Georgina Mcallister

With an NGO background since the early 1990s, my experience spans both humanitarian and development sectors in Europe, the Middle East, South East Asia, Pacific and sub-Saharan Africa. It was this engagement with the on-the-ground realities of those affected by ongoing political instability, social division and shattered infrastructure that first drew me to agroecology. Since co-founding GardenAfrica in 2001, I have been co-developing innovative plant-based health and livelihoods approaches with researchers and NGOs, and farmers and civil society organisations to explore strategies that stimulate localised economic opportunity while navigating social-ecological complexity and change. Over this time, I have also established a solid track record in collaborative project design, implementation, management and monitoring, evaluation and learning.

Equitable resilience; participatory action research; political ecology; peacebuilding; critical pedagogy; people’s knowledge; bio-cultural diversity; rooted networks & collective agency; gender & power; disaster risk reduction; generative approaches to climate change adaptation.

My research is interested in the transformative potential of agroecological processes in fragile environments and, more particularly, in the social-ecological processes and relationships through which communities of practice may be more able to mobilise and shape change on their own terms to reduce attendant vulnerabilities. This has included the potential of agroecology to address forms of violence by supporting social farming and deliberative democratic processes framed around the co-management of resources. It has explored the extent to which small ‘non-movements’ employ non-threatening, practice-based co-generative processes not only to shape physical landscapes, but to negotiate social change by re-forging networks based on principles of reciprocity and trust. My research interests also involve understanding how participatory praxis helps us to link the socio-cultural, ecological and political dimensions, and acts as a bridging concept between peace formation, disaster risk reduction and/or climate change adaptation on one hand, and equitable resilience and epistemic and cognitive justice on the other.

By integrating agroecology into the heart of prevention, preparedness, response and recovery strategies, I believe that we can dramatically reduce the impacts of disruptive events in rapidly changing and often fragile social, ecological, economic and political landscapes. But transformative agroecology also represents an opportunity to go beyond the biophysical to consider social and political change through emancipatory practice-led social learning. This is capable of strengthening social-ecological relationships by restoring eroded knowledge, recovering lost resources and rebuilding bonds between people and their landscapes. For this to happen, we need to facilitate inclusive processes that invite people into decision-making, not only to link relief to development more coherently, but to stimulate new ways of thinking and acting together. In applying these principles to stabilisation agriculture, my vision is to co-create and disseminate a body of transdisciplinary research that generates new insights, thought and practices that more clearly demonstrates pathways to social and environmental justice through equitable resilience. Seen in this way, stabilisation agriculture rooted in agroecological principles and practices can and should play a more prominent role in institutional formations, policies and processes dedicated to the prevention of, and recovery from, human-induced and natural disasters for more inclusive, equitable and ultimately durable outcomes.