Contribution short abstract:

Timor-Leste’s permaculture interventions combine critical pedagogy with localised knowledge and expertise. They reveal the short-sightedness of the bureaucracy-obsessed, capital-intensive, and project-oriented mindsets of many international aid and national government conglomerations.

Contribution long abstract:

Timor-Leste’s permaculture interventions, which carefully combine critical, embodied, and emplaced pedagogy with localized knowledge and expertise, reveal the short-sightedness of the bureaucracy-obsessed, capital-intensive, and project-oriented mindset of many international aid and national government conglomerations. A permaculture-based school curriculum works in the opposite direction, prioritizing the increasingly existential concerns of the growing number of communities that do not feel heard, seen, and cared for in ways that speak to their needs instead of forcing them into abstract systems of 'universal education' and 'agricultural development'. Whereas hegemonic pedagogical frameworks and neoliberal project logics obfuscate local knowledge, they remain essential and central in permaculture’s minor utopias and pedagogies of hope. They contest inequalities and marginalities by respecting and revitalizing local and Indigenous knowledge in combination with critical permaculture pedagogy that works and sweats with teachers and students in vulnerable soils instead of exploiting them.

Permaculture-based school curricula steer away from buzzwords of 'international development' and 'education for all' that often homogenize learning practices and infrastructures based on Eurocentric values that devalue local and Indigenous knowledge. Permaculture-based school curricula emanate hope through decolonial practices of learning together with ecological and cultural environments instead of disciplining, extracting, and exploiting them. Instead of investing in capital-intensive technologies of learning and knowing, learning institutions and political organizations in other parts of the world might also benefit from taking a few steps back and reflecting on the power of permaculture experiences and Indigenous practices that social actors acquire and deploy to work towards more sustainable futures.