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Paper short abstract

Ticuna women spontaneously form a collective and reimagine development beyond the state, building alternative futures through food sovereignty, autonomy, and care, demonstrating non-state agency under uncertainty while constructing relational pluriversal worlds grounded in Indigenous knowledge.

Paper long abstract

In the Amazon Basin, Indigenous rights and knowledge systems are routinely instrumentalised or marginalised by state actors and external institutions. The core challenge therefore lies not in merely expanding participation within existing development frameworks, but in fundamentally reimagining development itself, redistributing power, and reawakening diverse knowledge systems and cosmologies. In contexts of environmental degradation, political uncertainty, and contested boundaries, meaningful transformation is increasingly emerging from the ground up through Indigenous knowledge, everyday practices, and community-driven autonomous action.

This research examines how Ticuna Indigenous women collective emerges as non-state actors actively reconfiguring agrifood systems and redesigning alternative futures. Focusing on the localized, bottom-up structure, this research analyses the Saberes y Sabores Ticuna, a woman-led community-based organization in the Colombian Amazon through a mixed-methods approach, comprising participant observation, semi-structured interviews, focus groups, cooking meetings, and secondary data analysis. It investigates how these Tikuna women reimagine development (Meechi Torü Maú - good living), the challenges they face, and how their innovative practices in pursuit of prosperity drive transitions within the agrifood system, from chagra (farmland) to the table. Specifically, it examines how Ticuna women autonomously restore, innovate, and share traditional recipes, thereby preserving Indigenous food culture, empowering women, fostering a multispecies ethic that extends beyond human concerns, and unsettling dominant, state-centred models of agrifood development. By foregrounding Indigenous women’s agency under conditions of uncertainty, the research contributes to the articulation of relational and pluriversal alternative worlds grounded in Indigenous autonomy, food sovereignty, and the creative power of communities at the margins.