Ecological pluriversality and convivial ecologies
A perspective on epistemological tensions in environmental sociology
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 24233035 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Prasanta Moharaj (0000-0002-9135-4140, Bennet University), Subhra Rajat Balabantaray (0000-0002-7693-0402, Indian Institute of Management) |
| Year | 2026 |
| Pages | 1-10 |
| Publication date | 2026-10-12 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Environmental Sociology (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 2325-1042 • E-ISSN: 2325-1042 |
| Publisher | Informa UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1080/23251042.2026.2747005 |
| OpenAlex | W7221528269 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 35 |
This paper seeks to contribute to the broader debates in environmental sociology by proposing the framework of ecological pluriversality. Offered as a perspective, the framework is advanced not as an antidote to Northern theory but as a way of holding together challenges already animating the field in terms of relational epistemologies, more-than-human agency, and engagement with diverse knowledge systems without pan-Southern or pan-Indigenous essentialism. Environmental sociology has generated important internal critiques of nature–society dualisms, linear temporalities, and colonial legacies, yet these have not been consolidated into a single architecture capable of accommodating ontological multiplicity without collapsing into relativism. Drawing on Indigenous cosmologies, postcolonial ecological thought, and Southern relational epistemologies, particularly Arturo Escobar, Boaventura de Sousa Santos, and Mario Blaser, and placing these in dialogue with the multiple-modernities tradition, we develop convivial ecologies as an analytical category capturing relational, non-hierarchical human–environment interaction. We illustrate the framework by analysing the recent recognition of rivers as legal persons in New Zealand, Colombia, and India. We do not claim to resolve the field’s foundational debates; our contribution is integrative and generative, that honours the diversity of ecological worlds while retaining critical purchase on structural inequality and planetary crisis.
epistemological tensions · indigenous cosmology · legal personhood of rivers · more-than-human agency · Multiple Modernities · nature-society dualism · planetary crisis · relational epistemology · Structural inequality · Decolonial Thought and Epistemologies · Ecocriticism and Environmental Literature · Posthumanist Ethics and Activism
Designs for the Pluriverse
Storytelling Globalization from the Chaco and Beyond
The Environmentalism of the Poor
Misreading the African Landscape
Buen Vivir
Neighborhood as Refuge
Risk Society
Liberation Ecologies
Sacred Ecology
Reassembling the Social
New Transitions from Human Rights to the Environment to the Rights of Nature
Ecological modernisation theory in debate
Buen vivir
Governing through disorder
The globalization of socio-ecological systems
Urban Political Ecology, Justice and the Politics of Scale
Struggling with human exemptionalism
Neo-extractivism in Latin America
Geographies of race and ethnicity II
Decolonizing Post-Colonial Studies and Paradigms of Political-Economy
Resilience
Society, Biology, and Ecology
Ch'ixinakax utxiwa
Encountering Development
Creating legal rights for rivers
The Economy, Military, and Ecologically Unequal Exchange Relationships in Comparative Perspective
Materialist returns
Indigenous Cosmopolitics in the Andes
The agroecological revolution in Latin America
| Highly cited | No |
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