Climate change discourse and exclusion of indigenous knowledge among shade-coffee producers in Chiapas, Mexico

• In Event: Safeguarding Sustainable Development and Indigenous Knowledge

Abstract

We depart from the premise that there is a global discourse of climate change, constituted and/or institutionalized by the most industrialized nations and global institutions, and that it cannot be considered neutral in its approach and provisions. Specially, when global and local institutions dictate specific means of mitigation and adaptation to climate change to specific local realities, especially, in poor rural livelihoods. Therefore, the climate change discourse has significant impact on social practices, levels of "common sense", ethics and local politics. Nevertheless, it is a position from which it can be argued that local interpretation is an opportunity for indigenous systems of knowledge to hold and control an externally produced narrative, through the production of new symbolisms that, in turn, will determine the direction of their social practices.
The paper focuses on the experience of indigenous shade-coffee producers of the Comon Yaj Noptic agricultural cooperative in Chiapas, Mexico. The work aims to have a view on how local interpretation confronts or mediates the material and symbolic structures of climate variation, that eventually will transform the meaning of actions and its overall implications to inclusion. To what extent, the rural collective in socioeconomic disadvantage can claim its singularity and difference, given the forceful appearance of the knowledge body, ethics and politics encompassing the discourse of climate change.

Author

• Gabriel Cué