Campesino communities’ knowledge and its contribution to "Forests for a just future"

In Tropenbos Colombia, we have witnessed how local research allows us to approach the knowledge and experience of people living in the rainforests and strengthen their position in land management processes. Following this successfully established route, we invited campesino communities in Solano, Caquetá, to develop local research projects. The results certainly open a window to understand the richness in their culture and territory.

The local research exercises presented in this series of booklets seek to strengthen campesino cultural identity, knowledge and respect for collective work and their territory. They also provide tools that allow us to reflect on the environmental problems faced by communities as well as their active role when formulating solutions and alternatives. Since campesino knowledge is transmitted orally in quotidian activities and spaces, the objective of these local research publications is to contribute to building a memory of the local organizations and to promote the recognition of the cultural practices directed to taking care of nature.

These research projects involved numerous interactions and collaborative efforts among community members. They fostered a new dynamic, bringing together different generations in various settings to reconstruct their own history through writing, recording, or illustration. All the proposals were freely developed by the authors, who chose topics of personal or shared interest. They used their own language, frameworks, and personal archives.

The following booklets form the series “Forests for a Just Future”:

• Medicinal plants in the garden and the forest by Rubiela Pava Arias, Javier Bolaños López and Camila Sandoval Pava
• Amazonian recipe book: a summary of my life by Leonor Elvira Bravo Home
• Peñas Blancas: a campesino history of struggles, wisdom and resistance by Ana Martina Gaitán, Carlos Andrés Urrea, Yeni Karina Chavarro García, Jorge Obregón Fernández and Hector Emilio Restrepo Velásquez
• Timber trees in El Rosal: their uses in the life and home of campesino woman by Senaida Quintero

We hope that whoever reads the booklets can approach the experiences and feelings that the researchers wanted to transmit. We also expect the publications to be used as a pedagogical resource to raise awareness about the importance of campesino communities and make visible the way they contribute to taking care of forests and environmental governance. Finally, we hope they motivate and inspire similar exercises in similar communities in the future.

This series of publications is the result of four local research projects directly formulated and implemented by male and female campesinos from Peñas Blancas, in the municipality of Solano, Caquetá. They worked for several months in a process of dialogue for the collective construction and systematization of their own knowledge. This process was an initiative of Tropenbos Colombia in the framework of the "Forests for a Just Future" project of the Green Livelihoods Alliance.