Under the overarching theme “Advancing Transdisciplinary Research for Global Development: Crisis, Collaboration, and Change”, the conference explores how research can respond to current global challenges and contribute to sustainable and scalable solutions. https://www.sor4d.ch/en/V6kPVrvBJtdM3hy4/event/sor4d-research-conference-2026
WS 4 Workshop | 11:15–12:45 The Real-world lab workshop: Challenges of scaling-up agroecology
Lead: Emilie Cremin, University of Lausanne, Switzerland | Jinat Hossain, University of Bern, Christophe Gironde, IHEID | Shirisha Junuthula, CSA, and Lucile Mougeat, UNIGE
Abstract: This workshop will involve participants in reflecting on the challenges small farmers face in many parts of the world when willing to implement agroecological solutions. Participants will review the laws and policies governing land access. They will experiment with the challenges posed by environmental conditions, socio-economic conditions, and power relations that underpin the governance of land and water, access to bio-inputs, value addition to their products, and access to consumers and the market. The game is set within multiple disruptive risks (climate change as a ‘wicked problem’) in different spaces and places.
Objectives of the game: The participants take the role of a stakeholder and will have to exchange their perspectives on environmental and livelihood issues they are facing. They will elaborate on sustainable solutions.
Organisation: 4 tables of 4 to 10 people, each table elaborate on one case study
Material available
• 4 site profiles of each type of stakeholder, including farmers and their farms and explaining their constraints and solutions inspired by SOR4D projects
• Local profiles for each site, presenting the economic and social constraints (one page for each profile)
• Mapping of the sites: 4 large maps (A0 format)
Your role
Phase 1: Present the main issue and the perspective on the issue by each stakeholder
Phase 2: Prepare 3 scenarios per sites
Both on an A0 flipchart
Session duration = 90 minutes
Organisation / timing of the game
• 10′: presentation of the game and rules
• 40′: Discussions around the tables/ 5 to 8 participants? 5 minutes per profile.
o 20’ Phase 1 (present yourself to the other players and present the main issue from each one perspective) /
o 20’ Phase 2 (Prepare 3 scenarios: elaborate solutions altogether)
• 10′: preparing synthesis of the RT to be presented in plenary
• 30′: Plenary to present each Living labs (5′ each) on poster
4 case studies selected in our SoR4D projects
1- Indian Sundarbans: Forest management and livelihoods lead by Emilie Cremin
2- Bangladesh Sundarbans: Shrimp and disaster management lead by Jinat Hossain
3- Andhra Pradesh: Paddy and horticulture – bioinputs lead by Shirisha Junuthula
4- Bolivian Altiplano: vegetables – irrigation – commercialization lead by Christophe Gironde and Lucile Mougeat
Participants will assume the roles of various actors in the field to identify the challenges of implementing and scaling up agroecological solutions.
“Invisibility and Recognition of Women’s Agricultural Work in the Bengal Delta: Between Empowerment and Constraint”
Paper presented at the ISWA conference in Bern : https://iswa2026.symposium.inrae.fr/ International Symposium on Work in Agriculture – ISWA in collaboration with Fachausschuss für Arbeitswissenschaften im Landbau and HAFL Cecchini Institute “Addressing current and future challenges of work in agriculture: research, policy and practice” 7-10 July 2026
Emilie CREMIN1, Jinat HOSSAIN2
1 Université de Lausanne, Switzerland;emilie.cremin@gmail.com,
2 Université of Bern, Switzerland; jinat.hossain@geo.uzh.ch
Women’s labour is central to agricultural production in the Bengal delta (India and Bangladesh), yet it remains persistently undervalued, informalised, and rendered invisible within agrarian economies and policy frameworks. This paper examines the specific challenges faced by women engaged in agricultural work in deltaic environments marked by hydromorphological instability, agrarian transitions, and socio-ecological change. Drawing on qualitative fieldwork conducted in the Bengal delta, it analyses how women’s contributions— ranging from farming and aquaculture to resource management and care work—are obscured by gendered divisions of labour, land tenure regimes, and development narratives that privilege male farmers and market-oriented production.
Beyond documenting invisibility, the paper critically engages with processes of (re)recognition promoted through development interventions, state policies, and NGO programmes aimed at empowering women and making their work visible. While recognition can open access to resources, rights, and political voice, it also generates new forms of regulation, surveillance, and normative expectations that may reinforce gendered responsibilities and intensify women’s workloads. The paper highlights this ambivalence, showing how visibility can simultaneously enable recognition and impose new constraints within increasingly technocratic, project-driven governance frameworks.
By situating women’s agricultural labour within the socio-ecological dynamics of the Bengal delta, the paper contributes to feminist political ecology by questioning the assumption that visibility is inherently emancipatory. It argues for a more nuanced understanding of recognition that accounts for power relations, environmental uncertainty, and women’s own strategies of negotiation, partial visibility, and resistance in deltaic agrarian systems.
Jenia Mukherjee (Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur) Agrima Mishra (Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur) Priyadarsini Sinha (Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur) Souradip Pathak (Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur) Raktima Ghosh (Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur) Send message to Convenors
Format: Panel Location: UB-205 Facultat de Geografia i Història Sessions: Friday 3 July, –, –
‘Transform-agencies’: A political ecology (PE) praxis through experiments in engaged ethnography . Panel P105 at conference Pollen2026: Diverse Origins, Multiple Futures: The Stories of Political Ecology.
Built on sharp theoretical insights and critical empirical studies interrogating grave odds around rights, justice, identity, and agency across scales, PE has reflected on ideas, events, perceptions, processes which relate the questions of power. But who are the listeners? How does the concept of praxis, aligning with community participation and engagement beyond academia, as well as responses from more-than-human beings, interact with methodological experiments? How can key challenges at the intersection of PE and transdisciplinary research be addressed? In fact, disciplinary barriers at the academic level and the transdisciplinary need at the practical level pose major challenges to socio-ecological research, especially in addressing ‘wicked problems’ today.
This panel invites submissions on inclusive, innovative, participatory methodological experiments to better recognize, ascribe meanings to and actively respond against power equations entrenched in social-ecological systems. We seek cutting-edge, creative approaches—from participatory cartography, sensory ethnography, photovoice to transdisciplinary collaborative practices—that challenge traditional research hierarchies and foster engagements. We provoke conversations about how such methodological approaches, by blurring the boundaries between the researcher and the researched, can reimagine and reframe the notions of participation, accountability, entitlement within the framework of PE and thereby, can become ‘acts’ for social-environmental justice. We invite researchers, practitioners and transdisciplinary consortiums to share experiences of their methodological experiments and critically reflect on how those experiences can craft the pathways of PE research. The panel is interested in exploring challenges, possibilities, apprehension, and impediments surrounding the experiments and engagements to have ideas about the efficacy of transdisciplinarity in PE. It aims to create a space, crafting a dialogue between transdisciplinarity and political ecology through critical reflections on the challenges of transdisciplinary praxis (institutional barriers, epistemic conflicts, and ethical dilemmas), while assessing its potential to deepen PE’s transformative impact.
POLLEN 2026: ENGAGE and ResEaux and jointly organise the panel « Rivers, Power, and Resistance: Political Ecology and Transformative Water Governance in South Asia »
Emilie Cremin (UNIL University of Lausanne) Johan Krieg (Paris Nanterre University)
Chairs:
Emilie Cremin (UNIL University of Lausanne) Johan Krieg (Paris Nanterre University)
Discussants:
Vinita Damodaran (University of Sussex) Rahul Ranjan (School of GeoSciences, University of Edinburgh) Jenia Mukherjee (Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur) samiya Selim (University of Liberal Arts Bangladesh)
Rivers, Power, and Resistance: Political Ecology and Transformative Water Governance in South Asia. Panel P057 at conference Pollen2026: Diverse Origins, Multiple Futures: The Stories of Political Ecology.
This panel will be based on paper presentations and discussions led by panel conveners, followed by Q&A with the audience.
Long Abstract
Rivers in South Asia are not just ecological systems—they are sites of power, identity, and resistance. This panel, grounded in political ecology, examines how infrastructures and discourses of river management—dams, river-linking projects, sacralized waterways—become instruments of state-making, ideological control, and contested visions of development. Hydrosocial interventions often reinforce caste, class, and religious hierarchies while eroding vernacular knowledge and undermining local ecological autonomy.
Environmental governance across the region is increasingly ideological. Nationalist and authoritarian regimes deploy rivers to craft homogenised narratives of nationhood, while civil society actors face mounting surveillance, repression, and financial barriers such as India’s Foreign Contribution Regulation Act. Yet alongside these pressures, subaltern actors—indigenous communities, women, Dalit groups, and environmental activists—mobilize alternative practices that challenge dominant hydrosocial regimes and open space for more inclusive and ecologically just futures.
This panel invites contributions from across the social sciences and humanities that engage the politics of rivers and water governance in South Asia. Topics include: river management and state formation; purity, cleanliness, and security discourses; subaltern strategies of resistance; the analytical contributions of political ecology; and the geopolitical dimensions of transboundary river governance. We particularly welcome work exploring how local knowledge and participatory approaches can reconfigure hydrosocial territories to confront climate change, address inequalities, and restore degraded aquatic ecosystems.
Johan Krieg and Emilie Cremin have organised the panel « Rivers, Power, and Resistance: Political Ecology and Transformative Water Governance in South Asia » on the 2d of July 2026 at the Pollen 2026 conference in Barcelona.
SAJIDA Foundation and the University of Liberal Arts Bangladesh jointly organised an inauguration event for a crop-processing facility and a solar-powered irrigation system under the ENGAGE4Sundarbans project in Pratapnagar, Satkhira, on 30 December 2025, attended by the local community, government officials, NGO representatives, and other stakeholders.
