Wetlands under pressure

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DOI: 10.4324/9780429331930-12
Introduction
The question of transformation is complex. It involves uncertain, often un-
predictable, outcomes in contested spaces fraught with historical meaning,
long-standing and often polarizing perspectives on what is “good” and what is
necessary for such spaces, and who will benet or lose out from any intervention.
Such is the case with the Xochimilco wetland in the southern part of Mexico
City, in the borough of Xochimilco. This urban wetland is the last remnant of
the complex lacustrine system that was the basis for agriculture and livelihoods
in pre-Columbian times (Morehart 2018). Xochimilco’s fate is intertwined in
the history of water exploitation, access and use in Mexico City. Prior to the
arrival of the Spanish, natural springs fed the wetland, providing a freshwater
system supporting signicant biodiversity and enabling a unique agricultural in-
novation, the chinampa system. Chinampas are articial islands of rich organic
matter, intentionally built up through the excavation of lakebed soils, which are
carefully contained by a border formed by the roots of ahuehuete trees, planted in
rectangular formation directly into the wetland. This highly productive farm-
ing system supplied the pre-Hispanic population with food and transformed the
wetland into a signicant agroecosystem with deep cultural and economic sig-
nicance (Morehart 2018).
The chinampa system continues to be a source of diverse ecosystem services as
well as the basis for micro agro-enterprises that supply vegetables to high-end
consumers and city and local markets. However, the wetland agroecosystem is
much smaller than in the past. Irregular, urban settlements have encroached on
the wetland conservation area and contribute to signicant contamination of
the wetland’s water through illicit sewage discharge, together with waste from
tourism, agriculture and other activities (Zambrano et al. 2009). Water quality
9
WETLANDS UNDER PRESSURE
The experience of the Xochimilco
T-Lab, Mexico
Hallie Eakin, Lakshmi Charli-Joseph, Rebecca Shelton,
Beatriz Ruizpalacios, David Manuel-Navarrete
and J. Mario Siqueiros-García

Mexico: wetlands under pressure 139
concerns have undermined shing and agricultural livelihoods, and threaten
the eco-tourism activities of the area (Mazari-Hiriart et al. 2008; Zambrano
etal. 2009). The wetland ecosystem nevertheless is recognized and valued locally
and internationally as a cultural and historical site, green water infrastructure,
and symbol of Mexico’s indigenous past and ecological aspirations for the future
(Manuel- Navarrete et al. 2019).
This was the ecological and social domain in which the North America Hub
working in Mexico focussed its transformation lab (T-Lab) experiment. The nu-
merous interventions that had been made over the prior three decades had largely
been unsuccessful in reversing ecological degradation and creating viable liveli-
hood opportunities for those who depend on the wetland’s sustainability. Despite
the clear value of the area to local residents, its cultural and historical symbolism,
and its stated ecological signicance for the city as a whole, eorts to conserve
the wetland were failing. Our premise was the possibility that problem reframing
and new sources of collective agency might be necessary to nd alternative pathways
towards sustainability (Charli-Joseph et al. 2018). We proposed a T-Lab as a novel
form of intervention that might serve this function.
The problem space
Sustainability challenges in Xochimilco have been long in the making, and are
intimately related to the broader challenges the megalopolis of Mexico City,
population 21.6 million (United Nations 2018), faces concerning water, poverty,
urbanization and governance. Water is highly political and contested in Mexico
City, and characterized by signicant inequities (Castro 2004; Jiménez Cisneros
2011). The solutions that have been implemented to address scarcity and ooding
in the city have often exacerbated social inequities. Natural springs, perceived
as the dominion of pueblos originarios (villages of indigenous origin on Mexico
City’s watershed), have been tapped and piped to supply the economic activities
and population of Mexico City’s urban centre – an action that has left deep re-
sentment in communities that once controlled the use of such springs, and has
exacerbated water scarcity (Aguilar and López 2009, Tellman et al. 2018). In
Xochimilco, the water that sustains the wetland is no longer from local natural
springs, but rather from treated wastewater from the neighbouring urban bor-
ough of Iztapalapa.
As Mexico City’s population burgeoned in the 20th century, groundwater
extraction from the aquifer below the city accelerated, eventually supplying 60%
of the city’s demand. This exploitation is not sustainable: extraction vastly ex-
ceeds recharge and has triggered massive subsidence of as much as 300 mm/y
(Osmanoğlu et al. 2011). Subsidence, in turn, exacerbates ood risk – leaving
some chinampas in Xochimilco chronically inundated. Subsidence and ooding
together add to the precariousness of housing, particularly informal housing,
which is unlikely to meet urban construction standards, in what is also an active
seismic zone.

140 Hallie Eakin et al.
The challenges of Xochimilco are also embedded within a larger problem of
urbanization and access to adequate housing in Mexico City. A lack of aordable
public housing in the urban core has pushed lower-income residents to the urban
fringe where cheaper land is more available. Low-income families have used
informal networks and strategies to build homes where they can: most often on
agricultural parcels, or land reserved for ecological services and watershed con-
servation (Wigle 2010). The border of the Xochimilco wetland, despite its un-
stable soils and risk of ooding, as well as the chinampas themselves, have become
sites of such informal expansion (Connolly and Wigle 2017).
As one can imagine, the chronic pressures of housing, water scarcity and ood
risk have become signicant burdens for urban governance (Lerner et al. 2018).
There is little trust among residents of the city and federal water authorities, and
many residents perceive injustices in water allocation across economic classes and
between residential areas (Eakin et al. 2016). This tension results in mistrust that
periodically erupts in protests and civil actions, some of which turn violent (Cas-
tro 2004; Eakin et al. 2020). Water resource management is heavily centralized
and largely in the hands of authorities who rely on conventional engineering
and infrastructural solutions rather than social interventions (Lerner et al. 2018).
Informal residents in the wetland area not only struggle with exposure to
ooding and subsidence, but are also villainized in public discourse for not com-
plying with urban regulations and for discharging their sewage directly into the
wetland waters. Government-funded infrastructure solutions are also prohibited
by law in those settlements considered “informal” or “irregular”. Yet corruption
is also in play: public ocials are not inclined to enforce regulations during elec-
toral seasons and permit housing construction or even incentivize construction
by promising that formal public services will follow, if the candidate is elected
(Connolly and Wigle 2017). The shers and farmers who rely on the wetland’s
ecosystem services, and struggle to maintain their livelihoods, are also often
implicated in its degradation through association with agrochemical contam-
ination, mechanization, illicit land sales and construction. In this context, the
younger generation – the children of chinamperos – are less and less inclined to
pursue farming, leaving less incentive for wetland conservation.
While there is broad recognition that the Xochimilco wetland is faced with
persistent, often interdependent issues, dierent groups have conicting percep-
tions of the causes and solutions to these issues. Many residents in Mexico City
perceive the area to be polluted and degraded, but simultaneously recognize it
as part of the cultural heritage of the city and as a site for recreation. For civil
society groups, there is a problem of siloed activism, with uncoordinated groups
working on dierent, specic challenges. While urbanization of the wetland
is widely recognized as a problem, the dominant narrative and eort has been
focussed on ecological conservation and restoration, rather than on the drivers
of urbanization itself. Informal and illegal settlements are typically blamed for
environmental “bads”, yet it is also recognized that informal urban growth is
often incentivized through electoral politics.

Mexico: wetlands under pressure 141
In light of the multiple agents involved in Xochimilco, the North America
Hub hypothesized that a new foundation for collective action in this complex
problem space might be needed for systemic change towards a more sustaina-
ble future. This foundation would need to be based on reframing the problem
from one that is out of anyone’s control and driven by exogenous stressors
degrading the system, to one in which all agents could see their role in, and
capacity for, enacting change. We hoped that the T-Lab process would help
create problem ownership, system understanding and the identication of al-
ternative pathways.
Theory, research and action
Our primary objective was to create a space and process through which a small
group of diverse actors from Xochimilco could work towards discovering new
collective possibilities for transformative action. Our approach thus foregrounded
participatory methodologies that were designed to foster alliances among the par-
ticipants in the process. The T-Lab was designed as a two-year process in which
there would be at least two intensive collective interactions among a group of
actors (named T-Lab workshops 1 and 2), along with a series of other activities–
individual interactions between single participants and the research team or other
small group events. No specic project outcome or innovation was envisioned by
the research team; rather, our aim was to provide space and facilitate the activities
to let collective agency emerge without our control or direction.
Theory of transformation
Our design of the T-Lab was based on the idea that transformation entails in-
ternal, cognitive shifts as well as changes in behaviour and institutions (O’Brien
and Sygna 2013). We also initiated the activities with the premise that agency–
individual and, critically, collective agency – is fundamental to any social-ecological
transformation. Collective agency is built from explicit recognition and reec-
tion on individual agency and empowerment in relation to the role of individ-
uals as part of shaping and being shaped by a complex social-ecological system
(Bandura 2000; Pelenc et al. 2013; 2015). Transformation thus entails eliciting
the values, meanings, skills, expectations and understandings experienced by the
actors within a social-ecological system (SES); mobilizing existing agency and
connecting actors to novel ideas, new actors, new sources of knowledge and un-
derstanding; problem reframing; and nally a collective process of opening-up
and dening courses of action and experimentation. This process creates an op-
portunity to make new connections and alliances, and potentially enables actors
to feel empowered to engage with existing power structures and processes with
new energy and constructive strategies.
Reframing (for details on our project’s eorts in problem reframing, see
Chapter 11) is about reecting on meanings and it includes a set of steps: (a) to

142 Hallie Eakin et al.
recognize what is meaningful, (b) to detach meanings from their material sup-
port, (c) to question narratives that support a given set of meanings, (d) to create
new narratives and connections between meanings and (e) to nd new material
support for those meanings. This does not necessarily follow a linear process.
However, these steps were iterated multiple times during our T-Lab process. Re-
framing can contribute to breaking cognitive pathways and mental models that
limit one’s ability to imagine solution possibilities. But we further intended that
reframing would result in social learning and the emergence of new solutions.
We think that if reframing is achieved through discussion and accompanied by
the formation of new relationships, there is a greater possibility that the internal
changes that happen within agents manifest in projects and collective actions that
impact material, system dynamics.
Fostering collective agency involves engaging with methods that help ac-
tors identify their own agency, reect on what they value in the SES as well as
how their own activities and actions relate to those values, nd common values
with others and realize complementarity in skills and capacities. In reframing
the problem, we emphasize the need to focus less on the current material state of
the social-ecological system, and more on shared values and emotions associated
with the system. In recognition of the September 2017 earthquake and its eects
in catalysing action among participants in the T-Lab, we note that external cir-
cumstances and windows of opportunity are also critical in enabling actors to
reect and mobilize relationships and engage in new activities towards social and
environmental change.
Research methods: observing change and transformation
By focussing on process, rather than a specic outcome, our entire approach
entailed considerable attention to and innovation in participatory methodology
and group facilitation. These approaches and methods are described in the sec-
tions that follow. T-Labs workshops were structured and organized by the re-
search team, but the content was constantly co-produced; we held preparation
meetings with participants prior to the workshops in order to get input into the
structure, objectives and desired outputs. Consistent co-production along the
process, and of the very process, was key to sustain the participants’ commitment.
This co-production required continuous one-on-one interactions of members of
the research team with individual actors in between group meetings, activities,
and T-Lab workshops 1 and 2. Concurrent to both these forms of interaction
was intensive work by the research team in analysing the data collected in the
individual meetings in order to have material to return to participants prior to
group activities.
In parallel, we also implemented and designed metrics to evaluate change in
agency and problem perception through interviews with participants and peri-
odically repeated exercises employing a method we called “Agency Network
Analysis” or ANA, which articulates cognitive mapping and action networks

Mexico: wetlands under pressure 143
and that is accompanied by Q-Method analysis (Charli-Joseph et al. 2018). These
combined metrics allowed us to measure changes in, e.g. how long-established
inhabitants perceive new, often irregular, settlers; instead of viewing them as
“others” and a “threat”, they might now be viewed as potential collaborators.
In addition, we have evidence from pre- and post-Q-methodology evaluations,
social network evaluations, and qualitative evidence of empathy. The Q-Method
(baseline and change) captured learning as changes in individuals’ perceptions,
and the divergence or convergence of these perceptions within the group. In
terms of empathy, we recorded comments indicating how participants learnt to
see the system from the perspective of another. An additional indicator of learn-
ing and collective agency was simply the continued participation of the actors,
and their growing condence in their relationships with each other (Shelton
etal. 2018).
Measuring “transformation” is far more dicult. We do not know whether
or when (potentially years) or in what context transformative change will ma-
terialize, nor in what form or the extent to which it might be attributed to the
T-Lab. Our goal was to create the collective agency necessary as one important
ingredient towards system transformation, and our methods of evaluation fo-
cussed largely on that intermediate goal. We did, however, conduct follow-up
interviews after the second T-Lab and we continue to think about ways in which
to understand the system-level impacts of T-Labs.
T-Lab implementation sequence
The project evolved in an organic and dynamic fashion over the course of the
two years. While the rst activities were intentionally and carefully designed by
the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) – Arizona State Uni-
versity (ASU) research team, we left open the design of subsequent activities to
reect the nature of the group and the direction it would want to take. During
this second period, the research team played the role of sustaining, documenting
and feeding an emergent process (Figure 9.1).
FI GU R E 9.1 Individual and collective interactions throughout the process, indicating
the rst (T-Lab 1) and second (T-Lab 2) T-Lab workshops.

144 Hallie Eakin et al.
Phase 1: activities leading up to the rst T-Lab workshop
Preparations leading to T-Labs are as important as the T-Lab workshop itself
and therefore they require the allocation of signicant eort and resources. The
steps taken and decisions made during this initial phase will determine the entire
process and from the outset we conceived of the actual T-Lab workshop as only
a culminating moment in a larger process.
To identify and invite individuals to join us in this experiment, we drew from
existing literature on sustainability change agents (e.g. Westley et al. 2013) as well
as our own intuition. We sought individuals who all together possessed: (a) di-
verse types of knowledge about the area; (b) inuence over other social actors
(e.g. through capacity building projects, organized collective work, institutional
attribution); (c) capacity and willingness to experiment with dierent approaches;
(d) determination and will to support conservation of socio-ecological attributes of
the system; (e) sense of attachment to the place (identity); (f) experience in alterna-
tive activities (e.g. organic farming, ecotourism, eco-technologies); (g) solidarity
and empathy with respect to other group members and (h) experience working on
problems of community development and grassroots innovation. We expected that
individuals with these characteristics would be most likely to embrace the open-
ended, experimental nature of what we were proposing to do in the T-Lab and
would add constructive diversity and/or strategic social connections to the process
(Charli-Joseph et al. 2018). We conducted in-depth interviews with 17 individuals
identied by these criteria (11 of which resulted in continuing core participants).
A key innovation in this phase consisted of designing and implementing spe-
cic methods to elicit the proles of each agent, articulated in a novel approach
FIGUR E 9. 2 Prole of actor = ANA + Q-Method.

Mexico: wetlands under pressure 145
called Agency Network Analysis (ANA), which enables the visualization of an
individual’s activities, social interactions and relationship to the social- ecological
system (Figure 9.2). The information and baseline data collected through
these innovative methods allowed us to strategically design the actual T-Lab
interaction.
Phase 2: T-Lab workshop 1
Design
The rst T-Lab entitled “A transformative space for the Xochimilco wetland”
was conducted over two days in February 2017, in Mexico City, with 11 par-
ticipants (3 chinamperos, 3 residents and activists with informal settlements, 4
members of civil society groups working in sustainable agriculture, rainwater
harvesting or ecological restoration and 1 person associated with the federal
government). All activities in the rst T-Lab were designed to help build trust
among participants, and reveal explicit, implicit and underlying meanings, val-
ues, and emotions associated with the social-ecological system that constitutes
“Xochimilco”. It was clear from the interviews that the personal process of ac-
cepting loss of geographic or physical attributes of the wetland (e.g. the agricul-
tural land, the chinampas, or the problem of water contamination) are a key step
in embracing social-ecological transformations (Eakin et al. 2019). We wanted
to direct the conversation away from the standard dynamics of non-academic
partners requesting more data and information from the universities, and the
universities dumping such knowledge on non-academic partners without a real
plan for action. We worked to avoid a “blame game” in which the discussion
focussed on external actors and how they had created the problems as such dis-
course may undermine the agency present in the local population. Participants
were invited to stay overnight in the retreat where the interaction was facil-
itated. We hoped that this retreat-style design would encourage casual social
interaction over food and drinks.
Facilitation methods
The rst day was spent in a series of participatory and tactile activities. For ex-
ample, each participant created an “avatar” to represent him or herself, with
associated “powers” that reected their particular personal capacities or skills
that we had a priori selected as potentially associated with collective action and
agency (Westley et al. 2013). In small groups, the participants created dioramas
of aspects of the social-ecological system that were particularly meaningful to
them, discussed what those meanings were and what values they represented,
and shared those with the broader group. Collectively, we decided to focus on
examining the more abstract underlying values that the participants had articu-
lated. These, then, became the focus of discussion: were they threatened? How

146 Hallie Eakin et al.
could they be preserved? What were barriers to change? What was threatened?
As participants became more familiar with each other they shared more intimate
narratives of change and stagnation, identied underlying senses of loss associ-
ated with the psychological impacts of ecological degradation and livelihood via-
bility (Charli-Joseph et al. 2018; Eakin et al. 2019). The second half-day, inspired
by the 3-Horizons approach, was dedicated towards brainstorming strategies for
overcoming barriers to change: what would these look like? What would they
entail? How might these strategies draw upon the knowledge and capacity exist-
ent among the group? What should be the next steps?
Reections
The rst T-Lab accomplished many things but perhaps most important for our
purpose of catalysing collective agency was the facilitation of trust and a spirit of
collaboration among the participants, very few of whom knew each other prior
to the meeting and acknowledged having shared concerns. However, we found
that reecting as a group about system transformations can be daunting. One
challenge was to separate material objects and realities (e.g. the land on which
they traditionally farmed) from the participants’ values and feelings towards
them (e.g. the autonomy that farming provided the household). Centring the
conversation on the potential persistence of intangible attributes allowed a dis-
cussion of the possibility of inevitable material losses intrinsic to transformations.
While some objects must go, we can still preserve or recreate their benets and
associated values. The goal was to reconceptualize the wetland system in terms
of a suite of intangible values that seemed to resonate with the group as a whole
to then think about possible intervention pathways.
Another challenge was the tendency of the collective conversation to focus
on what had already been tried and practised in the past. People had diculty
imagining that any eort to, e.g. sustain “self-suciency” would be aimed
at a dierent material manifestation in the system than “maintaining the chi-
nampas”. Thus, the pathways turned out to be less transformative than we had
hoped: a pathway to support the value of “self-suciency” was not “imagine
an alternative livelihood in case the chinampas was no longer viable” but rather
“use rain barrel technology to capture clean water for the chinampa”. This was
somewhat dierent than the more traditional response of “improve the water
quality in the wetland”, but we did not feel like we were moving the group
into a new mode of thought. When we probed participants to explain how
these solutions (e.g. “organize workshops to help people use rain barrel tech-
nologies”) might lead to outcomes that were dierent than what had been tried
in the past, the conversation turned to recognizing existing structural barriers
that hinder more transformative change. We ended Day 2 with a recognition
that if the internal barriers – those emerging within the community – were not
addressed directly, the proposed pathways would likely not have results dier-
ent than those of the past.

Mexico: wetlands under pressure 147
We had initially wanted to avoid conversation about barriers to change, fearing
that this would be a disempowering conversation. We realized, however, that if
the barriers are not tackled explicitly, the types of interventions proposed by the
group would unlikely be dierent from those in the past. The conversation around
barriers seemed to open up new ways of thinking about an issue and revealed some
of the deeper cognitive and social factors perceived as impeding change within the
community. These barriers then became the focus of action (for instance, how to
address lack of self-esteem in the community), rather than the concrete strategies
for addressing the manifestation of the problem in the landscape (i.e. how to ad-
dress water quality). The rst T-Lab laid the foundation of a new social network
and a shift in framing reected in a shared language among participants and inter-
est in continuing to engage and meet in the months that followed. We noted the
emergence of a greater sense of problem ownership and individual empowerment,
and crucially, that solutions must be formed and implemented from the ground up.
Phase 3: continuous engagement
As a way of building momentum towards T-Lab workshop 2 and eliciting what
the participants hoped to achieve from the process, we conducted three explora-
tory exercises, and organized two excursions: to a chinampa cultivated by one of
the participants, and a walk on a volcanic mountain that overlooked the wetland,
on which irregular settlements were developing. These exercises and activities,
discussed in greater detail in the “Innovation and alternative pathways” section
of this chapter, were designed to help participants assume alternative perspectives
on the challenges they perceived, explore possibilities of collaboration, and en-
vision alternative realities.
Prior to T-Lab workshop 2, we convened a small group of core participants
to play a role in planning the next steps. It was the rst time they expressed their
restlessness towards the project’s open design and focus on interactions, which
contrasts with more traditional, goal-oriented workshops and projects. They
also questioned how far we were willing to take our involvement as researcher-
activists and wanted to know if they could count on us to participate in the
initiatives they proposed. During the meeting, participants decided that any in-
tervention had to address not only the urban-chinampa divide, but also recognize
and connect with the other groups found in Xochimilco in a more concrete
initiative with both short- and long-term goals.
Notably, a major earthquake occurred in Mexico City during this phase of
our work (September 2017); this devastating event provided an opportunity to
focus the group on concerns of solidarity and collective agency in the midst of
“rebuilding” in a fragile and hazardous ecosystem. The earthquake itself appeared
to reinforce the nascent idea that the urban residents do not have many alternatives
to residing (illegally) within the wetland and thus are not entirely to blame for the
encroachment. Building on our prior eort to help all participants identify their
“powers”, we organized a meeting in which we exchanged ideas about the services

148 Hallie Eakin et al.
and capacities each of us had to oer, and what each of us required or desired in
the wake of the earthquake. A new sense of empathy and a new interest in "build-
ing bridges" between the wetland stakeholders and the urban residents seemed to
emerge from the recognition that all were aected by the earthquake; this solidar-
ity was exemplied in the Pathways to Sustainability Game, described in greater
detail in the “Innovation and alternative pathways” section of this chapter.
Phase 4: T-Lab workshop 2
The second T-Lab focussed on a plan of action directed and initiated by the
non-academic participants. The action plan was based on a previously collec-
tively articulated cognitive map of the “problem” of Xochimilco. The research
team intentionally refrained from taking leadership in this last T-Lab, other than
serving as facilitators and conveners and advocating for framing whatever strat-
egy participants decided to pursue in line with transformative pathways to sus-
tainability. We hoped that the accumulated evidence that the group had acquired
considerable agency and capacity would be motivating to the participants to act
on the values they now knew they shared, and the knowledge they had gained
over prior activities in terms of possible action-pathways. First, the research team
summarized ideas that had emerged over the course of the two years:
1 the need to create bridges between the two worlds of the urbanizing core
and the livelihoods dependent on wetland conservation and agriculture,
2 the need to “reactivate” the agroecological traditions of Xochimilco as a
means of halting urbanization,
3 the idea that informal residences could be made more compatible with the
ecology of the area through innovations in construction and design.
What emerged as an output of this T-Lab was the desire to develop a project
proposal that mimics, in some way, the understanding and empathy that has de-
veloped across T-Lab participants and dierent zones of the wetland. The group
specically wanted to develop a pedagogy for questioning and understanding the
complexity of the water problem in Xochimilco through programmes or work-
shops in which people come together to carry out particular technical projects
to improve – on a small scale – water quality or quantity. Their idea was to meet
people where they are: nd what connects them to the place of Xochimilco and
the water issue and, through specic capacity building projects, enhance that
connectivity and mobilize action.
Post T-Lab workshop 2
After T-Lab workshop 2, in individual interviews, we met with each partici-
pant and again applied the ANA methodology to assess whether: (a) ego-nets
had expanded or changed; (b) links between participants had been created or

Mexico: wetlands under pressure 149
strengthened; (c) practices in the action-nets had changed in terms of relations
between collaborators-practices (we expected this to change after the earth-
quake) and (d) cognitive maps changed in the way they represent the issues in
the system (reasons for degradation), or in the perception of the issue itself (this
would imply reframing, since even if the cognitive map does not change per se,
the way they explain or frame the problem could change). We also applied the
Q-Method to assess whether the participants had changed their perspective on
what attributes were meaningful to them in the wetland.
Following the proposal of T-Lab workshop 2 for a pedagogical initiative and
participants’ interests on learning facilitation and participatory tools and techniques,
we held a 1-day workshop where participants reected on transformative learning
and planned this initiative. Our team participated on equal terms as the rest of the
core participants and we hired external professionals to facilitate the workshop. The
outcome was a T-Lab facilitator’s toolkit and guide to assist others in replicating our
process of fostering collective agency (see Ruizpalacios et al. 2019).
Innovation and alternative pathways
Though innovation was not a key theme in our work, a central aspect of our
T-Lab was that it opened the possibility to construct a new pathway in which
chinamperos and urban dwellers could come and work together. This pathway may
be thought as socially innovative in itself. These are groups that have positioned
themselves as antipodes to each other, both in terms of what Xochimilco means
to them and also in terms of who is perceived as responsible for the degradation
of the area or unmet needs. By the end of the project, the participants had altered
their discourse, and were emphasizing the pursuit of activities that would “build
bridges” and solidarity towards common goals.
While the entire process of the T-Lab was oriented towards problem refram-
ing and questioning of prior assumptions, there were several exercises specically
aimed at such social innovation and exploring alternative pathways. For example,
we designed an interactive role-playing game that we called the “Pathways to
Sustainability Game” (Ruizpalacios et al. 2018) to help the participants move
towards the idea of thinking about a strategic intervention and how it might play
out in a complex system such as Xochimilco. The game simulated collaboration
in a planning context (role playing a committee with a budget for implementa-
tion) as well as enabling the players to monitor and reect on the strategies they
pursued as they aect the system over time. In another activity implemented in
the months following the earthquake, participants prototyped miniature models
of new settlements that would maintain the core values identied in T-Lab work-
shop 1 (aesthetic, self-suciency, and identity) and set new pathways towards
desired scenarios where agriculture on the chinampas and urbanization might
coexist. The models depicted well-conserved chinampas and included houses that
were smaller, built with lighter materials and eco-technologies. These imagined
designs are radically dierent from the ones currently being built.

150 Hallie Eakin et al.
Through exercises such as the ones described above, the participants and re-
search team began to see that ecosystem health and human well-being are not
separate issues, and that residents in the urban areas and in the wetlands may
share common ambitions about system change. While the activities of the T-Lab
may be only partially responsible for this realization, now there is acknowledge-
ment that any action must involve eorts from both sides, and this represents a
success in opening new pathways for Xochimilco.
As a result of the second T-Lab, the participants concluded that they wanted
to pursue the idea of “bridging” worlds: that of urban/chinampa, as well as the
highland/lowland parts of the system. As they formulated the focal activities
in this pathway of change, they emphasized education: interventions to change
perspectives, attitudes and behaviours around the issue of water, concluding that
water linked the dierent parts of the system that have not been in coordina-
tion. They envisioned the creation of bridges through outreach and innova-
tive education between actors with dierent roles in the system: chinamperos
and non-chinamperos, those in the urban core versus the wetland, and between
generations. Essentially, participants recognized the scaling of T-Lab-like peda-
gogical process as a main transformative pathway towards sustainability in Xo-
chimilco. They advocated for more transformative methods and pedagogy for
engagement, drawing the recognition that the arts, as well as technical expertise,
might be mobilized towards transformative ends. At their request, we produced a
“guidebook” that captures the essence of the dierent methods and approaches to
engagement that we used in the project: The Transformation Laboratory of the Social-
Ecological System of Xochimilco, Mexico City: Description of the Process and Methodolog-
ical Guide (Ruizpalacios et al. 2019) for use not only by the participants in their
own activities and advocacy work, but also for public dissemination.
Networks, alliances and collective agency
The aim of the T-Lab process was, in essence, to create conditions that would
give rise to a sense of collective agency. Our decision, at the start of the project,
to invite individuals to join the T-Lab who had limited, if any, prior connection
to each other, was strategic. Our aim was to see if the activities we engaged
in would be conducive to forming a new network of individuals with diverse
capacities, interests and stakes in the system, but who nevertheless could collab-
orate towards a common goal. In this objective, we noted signicant changes:
the Agency Network Analysis we conducted with the participants illustrated to
them and us that many of them saw their social collaborative networks expand.
We established a WhatsApp group and Facebook page that facilitated con-
tinued communication among participants during the entire process, not only
about project sponsored activities but also about information that individual
participants wanted to share with the group, and even for informal social and
friendly chatting – building social bonding within the group. At present, as we
are writing this chapter (2019), they continue to interact through social media

Mexico: wetlands under pressure 151
and in person. While they have not focussed on a single, specic project, they
have met to support each other in political action. Recently, e.g. after the for-
mal T-Lab project had come to a close, one member of the T-Lab group called
other members through social media to a critical situation in the wetland: the
wetland’s water in one area had simply evaporated, leaving the chinampas desic-
cated. With subsidence and problems in water management, this occurrence is
increasingly likely. The T-Lab group mobilized collectively, without our support
to address the situation through civic action. Events such as this suggest that the
primary goal of the project – to create conditions in which collective agency
could emerge among relative strangers – was achieved.
While the T-Lab process ultimately did not incorporate new actors over the
course of the two years, the activities that we conducted as a group such as the
Pathways to Sustainability Game and discussions following the September 2017
earthquake emphasized to the participants the need to build bridges to commu-
nities not well-represented in the T-Lab process. Hence the eort of the group
on learning and developing capacities in pedagogies that could “build bridges”
across dierent social and ecological divides that mark the Xochimilco wetland.
Concluding insights
The T-Lab of Xochimilco was designed under the assumption that transfor-
mations of social-ecological systems cannot be engineered from outside since
such human-dominated systems are extremely complex and not amenable to
controlled manipulation. Instead, social-ecological transformations require cul-
tivating changes in the system’s main driving component; human individuals
and collectives. Consequently, we did not attempt to catalyse a specic, pre-
conceived pathway or strategy of change but rather focussed on creating a space
for reection, reframing and exploration with the hope that such a space might
aect transformative processes. Due to the project’s own limitations, we could
only involve a reduced number of people with limited inuence in the whole
social-ecological system. While this constrained the possibility of eecting an
actual system-level transformation, by selecting participants who were not al-
ready intensively collaborating we were able to experiment and learn important
lessons about cultivating transformative intentionality through the nurturing of
individual and collective components of a system (Manuel-Navarrete et al. 2019).
We achieved this experimenting and learning by providing a space in which
people could reect on their agency and what they might be able to do together
that they could not achieve alone, or within their siloed networks. Ultimately,
transformative spaces must be community-building spaces: spaces that cultivate
collective agency (Pereira et al. 2018). In such spaces the relationships of actors
to other system elements through livelihood activities are potentially disrupted,
and connections are built on shared values, histories and futures. The project
was able to create conditions in which collective agency emerged among relative
strangers, and was self-sustained by them after the project was concluded.

152 Hallie Eakin et al.
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