| Grassroots learning through indigenous co-design for a Kvmemongen in Coastal Lake Budi, Chile Given calls to decolonise engagement with Indigenous communities, this article explores how allied researchers can participate in self-determined learning with Indigenous Peoples. Drawing on over a decade of experience within an action-research collective in a Mapuche context, the authors suggest that allied researchers can accompany Indigenous-led co-design in a manner that not only strengthens genuine Indigenous participation but also fosters mutual and collective learning from within the co-creative processes themselves. Lake Budi, a biocultural hotspot in the Pacific coast of Northern Patagonia, Chile, is a coastal wetland habitat for hundreds of endemic and migratory species and the ancestral homeland for the Mapuche-Lafkenche (∼15,000) who, through grassroots learning, are determining practical steps towards restoring their territory and its self-governance for kvmemongen. This Mapuche concept refers broadly to enacting forms of living well together, humans and non-humans. As allied participants in a Mapuche-led codesign collective since 2013, in this paper, we focus on exploring key “moments of mutual learning” within this longer-than-usual co-design process. Each of these moments involved collective learning that required interaction and feedback loops across diverse areas of expertise, made possible over longer and flexible rhythms and periods. Tools, protocols, and methods gradually take shape in such a process through mutual learning opportunities provided by relationship building, cultural immersion, community-led protocols, decision-making, and evaluation mechanisms. This work suggests a new understanding of the involvement of allied researchers in Indigenous-led co-design as an emerging and increasingly relevant form of grassroots mutual learning toward climate resilience. |
| Resilience Resilience has become a “buzzword” of our time. It is commonplace to hear individuals, communities, organisations, and systems described as resilient. Resilience has also become a buzzword In development discourse and practice. World Bank programmes for instance, refer to ‘resilient cities’, ‘resilient institutions’ and climate risk management ‘resilience strategies’. As noted by developer thinker Andrea Cornwall (2007), buzzwords tend to garner general abstract consensus around the importance of certain concepts but they equally can be vague and ‘fuzzy’, providing little sense of what a concept actually ‘looks like’ or how it translates in practice and in specific contexts. Here, we provide some clarity around the concept of resilience and how it is used in development today. We provide contextual examples drawing on development practice in Chile and Cambodia.
It is common in contemporary development practice and discourse for resilience to be framed within scientific understandings of how ecological systems work. An alternative framing and the position we take as authors, combines science and social science perspectives and defines resilience as an ability of humans and nonhumans to ‘survive well’ in the face of change and crisis (Gibson-Graham, Hill and Law, 2016). Within this frame, disturbances can be understood as a range of human and nonhuman processes including recovering from severe illness, emotional, and or socio-cultural trauma, navigating a significant economic shock, or surviving an extreme weather event. If resilience is understood as the ability to survive well, then development can thus be thought about as the active work of creating and maintaining the conditions of possibility for surviving well. This includes economic and livelihood conditions, and sociocultural and ecological ones. |
| Turismo Invasivo y Turismo Mapuche: territorio indígena y emprendimiento con identidad en Laguna Icalma, Alto Biobío Invasive Tourism and Mapuche Tourism: indigenous territory and entrepreneurship with identity in Lake Icalma, Higher Biobio - This qualitative research explores the economic agency of Mapuche tourism entrepreneurs at the intersection between Development with Identity discourse and the touristification of Mapuche-Pewenche territory in Southern Chile. Based on the triangulation between institutional documents, interviews and ethnographic observation conducted in the Lake Icalma region, this research traces the strategic appropriation of the governmental discourse of ethno-ecotourism or “tourism with identity” by a new kind of indigenous economic leaders, who re-politicize, in situated and creative ways, both Deve-lopment with Identity, and the possible trajectories for touristification of the indigenous territory.
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| Impact Evaluation Report: Mutual Support Group 2014-2018 After five years of the consolidation, Mutual Support-Rekülüwun can be seen as part of a repertoire of creative responses by Mapuche families to the monetization of their rural economies in southern Chile, which has accelerated notoriously in the last decade. The project was set out in 2012 by the Mapuche-Lafkenche community of Llaguepulli and MAPLE, to create a member-owned institution while abiding to an indigenous cultural context and community protocols.
Commissioned by Mapuche traditional authorities, Alison Guzman and Ignacio Krell, co-founders of the MAPLE Chile program and co-designers and advisers to Apoyo Mutuo Llaguepulli in the field since 2013, conducted in early 2019, an evaluation on the multidimensional impact of the Mutual Support-Rekülüwun. A community-led framework of Sixteen Strategic Directions elaborated in 2014 by Apoyo Mutuo’s management team, and validated by the project’s Council of Traditional Authorities, helped MAPLE Chile build the research based on priorities self-determined by the community. 
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