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Paper short abstract:

This work intends to understand the nature, land, and climate perceptions of territorial movements led by women that face the dominant extractivism model in the tropical forest of Brazil and the Democratic Republic of Congo (RDC).

Paper long abstract:

This work intends to understand the nature, land, and climate perceptions of territorial movements led by women that face the dominant extractivism model in the tropical forest of Brazil and the Democratic Republic of Congo (RDC). Departing from the idea that their political ontologies, the form of struggles, and their relation to land and nature can be a path to the constitution to what Federici calls the new commons (2011).

It looks closer to the context of tropical forests, where many major international sustainability agendas still understand as empty, inorganic spaces, as objects to be incorporated “sustainably” into the world market, and how, in this context, women carry a double burden as primarily responsible for the cultural protection and environmental justice of the commons, and, in equal proportion, the most attacked for defending their communities from extractive projects.

Despite the very unfavorable scenario, this research, looking in specific at the cases of the Coalition of Women Leaders for the Environment and Sustainable Development in DRC, and the Interstate Movement of Babaçu Coconut Breakers, explores how the notions articulated by these movements can be consolidated as a catalytic point of emancipatory climate narratives and to a decolonized climate sociology. One that challenges the notion of property, subverts the legislative systems of nation-states and simultaneously gives sense to the idea of being in common.