“Rethinking Forest Governance — Indigeneity, Custodianship, and Cosmoecologies.”

24 November CIFOR-ICRAF Nairobi

This seminar was hybrid and served as a pivotal step toward another hybrid symposium held in Nairobi on 28 January 2026, featuring distinguished speakers from African and Afro-diasporic contexts as part of the SPIRAL project and the delphi process to discuss with indigenous and area based scholars policy discourses on forest protection.

ABSTRACT

SPIRAL: cross cultural study of sustainable management practices of spiritual landscapes critically examines the technocratic, top-down models of landscape management imposed during the colonial and post-colonial periods, and instead proposes pluriversal frameworks that honor the epistemic dignity of local management practices rooted in relational cosmoecologies of connection and interdependence. As part of this initiative, Manzini has launched a Delphi process to map spiritual practices and forms of custodianship across diverse societies, from West Africa to Madagascar, culminating in a collective book project on African and Afrodiasporic spiritual landscapes. This workshop serves as a pivotal moment in preparation for the Spring Seminar at CIFOR-ICRAF (28 january, 2026), offering a collaborative platform to engage with ecospiritual practices and to explore alternative paradigms of sustainability.

SPIRAL PROJECT

The SPIRAL project explores spiritual landscapes and sustainable management practices across 72 societies. With major case studies in Indo-Burma (Northern Thailand) and the Diola territories of Lower Casamance (South Senegal, Northern Guinea-Bissau), and another forthcoming in the Tropical Andes, the project aims to reshape sustainability thinking by integrating relational ontologies and eco-spiritual worldviews to support biocultural diversity. As part of this initiative, researcher Manzini has launched a Delphi process to map spiritual practices and forms of custodianship from West Africa to Madagascar. This collaborative effort will culminate in a collective book project focused on African and Afrodiasporic spiritual landscapes.

SPIRAL was supported by the EUTOPIA Science and Innovation Fellowship Programme and funded by the European Union Horizon 2020 programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No 945380.

MEDIA CONTACTS

Alessandra Manzini, EUTOPIA-SIF Marie Sklodowska-Curie COFUND Fellow at CY Cergy Paris University web: alessandramanzini.com contact: alessandra.manzini@cyu.fr