Transformation initiatives, territories, territorialities, and multiterritorialities in the rural Andes

Abstract The transformation initiatives (TI) developed and implemented by communities, groups, organizations, or activists to tackle problems for which no solution can be found within conventional political structures are closely linked to the territories in which they are rooted. However, their territorial anchoring has been insufficiently addressed in the literature. This is evident in Latin America, where the concept of territory has circulated widely, especially in the context of calls by social movements to “defend” the commons (“we don’t want land, we want territory”). Yet the meaning of the concept has been diluted as it has become more widely used. For this reason, we draw on data from ethnographic research carried out in rural Andean communities in Colombia, Peru, and Bolivia between 2020 and 2023 to examine the concepts of territory, territoriality, and multiterritoriality and their relationship with social change. Since the 1990s, territories have undergone profound, large-scale transformation and this is reflected in the functioning of TI and the diverse, reformulated territorialities in which they are situated. Those involved in TI often lead multilocal lives, establishing a network of relationships with the spatial, economic, social, and political environment that make daily practices of autonomy possible. This runs counter to localist representations of TI, which assume the existence of territories that are frozen in time and space. In this article, the transformative power of multilocal experiences is discussed and the form and intensity of mobility and multiresidence (as different to multiterritoriality) is shown to have a significant effect on the TI studied.