Paper short abstract:

Based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in the Andean-Chocó region in Ecuador, this paper offers an insight into the social-environmental strategies of youth to cope with a constantly contested territory. This work stands as an exploration of resistance and re-imagination in a rural context.

Paper long abstract:

As global the “climate crisis” may sound, it is not caused or felt homogeneously. It is caused by a western-colonial-extractivist-patriarchal system. Therefore, the resistances to this system can’t and shouldn’t be homogenized either. It is utterly important to acknowledge lifelong resistances form the “Global South” grounded in popular knowledges, relational worlds, but also in the constant ontological occupation of the Territories.

“The Resistance” is an organic process, constantly being re-define by the struggle and the ones who live it. This is an important moment in time because the climate crisis cannot be ignored any longer, and “Nature” must not be considered an object of study or exploitation anymore. Therefore, the western interpretation of nature must be reimagined and redefined, and the presumptions of being the only valid creators of knowledge must come to an end. It is time to learn from those who have been resisting, those who can give the Western World different ideas to redefine affiliations with the “rest of nature”, and work alongside each other for another more just world, understanding that climate justice is social justice and upside down.

Thus, through the ethnographic fieldwork conducted in the Andean-Chocó region in Ecuador, this paper offers an insight into social-environmental strategies of youth to cope with a constantly contested territory. This work stands as an exploration of resistance and re-imagination on a rural context under the theoretical framework of Epistemologies of the South (Escobar, 2016), new social Latino American movements (Sierra, 2018) and new ruralities (Rosas-Baños, 2013).