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Cooperatives have been widely supported as vehicles for community-based conservation and development. However, these organizations are often developed around specific income-generating projects rather than broader considerations of how relations of power and ecological exploitation might be transformed. This article uses the case of AmazonCoop—a cooperative dedicated to the supposedly fair trade of Brazil nuts between Amazonian indigenous people and the multinational corporation The Body Shop—to illustrate how historical political ecology might facilitate the design of more radically transformative cooperatives. Contextualizing AmazonCoop within the history of Amazonian extractivism, and particularly the extraction of wild rubber, reveals the specific mechanisms and processes through which indigenous people have gained and lost power. This analysis thus creates opportunities for thinking more creatively about how contemporary conservation–development schemes might pursue ecologically sustainable and socially just social transformations.Keywords: cooperatives, fair trade, conservation, development, indigenous people, Brazil

Cooperatives and socially responsible corporations are being hailed as possible correctives to the socioeconomic and ecological exploitation of transnational capitalism. AmazonCoop—a cooperative linking indigenous Brazil nut harvesters and the multinational firm The Body Shop through trade and development projects—capitalized on indigenous symbolism to generate significant material benefits for both parties. At the same time, however, it made indigenous people more vulnerable and dependent, failed to promote participatory development, masked the effects of unfavorable state policies, and perpetuated discriminatory distinctions among indigenous people. Furthermore, the cooperative did not provide an organizational framework to ameliorate the vulnerabilities of indigenous identity politics or transform symbolic capital into enduring political-economic change. This case strongly supports arguments that cooperatives must be rooted in participation, democratic member control, and autonomy if they are to promote "fair globalization" or social transformation rather than institutionalize existing patterns of exploitation.

The articles in this special section, by offering ethnographically grounded reflections on diverse strains of economic activism, begin to articulate a non-capitalocentric political ecology that we think can help scholaractivists politicize, reimagine, and recreate socio-ecological relations. In this introductory article, we offer a useful vision of how scholar-activists can engage with and support more just and sustainable ways of organizing human–human and human–environment relations. Specifically, we argue that engaged researchers can significantly contribute to a meaningful "ecological revolution" by (1) examining the tremendously diverse, already-existing experiments with other ways of being in the world, (2) helping to develop alternative visions, analyses, narratives, and desires that can move people to desire and adopt those ways of being, and (3) actively supporting and constructing economies and ecologies with alternative ethical orientations. Each article in this collection attempts one or more of these goals, and this introductory article provides a conceptual grounding for these ethnographic studies and a synthesis of some of their primary contributions. We begin by describing why critique is analytically and politically inadequate and explain why we think a non-capitalocentric ontology offers an essential complement for engaged scholarship. We then turn to the work of J.K. Gibson-Graham and the Community Economies Collective in order to explain how ideas of overdetermination, diverse economies, and performativity better equip the field of political ecology to contribute to alternative futures. And finally, we discuss how the articles in this volume reconceptualize values, politics, and scale in a manner that illuminates our scholarly and activist efforts.Keywords: non-capitalism, political ecology, alternative economies, capitalism, scale, values, politics, Gibson-Graham

"Cooperatives, Grassroots Development, and Social Change" presents examples from Paraguay, Brazil, and Colombia, examining what is necessary for smallholder agricultural cooperatives to support holistic community-based development in peasant communities. Reporting on successes and failures of these cooperative efforts, the contributors offer analyses and strategies for supporting collective grassroots interests. Illustrating how poverty and inequality affect rural people, they reveal how cooperative organizations can support grassroots development strategies while negotiating local contexts of inequality amid the broader context of international markets and global competition.

The contributors explain the key desirable goals from cooperative efforts among smallholder producers. They are to provide access to more secure livelihoods, expand control over basic resources and commodity chains, improve quality of life in rural areas, support community infrastructure, and offer social spaces wherein small farmers can engage politically in transforming their own communities.

The stories in "Cooperatives, Grassroots Development, and Social Change" reveal immense opportunities and challenges. Although cooperatives have often been framed as alternatives to the global capitalist system, they are neither a panacea nor the hegemonic extension of neoliberal capitalism. Through one of the most thorough cross-country comparisons of cooperatives to date, this volume shows the unfiltered reality of cooperative development in highly stratified societies, with case studies selected specifically because they offer important lessons regarding struggles and strategies for adapting to a changing social, economic, and natural environment.

"Provides a cross-country comparison of smallholder agricultural cooperatives in Paraguay, Brazil and Colombia, revealing immense opportunities and challenges for community development, empowerment, and social change." - Provided by publisher

In order to move global society towards a sustainable "ecotopia," solutions must be engaged in specific places and communities, and the authors here argue for re-orienting environmental anthropology from a problem-oriented towards a solutions-focused endeavor. Using case studies from around the world, the contributors—scholar-activists and activist-practitioners— examine the interrelationships between three prominent environmental social movements: bioregionalism, a worldview and political ecology that grounds environmental action and experience; permaculture, a design science for putting the bioregional vision into action; and ecovillages, the ever-dynamic settings for creating sustainable local cultures