COMCHA: Community-based change: local and traditional knowledges in NBS

This EU Biodiversa+ funded project explores how community knowledge and practices, constituting a form of non-conventional NBS, can contribute to leveraging regenerative processes aligned with the goals of the European Green Deal and the European Partnership for Biodiversity. Fostering mutual learning between European contexts and Overseas Countries on issues such as community engagement, co-governance, just redistribution of natural resources and community-based solutions for adaptation to environmental challenges, this project aims to identify blind spots in universalised approaches to NBS, collecting a set of features able to enhance and leverage processes of co-creation and collective implementation. Analysing community-driven nature-based solutions in threatened lands for socio-environmental issues, the following ideas underlies this proposal: (1) traditional and local knowledge(s) may play a pivotal role in community processes of change associated with regenerative food systems, inclusive urban regeneration and adaptation to environmental challenges; (2) transformative change theory can benefit from theoretical and methodological refreshment coming from a process of intercultural translation, with mutual learnings between European and Overseas countries, particularly with regard to the pressure of anthropogenic drivers of biodiversity loss; (3) indigenous and other traditional practices not only bring new perspectives to the concept of transformative change but also foster a new look at a set of popular-based technologies of production aligned with biodiversity. Resulting from an intercultural dialogue regarding these three key perspectives and committed to enhancing the processes of co-creation, implementation and maintenance, we aim to create a set of qualitative criteria to refine NBS’s evaluation and monitoring processes. In this way, to address these main ideas, the COMCHA project will focus on the main study areas: rural settlements, urban poor communities (favelas), peri and semi-urban areas, isolated rural communities, peripheral islands (located in Macaronesia) and indigenous communities. Research Nodes (RNs) constitute the assemblages in which knowledge sharing happens, anticipating the key elements that will be part of policy recommendations. The thematic nodes will be co-implemented to share the analyses on cases and contexts between the universities and the communities and the communities themselves. Creating a set of three interrelated nodes aims to support this dynamic of sharing and co-producing knowledge related to food systems, alternative urbanisms and social technologies.