Land, Nature and Democracy: ECO-DEM Workshop in Cape Town
The fellows participating in the ECO-DEM crosshub project have come together in Cape Town for a workshop on land, nature and democracy.
UCT Nelson Mandela School of Governance, CEU Conference Held at Double Tree Hotel in Salt River on 12 May 2025. Photos by Je’nine May.
The ECO-DEM workshop convened GFDD postdoctoral fellows from the Colombo, Bogotá, and Cape Town hubs to explore the interlinked themes of democracy, ecological transitions, and development in the Global South. This gathering on 12 May 2025 marked the first formal in-person convening of the ECO-DEM working group and emphasized the importance of South-South knowledge exchange. Over twenty researchers and scholars joined us in-person and online.
We began with opening remarks from Alex Dyzenhaus, who welcomed participants to Cape Town and introduced the workshop’s aims: to reflect critically on the political and ecological transitions underway across Latin America, Sub-Saharan Africa, and South Asia and to foster long-term collaborations among GFDD fellows disciplines and geographies.
UCT Nelson Mandela School of Governance, CEU Conference Held at Double Tree Hotel in Salt River on 12 May 2025. Photos by Je’nine May.
The first panel brought together research on governance, identity, and democratic practice.
- Pooja Kalita (Colombo Hub) presented her work, “Going back to Tholuwa: for a sustainable future”, which explored the significance of reverting to indigenous practices of inclusion of both the human and more than the human world while challenging stratifications based on religion, caste, class, gender, region etc in contemporary neo-liberal times.
- Sarah Thompson (Colombo Hub) followed with a presentation on “Mainstreaming Pakistan’s tribal areas and anti-merger sentiment”. Her talk focused on judicial reform in Pakistan, prompting discussion on the forms that backlash to changing gender norms can take in various contexts.
- Rocío Fernández (Bogotá Hub) closed the panel with her research on “Education, Labour and Democracy: the rise, expansion and implications of the EdTech industry in teachers’ work”, analysing the increasing digitalisation of education from a labour approach to teaching. The audience engaged with themes such as its links with democratic futures and with new extractivist dynamics.
UCT Nelson Mandela School of Governance, CEU Conference Held at Double Tree Hotel in Salt River on 12 May 2025. Photos by Je’nine May.
The second panel examined the links between land, nature, and democracy.
- Elena Pérez Lagüela (Cape Town Hub) opened with her paper on “Historicizing Agricultural Development in Ethiopia (1930–1995)”. Her work traced the origins of contemporary structural transformation in Ethiopia, leading to a discussion of agricultural development as a driver for broader economic development.
- Olivia Arigho Stiles (Bogotá Hub) presented on “Agrarian extractivism in Bolivia; historical trends”, which examined how contemporary debates around agrarian extractivism can be informed through an analysis of longer histories of settlement and development on Bolivia’s Amazonian frontier, in which peasant and Indigenous movements emerge as complicated and dynamic actors. Histories of ecological destruction in Amazonian frontiers are at the heart of today’s profoundly unsettled land politics in Bolivia, in which Indigenous and peasant actors continue to face dispossession and marginalisation.
- Alex Dyzenhaus (Cape Town Hub) concluded the panel with his presentation on a co-authored paper “Negotiating the Boundaries of Farmerhood in Rural South Africa”. His talk focused on South Africa and how (or whether) established white commercial farmers integrate emerging Black farmers into agricultural communities. This sparked debate on the contemporary politics of land reform and agriculture in South Africa.
After lunch, fellows and participants were joined by Dr. Mnqobi Ngubane of Nelson Mandela University for a screening of his film, Mathonga Elizwe (Spirits of the Land). The film depicts a true story of latter-day land struggle in South Africa, laying bare the struggles of ordinary South Africans in obtaining land through the democratic land tenure reform process.
UCT Nelson Mandela School of Governance, CEU Conference Held at Double Tree Hotel in Salt River on 12 May 2025. Photos by Je’nine May.
