Scaling-up Ancestral Knowledges: Indigenous Climate Initiatives’ Boundary Work in Amazonia

Scholars and activists highlight the importance of Indigenous knowledges (IK) in maintaining higher proportions of forest cover and carbon storage in Amazonian territories. When making boundaries, or discussing the differences among knowledge systems, Science and Technology Studies (STS) both engages with and contests binaries including universal/particular or Western/Indigenous. STS further theorizes scale and scalability in relation to the technoscientific dimensions of global environmental challenges. However, analyses of how Indigenous peoples interweave IK in their own climate strategies at different political scales remain scant. Building from collaborative fieldwork, I analyze how Amazonian Indigenous organizations articulate Indigenous or ancestral knowledges (AK) in two climate initiatives: the Coordinator of Indigenous Organizations of the Amazon Basin’s (COICA) Amazon Indigenous Initiative to Reduce Deforestation (RIA) and the Organization of Indigenous Peoples of the Colombian Amazon's School of Political Training (the OPIAC School). Drawing on STS theories of boundary work and scaling, I argue that COICA, RIA and the OPIAC School navigate and entangle binaries like modern/traditional or global/local through boundary work, which enables their scaling-up of AK. For instance, they take Indigenous technologies like ecological calendars to national and global scales while also upholding their place-based dimensions. The conclusion discusses how these initiatives expand our understandings of climate politics, knowledge and power.