Agroecology and communal innovation: LabCampesino, a pedagogical experience from the rural youth in Sumapaz Colombia

Abstract

In Colombia, rural youth face multiple challenges and social gaps, so the main option is to leave rural areas and migrate to urban environments in search of better living conditions. Instigating collective processes that enhance prospects for rural permanence is crucial. The research gap that we face in this article is the limitation of research in knowledge co-creation dynamics based on the Citizen-Labs framework in rural environments located in the Global South. This article presents the systematisation of a LabCampesino, a space aimed at collaborative creating innovations for territorial management and alternatives to development from the rural youth in the Colombian countryside, as a new theoretical and methodological framework to examine knowledge generation. By applying a case study approach, this article explores the axes of agroecology, co-creation, and community organisation from a transdisciplinary and participatory action research lens. For this, sessions on exploration, experimentation, and prototyping were created in the province of Sumapaz, which led to learning around technologies and knowledge dialogue practices for the protection and reconstruction of peasant territories. The results demonstrate that the young participants can build, document and disseminate innovations at the community level related to situated technologies, processes and reflections on local socio-ecological processes. Thus, rural laboratories make possible practical, experimental, and situated rural education as a communal innovation experience in the territory, hand in hand with agroecological dynamics and political and social organisation, becoming places of articulation and advocacy for territorial actors and interests that seek a transformation of rurality.