Tom HenfreySchumacher Institute
Tom Henfrey
PhD
Developing a new action research programme in Sacred Political Ecology
About
43
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615
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Citations since 2017
Introduction
Additional affiliations
March 2017 - November 2018
Position
- Project Manager
Publications
Publications (43)
The experimental, academic project UrbanA, funded by the European Commission under Horizon 2020 from 2019 to 2021, investigated the topic of Sustainable and Just Cities. The project centred around four co-creative spaces, known as Arena events, and also established and still nurtures a “Community of Practice” and its own Knowledge Commons.
This paper explores the actual and potential contributions of community‐led initiatives (CLIs) to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). As examples of self‐determined practical action for sustainability and social justice, CLIs prefigure many of the intended outcomes of the SDGs. Existing evidence shows that CLIs are already contributing, at lo...
Cities play a key role in responding to the great challenges of our time, but increasing poverty and inequality are putting the resilience of European cities to the test. UrbanA is a 3-year H2020 project led by a consortium of seven partners, including FCUL. It seeks to synthesize knowledge, empower participants, facilitate interactions and influen...
*** Poster submission for Ecocity World Summit - https://ecocity-summit.com/ ** ABSTRACT: Shifting from sustainable to regenerative practice combats climate breakdown, while increasing social wellbeing for all humanity. This work explores the role of urban transitions in catalysing a regenerative world, where community-led ecocities are the goal of...
This article suggests that to adequately tackle climate breakdown, urban planning needs to move beyond sustainability to incorporate regenerative development frameworks. Key to this is activating and increasing citizen participation in a fractal-like, multi scaled, community-led, bottom up planning process, where active citizens design, construct a...
The social solidarity economy is an approach to the production and consumption of goods, services and knowledge that promises to address contemporary economic, social and environmental crises more effectively than business as usual. The paper employs the concept of commons ecologies to examine the practices, relationships and interactions among act...
The overall objective of this contribution is to investigate Collective Action Initiatives (CAIs) in the energy sector (e.g. energy communities, cooperatives and purchasing groups) as a trigger for the implementation of a strong sustainability paradigm. The assumption is that the active involvement of citizens in the energy chain is a crucial requi...
Researchers working on the local ecological knowledge of traditional resource users have long since been convinced of its scientific value, despite a relative scarcity of data in many subject areas. Interviews with indigenous Wapishana hunters in Guyana documented their knowledge of the ecology of six species of diurnal primate. Detailed comparison...
This paper examines how community-led initiatives are deploying social solidarity economy in distinctive ways as a vehicle for local action consistent with delivery of the Sustainable Development Goals. It employs the concept of commons ecologies to capture how such activities restructure relationships and interactions among SSE actors and organisa...
The Guide identifies 16 most significant cultural organisations contributing to social and environmental change in Portugal. In addition to the Directory, the guide also features 2 essays: one on Regenerating Sustainability Through Community-Led Initiatives by Gil Penha-Lopes and Tom Henfrey; the other by Nancy Duxbury, Thoughts on Future Direction...
Presenting the state of the art of knowledge on community-led action on sustainability and climate change in Europe, by the ECOLISE meta-network of European community-led initiatives
Based on an ethnographic account of subsistence use of Amazonian forests by the Wapishana people in Guyana, Edges, Fringes, Frontiers examines the social, cultural and behavioural bases for sustainability and resilience in indigenous resource use. Developing an original framework for holistic analysis, it demonstrates that flexible interplay among...
Although central to all aspects of social life, energy is largely a neglected area in most areas of anthropology, ecological anthropology aside. Anthropological contributions to wider debates on energy, development, and social change are also rather marginal, despite the unique insights anthropological theory and method can provide. With energy at...
Social–ecological resilience describes the ability of complex adaptive systems to negotiate and respond creatively to change. Its origins combine understanding of the structure and dynamics of ecological systems with findings from anthropology—particularly human ecology and indigenous knowledge—and other social sciences. Key concepts are the adapti...
The most critical question for climate research is no longer about the problem, but about how to facilitate the transformative changes necessary to avoid catastrophic climate-induced change. Addressing this question, however, will require massive upscaling of research that can rapidly enhance learning about transformations. Ten essentials for guidi...
In this paper I examine the relationship between resilience research and permaculture, a system for the design and creation of human habitats, organizations, and projects rooted in ethics of sustainability, well-being, and equity. I argue that applying permaculture as a tool in research design can enable research to contribute more directly, immedi...
This commentary relates findings reported in this collection to personal and collective experiences within ECOLISE, a unique experiment in creating a common platform for networking, collaboration, learning and policy influence representing multiple national and international networks of CBIs. The establishment of ECOLISE has raised numerous challen...
This article examines a trend over the past two decades towards more explicit politicization in some areas of the ecovillage movement, particularly where ecovillages engage with related grassroots movements for environmental and social change. It does so using an expanded political ecology framework, also drawing upon 'Multi-Level Perspective on Su...
Edges, Fringes, Frontiers examines differences between the ecological knowledge and associated practices of traditional resource users, whose depth of historical connection with particular ecological zones spans at least several generations, and that conventionally applied in scientific approaches to resource management. Empirical evidence shows mu...
Permaculture education as ecology of mind: the head, hands and heart of transformation This chapter considers permaculture education as a form of 'mass intellectuality', in the sense of being radically critical of dominant educational paradigms, particularly in higher education, and the institutions, practices, implicit politics and cultural assump...
Resilience, Community Action and Societal Transformation is a unique collection bridging research, theory and practical action to create more resilient societies.
It includes accounts from people and organisations at the front line of efforts to build community resilience, cutting edge theory and analysis from engaged scholar-activists, and commen...
Permaculture is a design system for sustainable human habitats and basis of a worldwide citizen-led movement present in over 100 countries.
For decades, permaculture practitioners have devised creative responses to changes in local climatic conditions. In doing so, they have developed a collective knowledge and experience invaluable to global effo...
The climate crisis has revealed a paradox at the heart of global governance: Those who
hold the power in the current system present as the solution to ecological destruction
and social dislocation the very paradigm and power relations that are driving the crisis.
This essay puts forward an alternative point of view and course of action.
http://...
This paper charts the emergence of a fourth generation of pattern languages that continues the generational progression identified by Takashi Iba. In order to characterize Pattern Language 4.0 in the context of societal change, we start by describing some of the complexities of social change processes: the systemic nature of the challenges involved...
An extended version of the chapter in the published book. The original is available for open access download from https://www.hammeronpress.net/shop/books/the-para-academic-handbook/
In the context of a rapid development of interest in community-university research partnerships, this article argues for a greater focus on collaborative reflexivity to enhance learning from the research process and contribute toward developing sustainable and ethical research collaborations. Incorporating perspectives of community and university p...
This book builds from a basic premise that energy security can be understood and approached in multiple different ways. In this chapter, the focus is on examining how people and communities reconfigure debates about energy security, in particular by bringing to light alternative, sometimes conflictive, understandings of both the problem and its pot...
The concept of the keystone species has a long history in ecological analysis, although its validity remains controversial.
Anthropological researchers have recently coined the term cultural keystone species, but have not demonstrated any significant
differences from existing treatments of culturally important species. We define cultural keystones...
We define cultural keystones as system elements with non-redundant functions in maintaining any given level of system complexity. This functional definition establishes that cultural keystones are not species, as previous writers have suggested, but complexes of belief and practice. These complexes are, however, often based around particular wild o...
Anthropological work in human ecology and ethnobiology supports the greater involvement of indigenous and other non-western peoples in development and conservation. However, there is still a shortage of data that can form the basis of practical action in these respects. A case study of Guyana confirms this, showing that debate over indigenous invol...
Projects
Projects (3)
How do we best tackle urban unsustainability & injustice? UrbanA is a three-year EU-funded project that aims to answer this challenging question. Its main aim is to gather knowledge from previous EU-funded research and other relevant projects and mobilise it more effectively for action and policy influence. It combines synthesis of existing information with active engagement of diverse city-makers in a series of four Arena events. https://urban-arena.eu/
Cities play a key role in responding to the great challenges of our time.
However increasing poverty and inequality, exacerbated by the recent financial and housing crises, are putting the social cohesion and resilience of European cities to the test.
Many researchers and innovators have focused on understanding urban social inequality and ecological unsustainability and have identified numerous ways of making cities more just and sustainable. This knowledge and experience needs to be further consolidated and effectively communicated.
UrbanA takes up this challenge
- Distilling and sharing knowledge generated by research and innovation projects and translating it into action.
- Facilitating interaction and knowledge exchange.
- Empowering UrbanA participants to apply this knowledge locally.
- Influencing policies in favour of sustainable and just cities.
Goal: The COMETS project aims to quantify the European-wide aggregate contribution of CAIs to the energy transition at national and European levels by investigating their evolution and scaling up at an in-depth level in six selected countries. The main expected impacts of the project are two-fold. Firstly, COMETS will advance the scientific knowledge on the motives, desires, objectives and barriers of such collective action initiatives and their historical and future role in the energy transition. Building on the information gathered and tested for its robustness, we will then co-develop and test supportive tools together with CAI members, decision makers and the scientific community. Lastly, these stakeholders will then be able to exploit the main outputs of COMETS, namely a Supporting Platform for CAIs, the enhanced knowledge base, scenarios and roadmaps for spreading CAI models, even after the project is concluded.
Funding: Horizon 2020 (from May 2019).
Project link: upcoming
