Bridge-building practices for holistic vision of agrarian-rural societies in India and Spain

Abstract

Small-holder agriculture and rural societies are often presented as declining and deteriorating contexts in media as well as national and international policies. The solutions aimed at addressing this decline often is framed in terms of external (market and policy) interventions while simultaneously presenting agrarian-rural societies as static and impoverished. This essentialist view of agrarian-rural societies is based on a modernist knowledge politics that functions by creating asymmetries of power through the practices of definitions and categorizations of understanding and engaging with the world. Binary oppositional categories, such as the rural and the urban, knowledge and experience, and nature and culture, is one route through which this knowledge politics unfolds. Rather than providing sustainable solutions, approaches based on these binaries have often exacerbated the vulnerabilities and challenges of agrarian-rural societies in terms of resource depletion, loss of biodiversity and livelihoods, deterioration of social ties, and challenges to food, nutrition, and health. In this paper, we present a comparative study of two Civil Society Organizations (CSOs) from India and Spain, which are engaged in the constructive practices of building relational connections across these binaries in order to re-envision agrarian-rural societies beyond modernist knowledge politics. Additionally, the paper brings together the cases from India and Spain to reflect on the binary of global south and north to build relationality and solidarity.