Sustainability and social transformation: the role of ecovillages in confluence with the pluriverse of community-led alternatives

Abstract

Amidst the uncertainties of a climate emergency scenario, sustainable and counter-hegemonic alternatives of social and productive organization are being developed by several grassroots local communities. Thus, this essay aims to critically discuss the role of ecovillages within the pluriverse of community-led alternatives, understood as a plural set of socially and environmentally transformative possibilities. Adopting a decolonial perspective, this study was carried out through an exploratory qualitative approach, based on a bibliographic and documentary survey. According to the adopted premises, it is possible to recognize that communal territorial innovations, as illustrated by ecovillages’ practices, may expand the horizon of solutions to face contemporary multiple crises. In line with the Paris Agreement and the 2030 Agenda, confluences between diverse community-led alternatives can contribute to deconstruct rooted development premises and to potentialize climate actions toward a just and sustainable transition, in tune with the triune dimensions of cultural identity, social equity, and ecological sustainability of the Buen Vivir communal ethics. Graphical abstract

Market‐based instruments and research infrastructures

“…While writing this, the World Economic Forum in Davos is taking place with environmental policy and climate change among the central topics on its agenda. There is an inherent dilemma in addressing climate change because of the burdens that the instruments to combat it place on the weakest of society and in the global world (Fonseca & Almeida, 2022; Markkanen & Anger‐Kraavi, 2019). Especially the financial aspects of developing and affording more climate‐friendly products, fostering less climate‐damaging individual behavior, and funding research on technological innovations that reduce the impact of humans on the climate are subject to frequent debates (Coleman et al, 2023; Dubois et al, 2019; Steinebach & Limberg, 2022).…”