Indigenous territoriality and extractivism

The recognition of territorial rights to Indigenous communities has gone side by side with an increase in the extraction of minerals and other raw materials, pushed by the global demand for resources and the energy transition. This often happens in protected areas and indigenous territories, and represents a critical challenge to economic and human development, undermining the concept of sustainability –that a few decades ago appeared as an achievement of civilisation.

We can offer diagnoses of specific local situations, set up and coordinate roundtable dialogues between stakeholders to recognise conflicts and demands. These should seek to guarantee the basic territorial and human rights of local and indigenous communities under pressure from extractivism, and/or the restitution of degraded ecosystems, as well as the management of extractive economies with a focus on long-term sustainability.

Community Health Management 

The involvement of communities in healthcare has experimented an expansion during the last decades, at the center of which a protagonist role is played by a number of local actors, ranging from nurses and health agents to midwives and several kinds of technicians. These social actors, often members of the community which receive training that allows them to manage and deliver many primary care tasks, have acquired in many areas of the world a key role as mediators between governments and the people of the communities, allowing for a deeper reach of welfare programs, and channeling demands for a better emplacement and provision of resources and services. Doctors and anthropologists in our team have significant expertise in such programs, and we place a longstanding bet on the benefits of community-based participatory research, as a means to provide longstanding and sustainable health results.

Community governance of development

Indigenous systems of production

Academic experts, institutions and multilateral governing bodies worldwide recognize the key contributions made by indigenous peoples, historically and today, to the field of livelihood techniques, in agriculture, forestry, biodiversity management or health. This evidence contradicts the prejudice insisting on Indigenous incapacity to adapt to contemporary challenges. However, few governments and institutions have ensured the protection of their knowledge or established systems of support to the people that treasure it, or channelled knowledge exchange on these topics, seeking an equitable introduction of these know-hows into mainstream production systems. Researchers in our network have been working in the frontline of these kinds of processes and can contribute their expertise to initiatives of local development, valorization and integration of indigenous knowledge in sustainable livelihood strategies..

Cultural and livelihood landscapes

Traditional communities give shape to their spaces of livelihood through resource use techniques, narratives and other expressive practices embedded into places and geography. The recognition of these cultural landscapes with profound significance and ecological know-how enables the defense and development of peoples's cultural and historical projects, often threatened by dispossession by resource exploitation and land-use planning efforts. Researchers of our platform have a solid experience in assisting the documentation of cultural and livelihood landscapes and their materialisation into maps and other media needed to secure the recognition of territories in complex scenarios of interaction with governments.

Towards more balanced and fair cities

Urban environments are not just sites of concentration of people and epicentres of allocation of services and resources worldwide. They are nodes of engagement with some of the key challenges of contemporary humankind: inequality, cultural diversity, integration and exclusion, waste management, energy and transportation transformation, etc. Consultants and researchers in our network can offer to government agencies and NGOs a solid experience in analysing and assessing urban welfare programs, neighbourhood conflict scenarios, social housing programs, underserved peripheries and issues of sociocultural diversity integration and exclusion.

Addressing inequalities in multicultural contexts

Inequalities related to cultural and ethnic differences are a source of conflict in the push-pull dynamics of labour force demands around the globe, in urban peripheries or agrarian landscapes relying on migrant labour. Professionals in the Oikeios network can advise local and regional governments through their expertise on development and integration policies, in order to avoid the stigmatization of ethnic workforces and the creation of ghettoes.

Natural Protected Areas and public use

The management of Natural Protected Areas (National Parks, Nature Parks, Reserves and others) represents a complex field involving different kinds of socio-environmental conflicts and potentialities in the current global environmental crisis. Programs of nature interpretation and ecological valorization in NPA constitute a key resource to advance the social appropriation of environmental protection. Researchers and consultants in our platform have significant experience in these fields.

Sociocultural perspectives on food and nutrition

The multilayered breadth of food brings to mind issues as hunger and famine, biosocial malaises such as malnourishment, obesity, bulimia, and anorexia, together with food procurement, production and distribution, food security, distribution, sanitization, packing, and conservation, and the environmental impacts and determinants of all the previous. 

Researchers and consultants associated with Oikeios work on the frontline of discussion of food and nutrition issues, and are able to advise an to tackle projects in these areas at different scales and in any area of the world. 

Ecotourism alternatives to extractive development

Community-based ecological tourism appears as an alternative to extractive exploitation. However,  there is no magical fix to the myriad conflict situations ariisng in resource-rich areas between developers and conservationists, which align citizens, local communities, governments, corporations and political parties usually in opposed sides.  As we believe in ecological and social sustainability as a requisite for lasting human and ecological development, we embrace the challenge of creating environments of communication and translation for negotiations between stakeholders based on the expertise of our consultants and researchers.