Between digital practice and transformative models: narratives beyond the digital divide and the DIVERSE project

How do movements for environmental justice (EJ) or those in defence of biocultural diversity engage with digital practices? To reflect on this question, let’s start by checking a case in the Peruvian Amazon.

Over the past decades, approximately 17% of the Amazon forest has been lost to deforestation (Veit, Gibbs, & Reytar, 2023). This loss strikes at the hearts of Indigenous lives, eroding sustenance, economy, culture, language, spirituality, and knowledge systems that thrive in these forests.

In response, to defend their livelihoods and sovereignty, Indigenous communities in the Loreto and Ucayali regions of the Peruvian Amazon have resorted to using satellite-based alerts to monitor and report deforestation via local networks. Satellite imagery provides these communities with up-to-date land data through customized geospatial platforms. Then, Indigenous monitors are able to access deforestation notifications, often via local information centers, mobile devices, or printed maps shared during community meetings, thus reducing the risks of in-person patrols that too often lead to confrontation or loss of life (Sanchez et al., 2024). Satellite monitoring eases the identification of new deforestation cases and subsequent notification to local communities, thus promoting action plans to prevent and curb these deforestation practices. The resulting increased visibility not only expands the number of reported cases but also enhances the predictive capacity to identify areas most at risk (Slough, Kopas, & Urpelainen, 2021).

This approach works: a study reports that communities assigned to receive satellite-based forest monitoring experienced a reduction in tree cover loss by up to 37% over a two-year span compared to control communities that did not receive monitoring notifications (Slough, Kopas, & Urpelainen, 2021). It is noteworthy that Amazonian forests managed by Indigenous forest-monitoring groups tend to have higher environmental integrity and are better preserved, while those managed by non-Indigenous actors are, on average, more degraded (Veit, Gibbs, & Reytar, 2023).

Yet, before embracing this case as an undisputed triumph of digital technologies, we must ask: What kind of digitalisation are we talking about? As these grassroots initiatives increasingly engage with digital systems and tools, we observe dynamic, situated, and deeply political socio-technical processes. Far from being a neutral, top-down phenomenon of increasing digital literacy, communities defending biocultural diversity and resisting environmental injustices aim to readapt, repurpose, and co-create digital tools, data, and technologies despite possible hesitancy in engaging with digitalisation practices. 

Across the globe, grassroots transformative alternatives (GTI) are already demonstrating that digital tools can serve transformation instead of extraction. For example, by amplifying voices or articulating data-management systems that resist extractive data practices, GTIs are able to redistribute power over (socioenvironmental) data and platforms (Forney & Dwiartma, 2022; Forsyth and McDermott, 2022). Several trade-offs also need to be negotiated. This is evident in Ecovillages, where communities use digital networks to share knowledge, map their initiatives, and document collective impacts, thereby reclaiming agency over how sustainable living is represented as well as facilitating peer learning and solidarity across communities worldwide (GEN, 2025).

The ERC-funded project “Digitalisation of Biocultural Diversity and Environmental Justice” (DIVERSE, 2025-2029), based at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra (PI Beatriz Rodríguez-Labajos), aims to understand these transformative digital practices further.

We are glad to be part of the upcoming POLLEN 2026 Conference in Barcelona, providing a perfect opportunity to engage with the political ecology community.

The panel P058, “Between grassroots digital praxis and transformative scholarship – seeking deep narratives beyond the digital divide,” aims to foster discussion between situated narratives of digitalisation in grassroots-led transformations worldwide.

The overarching questions this panel aims to address are:

1. What is the (changing) role of digitalisation in ongoing initiatives towards environmental justice and biocultural diversity? What trade-offs do GTI face alongside these processes?
2. How do grassroots narratives challenge (or reproduce) the narrative of the digital divide(s)?
3. Which questions should guide the exchange between GTI and transformative scholarship over the next two years?

Apart from contributions from fellow researchers, we intend for GTI participants to share experiences of digitalisation in their transformative efforts. We hope to gather participants from different cultural backgrounds and countries that share experiences such as the use of digital means for EJ advocacy; digital mapping and documentation (e.g., of grassroots alternatives, languages, ancestral lands and traditional ecological knowledge); and digital initiatives supporting environmental defenders.

If you are interested in submitting a paper to our panel, please refer to the POLLEN  Conference 2026 program or use this link to submit a proposal to the session directly. Please keep in mind that the deadline for submitting papers to panel proposals is December 5th, 2025. Papers should be submitted through the POLLEN website and not sent directly to us. That being said, if you have any inquiries regarding the panel or the DIVERSE project, please do not hesitate to reach out to us at diverse[at]upf.edu, find more information on our website https://www.upf.edu/web/diverse, or follow us for updates on Bluesky @diverse-project.bsky.social. We look forward to hearing from you!

The DIVERSE (Digitalisation for Environmental Justice and Biocultural Diversity) project is funded by the European Union’s Horizon programme for research and innovation under the grant agreement 101124195.

REFERENCES

Global Ecovillage Network (GEN) (2025). Ecovillages. Ecolvillage Map. Retrieved October 17, 2025, from https://ecovillage.org/ecovillages/

Forney, J., & Dwiartama, A. (2022). The project, the everyday, and reflexivity in sociotechnical agri-food assemblages: proposing a conceptual model of digitalisation. Agriculture and Human Values, 40, 441–454. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10460-022-10385-4

Forsyth, T., & McDermott, C. (2022). When climate justice goes wrong: Maladaptation and deep co-production in transformative environmental science and policy. Political Geography, 98, 102691. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.polgeo.2022.102691

Sanchez, N., Nogueron, R., Sanchez Hidalgo, W. A., & Snip, I. (2024, June 10). Indigenous communities in Peru protect their forests with MapBuilder. Global Forest Watch. Retrieved October 13, 2025, from https://www.globalforestwatch.org/blog/users-in-action/indigenous-communities-peru-amazon-mapbuilder/

Slough, T., Kopas, J., & Urpelainen, J. (2021). Satellite-based deforestation alerts with training and incentives for patrolling facilitate community monitoring in the Peruvian Amazon. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 118(29), e2015171118. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2015171118