COMMUNICATION AND CLIMATE JUSTICE

Intercultural training in climate justice for young quilombolas, indigenous people, fishermen and family farmers in Tocantins State.

This article was originally published at Voices for Just Climate Action Magazine in June, 2023. Read the full magazine here.

The climate crisis in Brazil is framed by inequalities, violation of rights, violence in the countryside and social injustices that distance and delay the process of maturation and consolidation of democracy and the materialisation of the rights provided for in our Constitution. One of the elements of this picture is the lack of representative voices of traditional peoples and communities in the spaces of negotiation, construction of agreements and visibility of the Climate Agenda, whether at the international level, at the United Nations Conferences on Climate Change (COPs on Climate Change), whether at the national level, in the areas of construction and implementation of the National Policy on Climate Change.

The Voices of Tocantins Coalition for Climate Justice articulates ten organisations to expand and qualify the performance and visibility of quilombolas, Indigenous people, small scale fishermen, settlers and tent dwellers of agrarian reform and those involved in agroextraction activities in the defence of their rights. Faced with the challenge of conquering rights and promoting justice in the Climate Agenda, it also supports the fight for public policies engaged with the insertion of young people and community organisations from Tocantins in the global debate on climate justice and the Amazon Climate Agenda, through continuing training for young people, strengthening community-based organisations and an integrated communication & advocacy strategy.

In terms of training young people, the coalition has been implementing the pedagogical plan for the Modular Course in Climate Justice and Communication. The course started in March 2023 and ends in July, comprising four face-to-face modules, involving 31 young people nominated and accompanied by the coalition organisations. The group is made up of young people aged between 16 and 35, representatives of the Krahô and Apinajé indigenous peoples, quilombolas from three territories in different regions of the state, fisherwomen from the Araguacema Fishing Colony, settlers and tent dwellers linked to the Landless Rural Workers Movement (MST), babassu coconut breakers, as well as those involved in agroextraction activities from the Cantão/Araguaía region. The four in person modules are conducted in immersion in four communities, namely: IL Krahô/Pedra Branca Village; IL Apinajé/Prata Village; Kalunga do Mimoso Quilombola Territory; and Olga Benário Agrarian Reform Camp.

The objective of this intercultural education process is to contribute to the formation of agents of change through the development of competencies (knowledge, skills and attitudes) to address the issues of youth invisibility and the insufficiency of voices of people and traditional communities of the Tocantins in the debate on climate justice and in the struggle for recognition of traditional territories and family production for environmental conservation, food and nutrition security and sovereignty associated with Bem-Viver in Brazil, as opposed to the heightened economic model in the State of Tocantins in recent years, founded on the advance of agribusiness, land grabbing with the expulsion of communities from their territories, deforestation and social exclusion.

For this purpose, the training approach is based on the principles and practices of popular education. Such orientation implies that the themes must emerge from reality and its meaning for the participants and promote the enchantment necessary to mobilise action aimed at the common good. Broadening this conception is an important task in the building of the pedagogical plan, allowing participants to recognise and organise the learning that comes from their discoveries and practical experiences. This premise is the basis of the popular education learning process translated into course planning from the generating themes, identified with the communities and agreed upon within the scope of the Coalition’s management council.

This “learning from practice” approach was implemented by the Institute of Social Development and the Society, Population and Nature Institute – ISPN in 2018, in Western Bahia, and inspires this initiative in Tocantins. This approach includes four stages in the design of learning situations and intercultural relationships that training will provide:

• To reveal and characterise reality: characterisation is, above all, an awareness. It allows participants to highlight and structure their perception of reality (community, organisations, context, themselves) while creating the opportunity to broaden this view from the exchange with other participants. In the characterisation, the participant has the chance to become aware of aspects of which he was previously not aware.
• To expand references: If, on the one hand, characterisation can raise new questions about reality, in the oxygenation stage what is sought is to bring references that serve as a term of comparison and reflection on reality (including oneself), but also be able to indicate instruments and techniques that enable new ways of coping with certain situations. Oxygenation is the link between characterisation and taking the initiative (to conduct), providing feedback to characterisation, and guiding the execution of an action, initiative, or experimentation.
• Experimentation: allows the participant to put into practice an acquired skill or knowledge, and therefore identify doubts, and limits (including personal ones) and confirm potentials and challenges of integration with their reality. Although the focus of the action is to create a basis for learning.
• To reflect and learn: while reflecting, the facilitator has a fundamental role, to lead participants to identify, organise and value the lessons learned from practice. For this reason, learning situations must be created that lead the person to deepen their reflection, manage resistance and draw conclusions.

These four stages are essential processes and underlie the creation of the four in-person modules and three distance modules (community time) of training in climate justice with young people linked to the Voices of Tocantins Coalition for Climate Justice. In this way, the contents will be defined with strong participation from the class, guided by the generating themes:

1. conservation of the Cerrado (Savanna);
   
2. rights of traditional peoples and communities;
   
3. social communication;
   
4. climate change and youth engagement for climate justice.
   

These themes will be intertwined by three common threads: a) social skills to lead/be an agent of change; b) key concepts, information, and tools in the negotiation spaces of the Agenda for Climate Justice; and c) change experiments – action plans designed, implemented, and managed by the participants.

It is expected that training in climate justice will contribute to the sustainability and strengthening of networking and intercultural articulations in the state, together with increasing the visibility of the claims and solutions promoted by family farmers, peoples and traditional communities within the scope of the Amazon Climate Agenda, especially with the expansion of Tocantins’ youth voices in the negotiation spaces of global and national agreements, such as the United Nations Conference on Climate Change.