Presentation short abstract

Using a Batwa case study, this presentation asks how ethnopharmacology and political ecology can collaborate to support land reappropriation and address the structural and environmental injustices affecting both health and medicinal knowledge.

Presentation long abstract

Ethnopharmacology and political ecology address overlapping concerns, yet their advocacy efforts rarely converge in a structured way. Political ecology analyses the historical and structural forces—colonial dispossession, land evictions, extractive economies—that shape environmental injustice. Ethnopharmacology, meanwhile, often works closely with Indigenous and traditional communities whose medicinal knowledge depends on access to ancestral territories now compromised by these same processes. Although this proximity gives ethnopharmacologists insight into the everyday impacts of unjust policies, existing policy frameworks—most notably the Nagoya Protocol—focus mainly on immediate research-related harms such as biopiracy, leaving broader issues like land loss, ecological degradation, and colonial continuities insufficiently addressed.

This presentation asks how the two fields might collaborate more intentionally to strengthen community-led efforts toward environmental justice. To ground this question, we draw on our collaboration with the Batwa, evicted from their forest homelands in the 1990s. What began as an ethnopharmacological project quickly shifted when the community contacted us during a severe tungiasis outbreak. Because the Batwa had been excluded from the forest where they once accessed plants used for traditional treatment, the outbreak escalated into a serious public health crisis. Responding required mobilising a specialised NGO for disease intervention—revealing how research with land-dispossessed communities can rapidly cross into forms of urgent care.

This experience shows why ethnopharmacologists increasingly encounter advocacy terrains associated with political ecology: land rights, environmental degradation, and structural marginalisation. We argue that shared spaces, joint frameworks, and cross-disciplinary networks could help both fields develop more coherent, community-aligned strategies for supporting the communities we work with.