each one of these considerations.

The need for radical transformations

When we talk about transformation, what are we really talking about? When can we say that something has been transformed? Who are the agents of transformation? And what is it that needs to be transformed? Transformation is an amorphous term and recently somewhat of a buzzword. This has led to calls for a clearer definition of the term; and the need to differentiate transformation from transition. Further, we believe it is necessary to parse out and better define radical initiatives and alternatives as those that offer the clearest paths to transformation.

Transformation by definition needs to reconfigure the structures of development through changing an overarching global political economy dominated by neoliberal capitalism with, in our day, increasing authoritarian tendencies (Pelling 2011). It includes Tadical shifts, directional turns or step changes in normative and technical aspects of culture, development or risk management (Pelling et al. 2015). From this perspective, transformation deals with the deeper and obscured roots of unsustainability, laden in social, cultural, economic and political spheres. These relatively invisible root causes often overlap and interact to produce uneven outcomes (Pelling 2012) including feedbacks. According to Scoones (2016), transformations to sustainability require a shift beyond scarcity discourses towards a politicized understanding of resources and sustainability. Thus, if transformation is to be achieved in an empowering and pro-poor way then a truly politicized view which exposes, problematizes and resists the ongoing reproduction of harmful power relations is inevitable (Gillard et al. 2016).

While there is broad acknowledgement that a transformation to sustainability requires a radical shift, including a shift in society's value-normative system and shifting relations across the personal (i.e. beliefs, values, worldviews), political (i.e. systems and structures) and practical (i.e. behaviours and technical responses) levels simultaneously (O'Brien and Sygna 2013), there is less consensus about what the ‘radical’ in radical transformations means. The word ‘radicalis’ comes from the Latin “of or having root” and refers to “change at the root, with connotations to fundamental and revolutionary change of social systems. A radical social perspective inherently calls for addressing social justice and power issues, as well as environmental ones, in the transformation process.

Nancy Frasers distinction between what she terms affirmative versus transformative change is illustrative. She argues that injustices may be resolved either affirmatively or transformatively. Affirmative redistributive remedies aim to correct existing income inequality by facilitating transfer of material resources to maligned groups, for example through the social welfare state. However, these remedies tend to leave intact the conditions, such as the capitalist mode of production, that were responsible for generating income inequality in the first place. In contrast, transformative redistributive remedies are aimed at eradicating the origins of economic injustice and eliminating the root causes of economic inequality, and would include 'redistributing income, reorganizing the division of labour, subjecting investment to democratic decision-making, or transforming other basic economic structures (Fraser 1995: 73). Regarding recognition and identity conflicts, the transformative remedy, in contrast to affirmative action, entails the deconstruction of identities themselves and the transformation of the underlying cultural-valuational structure.

In this way, we believe it is important to differentiate initiatives by communities, civil society organizations, government agencies and businesses that are dealing only with the symptoms of the problem, and can be considered reformist initiatives, from those alternatives and movements which are confronting the basic structural reasons for unsustainability, inequity and injustice, such as capitalism, patriarchy, state-centrism, or other inequities in power resulting from caste, ethnic, racial and other social characteristics. We call these transformative or radical alternatives.

It should also be noted that there is no necessary contradiction between reform and transformation; many reform measures may well be contained within transformative processes, and some reforms if stretched far enough can also be transformative.

However, we may argue that a radical transformation needs to be based on attaining the impossible, rather than limiting itself to purely technical questions and narrowly constrained approaches based on questions of ecological sustainability such as energy production technologies and costs. David Harvey (2011) calls this a “co-revolutionary theory, which picks up transformative steam from grassroots movements but without ignoring the reclamation of hegemonic state structures. The 'Initial point of entry for alternatives is less important than the need to infect and influence other domains, suggests Pelling (2012: 7), where societal 'shifts and movements are not minor historical events and most likely require energies both at the grassroots as well as momentum from above. This, we argue, is the basis of a radical transformative agenda: flourishing rooted, local alternatives connected to wider political transformations, meanwhile paying utmost attention to historical, social and political specificities to build emancipatory sustainabilities (Scoones et al. 2017).

Because EJ movements propose that environmental problems are political issues that cannot be solved apart from social and economic justice, and that these call for a transformative approach and the restructuring of dominant social relations and institutional arrangements, we argue that EJ movements need to be at the core of sustainability transformations. EJ brings attention to both the multivalent aspects of justice - from distribution to cultural recognition to participation, capabilities, cognitive justice and beyond - as well as an intersectional approach to forms of difference across lines of class, race, gender, sexual preference, caste, ability, etc. This multidimensional and intersectional approach has been sorely lacking from transformation studies. Further, the EJ approach focuses on the interdependency of issues, seeing environmental devastation, ecological racism, poverty, crime, social despair, and alienation from community and family as aspects of a larger rooted systemic crisis. Finally, radical politics and alternatives and knowledge on how to confront hegemonic power and injustices is often created through processes of struggle.

For us, radical transformation implies one which refers to a transformation of power structures and relations, from a situation of domination, injustice, violence and unsustainability to one of reduced violence, increased equality and flourishing. It entails challenging the sources of domination and oppression, including capitalism, patriarchy, state-centrism and inequities along lines of race, caste, ethnicity, gender, ableism, sexuality and others — and it is thus multidimensional and intersectional, balancing ecological concerns with social, economic, cultural and democratic spheres.

Socio-environmental conflicts as catalysts of change

From this perspective, the manifestation of socio-environmental conflict is the first step of sustainability transformations. This is because conflicts express a questioning of the status quo and of a system where some have to be ‘polluted; displaced and deprived while others benefit.

Yet EJ struggles go beyond demanding redistribution of environmental harms and resources, but rather contest the very economic, ecological, social and cultural principles behind particular uses of the environment (Gadgil and Guha 1993). In some cases, those resisting an extractivist project are often articulating an antisystemic vision for societal transformation to sustainability within their resistance practices. Further, the organizing and collective action in which they engage, in defence of their lives and livelihoods, often inspires the quest for more localized and democratic forms of governing resources and commons and leads to new practices and alternative forms of provisioning and production. This highlights the productivity of conflicts in the creation of transformation and alternatives.

Conventional approaches to social and ecological conflicts generally adopt a perspective focused on conflict resolution/management, which aims on achieving a mutual satisfaction of interests among actors based on the maximization of individual gains - win-win solutions, through cooperation, negotiation and consensus seeking (Fisher and Ury 1981; Ury et al. 1988). Under this approach, conflicts tend to be seen as negative phenomena to be avoided and 'resolved' as quickly as possible. However, such approaches can lead environmental conflicts to become recurrent and cyclical because they offer little opportunity for developing solid democratic and sustainable agreements for the use and management of the environment and territories. Socio-environmental conflicts have complex and profound roots, in the majority of cases with important political, historical, social, environmental and cultural components and profound power asymmetries and institutional failures, which limit the possibility of them being successfully dealt with through conventional, facilitated conflict resolution methods.

In contrast, a conflict transformation approach sees conflicts as a natural and inevitable part of human interactions that can have constructive potential. The starting point of conflict transformation is that conflict is rooted in situations that are perceived as unjust, and by unearthing and making injustices visible, conflicts become catalysts for social change (Dukes 1996; Lederach 1995). While conflict resolution tends to focus on reaching agreements and overcoming a crisis situation, conflict transformation engages with a much bigger question: the pursuit of justice in society through restoration, rectification of wrongs and the creation of right relationships based on equity and fairness (Botes 2003; Lederach 1995). More specifically, Lederach (1995) defines conflict transformation as:

the process that helps us visualise and answer to the flow and backflow of social conflict as life opportunities, that can create processes of constructive change, reduce violence, increase justice in interactions and social structures and respond to the real problems of human relations.

Thus, following Lederach, in this book we see socio-environmental conflicts as an opportunity for constructive change, and conflict transformation as the multiple processes that can make this change happen.

Alternatives as concrete materializations of the needed changes

Just as EJ conflicts signal the need for change, they also find expression in the form of counter-hegemonic alternative processes and narratives. Political ecologist Paul Robbins advocates what he terms a “hatchet and seed' approach (Robbins 2004). This entails a dual task of deconstructing and discarding dominant narratives, while also identifying alternative practices and knowledges and bringing these positive examples and theoretical innovations, developed by and through social movements and community activists, to light.

While we are concerned with the role of conflict and resistance in transformation, an integral element of this resistance is the social movements that are not actively opposing particular projects such as those defined by the EJAtlas, but are engaged in practices that provide an alternative to a part or the whole of the currently dominant system, challenging one or more of the capitalist, statist, patriarchal, religious, casteist or other structures of power inequity. For instance, a group of women farmers transforming their agricultural systems away from one of dependence on chemicals, corporate seeds and government credit towards self-reliance for seeds, organic inputs, local exchange and collective credit, and local knowledge are not necessarily struggling against a particular project or company but rather against a global agro-industrial model of injustice.

Alternatives can be understood as practices, performances, systems, structures, policies, processes, technologies and concepts/frameworks, practised or proposed/propagated by any collective or individual, communities, social enterprises, etc. that usurp or challenge the capitalist mainstream and that reflect a diversity of exchange relations, social networks, forms of collective action and human experiences in different places and regions (Gibson-Graham 2006). Alternatives can be continuations from the past, reasserted in or modified for current times, or new ones; it is important to note that the term does not imply these are always “marginal” or new, but that they adopt and operate with values and ideologies that overtly reject hegemonic economic and political practices. While they may position their activities in non-confrontational and potentially apolitical terms, their attempt to create alternatives to the hegemonic system is also often informed by an oppositional consciousness. This may include groups engaged in small-scale energy production, organic farming and permaculture, open-source software, and other forms of radical grassroots experimentation. While these groups are less likely to explicitly position themselves as EJ movements, through their embodied practices they can be said to be advancing a vision of what EJ could look like.

In summary, we see conflict and alternatives as intertwined processes. EJ struggles are spaces of reimagination, where ones and the other's ways of thinking, seeing the world and doing are disputed and reshaped in a dynamic and multi-scalar learning process. Moreover, alternatives can be both the result or the root of resistance processes. Communities can rebel against the de-legitimation of their values, worldviews and related practices. For instance, in the context of increased pressures and conflicts related to the mining activities in Latin America, social movements are formulating strategies to develop and strengthen local alternatives during, after and before the unfolding of conflicts. Alternatives are also fostered as a strategy to prevent, and oppose (e.g. Walter et al. 2016). Thus, social movements, resistance and alternatives are linked processes. People move across these spaces, protesting and engaging in rebuilding when they need to.

A Framework for Understanding Movements of Resistance as Agents of Transformative Change

Although EJ struggles/conflicts and alternatives are powerful processes where intended (and unintended) social transformations occur, the particularities of these processes remain largely under-examined. Furthermore, frameworks to analyse transformations with a focus on conflicts and alternatives from the perspectives of EJ movements are rare.

In ACKnowl-EJ we wanted to develop a framework that could help analyse bottom-up transformations based on two core ideas:

e Atransformation to sustainability must entail transformation of power relations.

e Social transformation studies need to pay attention to such power relations across multiple dimensions and scales to fully capture how truly transformative processes and alternatives occur, and how to prevent inequalities and injustices from being created elsewhere or displaced.

Most importantly, we needed to develop a common point of reference that could help us look in detail at cases but also make comparison across different political systems. For instance, much of the content of Grupo Confluenciass framework, which focuses on the development of intercultural relations using a decolonial environmental justice approach (Rodríguez 2020), and which makes sense in the context of current plurinational politics prevalent in many Latin American countries, did not necessarily apply to other countries which function under liberal or consociational democracies (e.g. Lebanon).!