24 November CIFOR-ICRAF Nairobi

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

The event is hybrid and serves as a pivotal step toward our upcoming hybrid symposium in Nairobi on 3 February, featuring distinguished speakers from African and Afro-diasporic contexts.

SPIRAL 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 (February 3, 2026), offering a collaborative platform to engage with ecospiritual practices and to explore alternative paradigms of sustainability.