The premise upon which we developed this project’s structure was that systems are about relationships and connections. What happens when we connect the dots between stories, practices, worldviews and communities, and then allow the tensions, threats and degenerative realities to emerge? Which social justice and grassroots movements around the world come up, and how do they relate to the human story?
Lua and I envisioned that this chapter would illuminate the ethos that the universe comprises a vast and infinite network of systems within systems. Complex, interconnected, evolving and whole. Instead of linear and limited definitions of systems, which is the more common approach, our invitation was to look at communities and systems as living networks and understand the systems, stakeholders and their interdependence, externalities and internalities and look at them with the understanding of the past and present contexts as well as aspirations and possible futures.
The brief for this chapter invited authors to break colonial frameworks that define a system and instead to explore the concept through the lens of grassroots revival movements. We reasoned that social justice movements could offer a vantage point wherein organic and entwined systems and their ancestral and living elements could emerge as visible. The history, the present and the possibilities of the future would also then find expression.
This process deviates from clinical methods of understanding a ‘System’, and instead recognises the myriad shapes and forms in which one exists. It highlights the needs and dreams of the pluriverse and the numerous stakeholders and participants engaged within.
Note on terminology
The term ‘stakeholder’ has been widely used in systems and conservation work, yet it is a term that has also become contested. In particular, Indigenous peoples and other groups with inherent rights have often been inappropriately grouped as ‘stakeholders’, rather than recognised as rights holders with distinct relationships, responsibilities and authority. In this anthology, we use the term ‘stakeholder’ critically, as a point of entry to question conventional mapping practices and to explore how such language might evolve toward more just, equitable and relational forms of engagements.
Acknowledgement: Nisha Mary Poulose and Lua Couto contributed as project co-leads during the initial phases of the Anthology's journey. We honour their foundational involvement and vision in shaping its beginnings.
This section positions the researcher as a conscious but colonised citizen of the global capitalist mainstream, reaching out to the communities of alternative knowledge as a learner and a collaborator, offering my services of mediation between the diversity of worldview languages.
I write this as a Dutch social sector expat living and working in India, in a culture that is infinitely more diverse than the one in which I grew up in the Netherlands, with layers of meaning that I will never understand.
I write from the United States and as a white woman, aware that the countries and systems dominating global discourse are not the ones that will lead the regenerative future we need.
I come to this work as an American from a settler background and as a professional linguist with over a decade of collaborative research on language diversity, ethnobiology and conservation within an academic context.
This section positions the researcher as a conscious but colonised citizen of the global capitalist mainstream, reaching out to the communities of alternative knowledge as a learner and a collaborator, offering my services of mediation between the diversity of worldview languages.
As we navigate the complex challenges of climate change, environmental degradation and social inequity, there is a growing recognition of the need to move beyond dominant Western paradigms and explore diverse ways of knowing and relating to the world. Indigenous cultures and knowledges have long served as invaluable repositories of alternative ways of living, being and sensing.
In this chapter, I explore two case studies of social activism using stakeholder mapping.
I write this as a Dutch social sector expat living and working in India, in a culture that is infinitely more diverse than the one in which I grew up in the Netherlands, with layers of meaning that I will never understand. I am aware of my privileges and try to be aware of my biases. Any misinterpretation is my own, as are omissions of important aspects that I am not seeing.
I write from the United States and as a white woman, aware that the countries and systems dominating global discourse are not the ones that will lead the regenerative future we need. For too long, those most impacted by extractive and inequitable systems have been sidelined, while privileged perspectives set the terms of change. Regeneration requires plural, rooted, and diverse leadership that empowers people everywhere to shape the future. It also requires space for grief and healing, and I am grateful this work offered that in community. I am committed to opening space for a symphony of voices and ideas, reflecting practices already in motion around the world, often for generations and millennia.
I come to this work as a geographer, trained to study the intersection of humans and the environment and to attend to the essence of place. This lens grounds me in the realities of specific communities, ecosystems, and contexts, while attentive to broader systems. Much of my work has focused on the private sector, which too often accelerates destruction and harm to communities, Indigeneity, biodiversity, and the spiritual.
I recognise my relative security and advantage, and do not claim neutrality. Regeneration demands rebalancing, unsettling inherited comforts, and creating conditions for more just, life-giving futures. I aim to use the relative advantage I hold within existing systems to redirect power and resources away from structures that no longer serve, channelling them toward emerging alternatives, nurturing equity.
I come to this work as an American from a settler background and as a professional linguist with over a decade of collaborative research on language diversity, ethnobiology and conservation within an academic context. In the work I bring to this project, I hope to facilitate, be led by and represent aspects of the long history and the extraordinary diversity of regenerative ways of being that are practised on our shared Earth. My contributions include aspects of my own academic research and representations of regenerative perspectives from members of local and Indigenous communities who have shared their histories, cultures and knowledge systems through publication, art and past collaborations. In this endeavour, I have aimed to adopt the triple identity of translator, weaver and window builder.