WS 3.125: Andean/Runa Mountain Social-Ecological Futures

Conservation efforts in Ecuador often coincide with the realities of rural and Indigenous communities, whose livelihoods and traditions are deeply tied to the landscapes they inhabit. As rightsholders of ancestral territories, these communities have invested their subsistence livelihoods in conserving, adapting, and mitigating local and bioregional biodiversity. To ensure these initiatives center on human-nature agency equity, effective kodesigned projects are vital; it is crucial to transition from viewing these communities as passive beneficiaries to recognizing them as active participants and leaders, as well as crediting their ko-authorship enfranchising them in the intellectual-economic activities. Enfranchising rural and Indigenous communities in the kodesign of conservation projects contributes to finding common ground and collective authority to advocate for land rights on emergent “commons” landmasses due to climate change. Critical Ecosystem Partnership Fund (CEPF) CEPF’s conservation projects have succeeded in attracting “collaboration” between academia and Indigenous/rural communities. However, when it comes to knowledge authorship crediting, data sovereignty, FPIC lifecycle, and responsible benefit-sharing, communities are still considered objects of study rather than research ko-authors, authentic contributors, and rightsholders to data. This workshop proposes to have a ‘blind entry’ of the BioKulture Design Framework to establish Guiding Principles for Responsible Relational Research Methodology in/with Mountain Local and Indigenous Communities that safeguard people-nature agencies from both Indigenous and rural custodians and, at the same time,