For several decades, political ecology has been developing as a field of convergence, dialogue, and mutual feedback among different disciplines and the knowledge systems of communities, stemming from a profound critique of the fragmentation of scientific and technological knowledge that responds to the idea of ​​a single environmental crisis. For this reason, the proposal begins with a necessary integration of perspectives to address its objects of study, including those that emerge from listening to, accompanying, and co-participating in the environmental struggles of communities. In this way, political ecology is simultaneously an inter- and transdisciplinary perspective on academic knowledge and a renewed political practice, articulated with the struggles of social, Indigenous, and peasant movements.

This field is concerned not only with conflicts over ecological distribution (Martínez-Alier, 2006), but also with exploring the power relations that are interwoven between the ways of life of communities that sustain socio-environmental coexistence and the dynamics imposed by the globalized world. That is, it encompasses the political conflict over ecological distribution and the social struggles for the defense of common goods and nature in its material and symbolic dimensions, as well as for the continuity of life on the planet.

Today we are witnessing a general polycrisis of global capitalism (Svampa, 2025) that is simultaneously a financial, social, economic, cultural and ecological crisis, including emotional and psychological well-being. Therefore, political ecology calls for dialogue across diverse fields of knowledge to form a transdisciplinary and complex vision with the intention of better understanding the multidimensionality of the socio-environmental conflicts of our time and building concrete alternatives that allow us to reorient our ways of thinking about the world and developing within it.

In this context, Latin American political ecology has become a distinct field of thought with international relevance. It is a pluralistic field of analysis, critique, and discourse, built upon the formation of Latin American academic networks that maintain continuity with regional traditions of critical, environmental, Indigenous, feminist, postcolonial, and anti-capitalist thought. It draws on an interdisciplinary theoretical perspective constructed at the intersection of environmental and political history, political economy, critical geography, ecological economics, cultural studies, social psychology, Latin American Indigenous studies, and environmental thought from the Global South.

The construction of human societies has involved issues of appropriation and the establishment of power relations that allow some actors access to nature and decision-making regarding its use, while excluding others. These power relations have been present in Latin America, particularly since the colonial era, and although they have gone through various stages over the centuries, they continue to perpetuate the coloniality of power under the construction of a Eurocentric modernity (Quijano, 2014). In this way, the genocide perpetrated since colonization and the reformulation of these mechanisms of expropriation and appropriation of nature today are obscured, as is the racist destruction or subalternization of identities (Alimonda, 2017). Therefore, political ecology focuses on analyzing the role of the State and its public policies as a relevant factor in the current configuration of society-nature relations and the disputes that emerge within them.

Latin American political ecology is not limited to so-called "scientific" knowledge. In recent years, numerous voices working in this field have been incorporating new understandings into the conceptual framework regarding the importance of intercultural diversity in the construction of environmental knowledge. They have shown that the planet's biological diversity is inextricably linked to the management of it by thousands of peoples and local communities throughout history, especially in the Global South (Toledo and Barrera-Bassols, 2008).

Thus, the recognition of plural knowledge and the need to construct alternative rationalities (Leff, 2019) is another key point in the theoretical and practical perspective of this field of knowledge. The exercise of power within the logic of accumulation and the market, while fragmenting scientific and technological knowledge and orienting it toward its own needs, has subjugated the vast diversity of popular knowledge about nature. Indigenous knowledge, based on centuries of coexistence, observation, and empirical experimentation within local ecosystems, was discarded from the Conquest onward and throughout a coloniality that persists to this day. Political ecology also presupposes an epistemology situated in territories with a decolonial perspective that politically transcends the interdisciplinary project of knowledge construction to encompass the environmentalization of social struggles (Ulloa, 2017).

Latin American political ecology has been developing through an active relationship of constant exchange and feedback with the diverse movements and struggles that are at the forefront of conflicts at different scales and in various circumstances. It gathers critiques of hegemonic development models and, together with them, outlines other possible futures. From this perspective, with struggles from below, by the left, and for the Earth (Escobar, 2017), political ontology and the action-research paradigm (Fals-Borda, 2025) become urgent and necessary tools for combating far-right extremism and denouncing the multiple forms of violence generated by the constant expansion of capital's frontiers and accumulation under extractivist logics. This is essential not only for understanding the complexity of these processes but also for supporting struggles in defense of Life through common and de-hierarchical means, within a framework of decolonization and multi-scalar dialogue.

To achieve these goals, nine lines of work are proposed:

- Environmental conflicts, violence, authoritarianism, and struggles in defense of life

- Capitalocene and disaster capitalism

- Ecofeminisms and women's struggles against extractivism

- Environmental Education in Latin America and the Caribbean

- Energy Transition and Climate Injustices in Latin America and the Caribbean

- Movements for Environmental Justice and Water Justice from the South-Caribbean.

- Cosmopolitics and multispecies political ecologies

- Insular Caribbean

- Art and political ecologies

-Political ecology of food

During this period, we plan to expand the focus to three relevant themes: political ecology in the face of technological advances, political ecology of well-being, and political ecology of businesses.

Furthermore, through various projects, research activities, and outreach efforts, we will strengthen ties with other Working Groups with which we have already been collaborating: Territorialities in Dispute and Resistance; Anticapitalisms and Emerging Societies; Indigenous Peoples, Autonomies, and Collective Rights; Borders, Regionalization, and Globalization; Latin American Critical Geographical Thought; Critical Studies of Rural Development; Bodies, Territories, and Feminisms; Energy and Sustainable Development; and Just Transitions and Care for Our Common Home. We also propose initiating joint projects with other Working Groups that wish to collaborate and establishing working networks with Paraguay and Bolivia.

At the same time, we are interested in initiating a process of dialogue and joint construction with researchers, organizations and social movements from other Global Souths, specifically from

Political ecology seeks to understand the processes that shape human and non-human life (Machado, 2016), asserting that societies are nature and do not exist outside of it. In recent decades, political ecology in Latin America and the Caribbean has consolidated itself as a dynamic field that transcends the theoretical realm and engages with global challenges. Emerging from struggles for environmental and social justice, it has generated concepts—such as environmental liabilities, sacrifice zones, and ecological debt—that have transformed the understanding of the relationships between economy, society, and nature in the Global South. These contributions have broadened the frameworks of dependency theory and development studies and have been adopted in regions such as Africa and Asia, where notions like extractivism, neo-extractivism, and ecologically unequal trade allow for a deeper analysis of the global extractive system and strengthen learning among the Global South. Likewise, agrarian movements, agroecology, and food sovereignty have driven the greening of social struggles, generating a political and epistemological shift that renews strategies, languages, and ontologies (López-Gómez, Nova, Castro, and Empinotti, 2025). Ideas such as body-territory, green colonialism, and the rights of nature are linked to Indigenous, Afro-descendant, and community feminisms, forming a pluralistic space where relational languages ​​become central. Latin American ecofeminisms and hydrofeminisms emerge as critical forces that challenge patriarchal and extractivist structures, confront criminalization, and act as bridges of exchange with other Global Souths, strengthening debate and collective action.

Therefore, the current proposal continues the themes developed in previous periods, and incorporates new topics:

- Political ecology of extractivism. Extractivism is not a recent or circumstantial phenomenon, but rather refers to a structural and long-standing problem, as it is a modality of capitalist accumulation (Acosta, 2012) that dates back to the times of the Conquest and the plunder of Abya Yala, but which has clearly intensified in recent decades in all Latin American countries, further deepening the colonial, peripheral, dependent and subordinate position of the continent in the world system (Machado, 2016) and which faces new challenges in the face of South-South and Southeast extractivism.

- Struggles in defense of life in rural and urban contexts, which strive daily to guarantee the material and symbolic conditions for their own (re)production and that of the ecosystems in which they live, particularly the Environmental Justice and Water Justice Movements. We draw on the Caribbean decolonial tradition in identifying the processes of subalternization of bodies and territories (hydraulic cultures).

The adverse effects of climate change in the region are felt most acutely by local communities and their territories, who have waged long-standing struggles for the survival of traditional ways of life in harmony with the environment. It is useful to present the alternative visions of environmental justice offered by the most vulnerable communities: Afro-descendant, Indigenous, and Raizal people.

- We highlight and analyze the leading and increasingly visible role that women are playing in the defense of threatened and affected territories; making audible the violence with which extractivism impacts them in a differentiated way, and driving collective efforts to persist in the sustenance, defense, and care of life. The defense of life is also a struggle to care for, heal, recover, and reclaim the body-territory while recognizing and questioning the marks of colonialism, patriarchy, and capitalism (Lang, Bringel, Manahan, 2024).

The Energy Transition and Climate Injustices in Latin America and the Caribbean are analyzed from a perspective that highlights the need for a socio-ecological transformation of the multiple processes of production and global economic management. We assume that energy capitalism presents us with false solutions such as renewable energies and the corporate energy transition.

- Connection with critical Environmental Education that problematizes the negative effects of a devastating development model and the unsustainable implications of fragmented knowledge. We propose to highlight and analyze how in our territories environmental education has been closely linked to sociocultural and ethnic aspects, leading to the construction of a distinct Latin American environmental thought, hand in hand with political ecology (Saldi et al, 2025).

The Capitalocene analysis is a diagnostic concept (Svampa, 2019), highlighting the space-time in which capital penetrated the sphere of production and reorganized the labor process according to its logic. In its expansive and accelerated logic, disaster capitalism, adopted by the corporate class and governments, allows them to profit directly or indirectly from disasters and their risks, employing shock doctrines and continuing to impose neoliberal and ultraneoliberal policies.

We believe it is necessary to recognize that we live in a pluriverse, building a shared world from seemingly irreconcilable worldviews. Cosmopolitics is about weaving together heterogeneity. Conflicts between worlds are not limited to human beings; they involve other species, objects, food, infrastructure, and so on. Therefore, multispecies political ecology engages in networks of relationships that enable alternative modes of existence.

- The study of food production and consumption modes from a political ecology perspective seeks to consolidate a critical line of research against the current hegemonic food system and its socio-environmental impacts, while recovering community knowledge and practices that support ways of life based on food sovereignty, ecological justice and epistemologies of care, recognizing in peasant, indigenous and agroecological experiences concrete alternatives to the collapse of the agro-industrial model.

- Art and political ecology. Political ecology linked to art emerges as a powerful tool for awareness-raising and symbolic transformation, providing tools to modify regimes of effectiveness (Giraldo and Toro, 2020)

- We will continue to promote the strengthening of the field of political ecology in Caribbean island countries and Central America, latitudes that are especially affected by climate change and extractivism due to their biocultural richness.

In this period 2026-2028 we will include new axes:

Political ecology versus technological advances: AI, ChatGPT developed by corporations with the aim of controlling bodies and minds, as well as the socio-environmental implications of the location of data centers in the Latin American region.

The political ecology of emotional well-being: analyzes how the processes of domination and exploitation of the capitalocene affect the emotionality of society, creating disturbances in situations of uncertainty.

The political ecology of companies analyzes the case of companies and corporations responsible for socio-environmental conflicts and damage.