Paper short abstract:

The Regional Amazonian University IKIAM has been conceived as a catalyst for Ecuador's economic transition towards sustainability. I explore this site of friction with attention to the way in which pathways to alternative sustainabilities are opened up and foreclosed in the Amazon and beyond.

Paper long abstract:

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. Using ethnographic methods and discourse analysis, I investigate a green transition initiative in the Ecuadorian Amazon: the Regional Amazonian University IKIAM, which has been explicitly conceived as a catalyst for Ecuador's transition from extraction and export of oil and other sub-soil resources towards a 'green and sustainable economy'.

IKIAM means 'forest' or 'nature' in Shuar, one of nine Amazonian languages spoken in Ecuador. With its 93,000 hectare 'living laboratory', the 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, and between different versions of 'green'. Such friction is not only conflictual, it is also 'interconnection across difference', productive of new relations and interactions (Tsing 2005).

I explore this friction with particular attention to the way in which pathways to alternative sustainabilities are opened up and foreclosed, in the Amazon and beyond. Working with indigenous midwives, healers and the university's hygienic services association, amongst others, I inquire into how stakes get defined, pathways made visible and socio-ecological risks and benefits distributed. I highlight the variety of perspectives on 'what the region needs' that is obscured by IKIAM's slogan 'a university in the Amazon, for the Amazon'.