Biodiversity Management and Food Security through Culturally Grounded Socioecological Restoration

This project, funded by a SSHRC Destination Horizon grant, is concerned with Indigenous-led socioecological restoration, and the concomitant benefits to biodiversity conservation and food security and sovereignty.  While the place of Indigenous Knowledge Systems is increasingly referenced in global and local scale initiatives, there continues to be an overreliance (in the field of restoration ecology) on the Natural Sciences, and an unbalanced emphasis on target-driven biological regeneration, but Dr. Andrea Cuéllar says, “the Social Sciences have an important contribution to make to this question, ecological restoration in Indigenous territories must be grounded in the knowledge systems and culturally situated goals of Indigenous rightsholders such that restoration amounts to socioecological transformation.” This work with the Quijos Nation of the Ecuadorian Amazon aligns with the European Commission’s Amazonia+ Programme, tasked to improve the capacity to reduce forest degradation and improve biodiversity in the Amazon by enhancing, among others, the participation of Indigenous peoples in environmental and forest governance policies and mechanisms.  Academic partners in the project include anthropologists, sociologists and human geographers from the Universidad San Franciso de Quito (USFQ) in Ecuador and GAIAS Europa (the USFQ’s academic hub in Spain), the University of Oxford (UK) and York University (Canada).