Roads to Sustainability: exploring the infrastructures of a sustainable future

Roads2SUSTAINABILITY develops a new form of political ecology, infrastructural political ecology.

This alters the theoretical work of political ecology (how culture, history and politics make natures), combining contemporary treatments of infrastructure (analyzing how hard infrastructures co-constitute social worlds) with theories of more-than-human assemblage (always changing human/ nonhuman relations) and multi-species justice (extending principles of justice beyond humans).

These will be led by political ecologys attentiveness to dynamics of power and scale.

Together, this transforms social science debates on infrastructure and political ecology with a new concern for how infrastructure co-constitutes socio-environmental worlds, creating new understanding of how trajectories of co-existence and sustainability are materialized. This is critical given accelerating climate change and global commitments to sustainable development.

With a team of 2 post-doctoral researchers and 16 Indigenous researchers, the PI will investigate road building in the Western Amazon and the emancipatory possibilities of alternative infrastructures.

Specifically, different types of transport infrastructure (top-down infrastructure, community roads and river networks) at three sites crucial for responses to climate change and sustainability Indigenous territories, conservation areas and cities.

Grounded in collaboration with four Indigenous territories, a core foundation is an innovative but reproduceable decolonial methodology. This is used to address three objectives 1.

To investigate how different forms of road and river infrastructure co-constitute trajectories of sustainable development and to conceptualise sustainable development from these material geographies 2. To reveal, analyze and advance the emancipatory possibilities of infrastructure 3. To improve highest ethical standards of how research is undertaken, networked and communicated on Indigenous land.