The Centre of Excellence Jean Monnet on Just Fossil Fuel Transitions participated in the XII Foro Social Panamazónico (FOSPA), held in Puyo, in the Ecuadorian Amazon Region, from the 16th to the 21st of July.
FOSPA is a biennial regional meeting, an autonomous and plural space created in 2002 from the Foro Social Mundial, with the aim of promoting territorial defense, the empowerment of independent governance, and the safeguarding of the rights of populations living in the Amazon Rainforest.
This meeting unites indigenous, Afro-descendant, and local communities, social organizations, movements, and academics from the countries that are part of the Amazon Basin: Ecuador, Peru, Brazil, Bolivia, Venezuela, Guyana, Suriname, and French Guiana. The main objective is to define common pathways to articulate territorial resistance and struggles to protect life, territorial rights, and social, environmental, and climate justice, as well as initiatives and experiences of autonomous territorial governance, in order to promote actions and measures against the risks and threats of extractivist processes in the Amazon Basin ecosystem, risks already amplified by the current context of the global climate crisis and military escalation.
In this context of far-right and authoritarian governments that have proliferated in Latin America in recent years, with an increase in extractivist processes related to minerals, fossil fuels, and agro-industry, FOSPA becomes a crucial space for collective reflection, articulation, and political action from the Amazon territories. The struggle of Yasuní, a global reference for a territory free from fossil fuels, marks Ecuador as the place to continue the processes of previous meetings, such as the Pan-Amazon Declaration of the X FOSPA in Belém and the Mandates of the XI FOSPA in Rurrenabaque (Bolivia). An opportunity, in this era of chaos capitalism, to strengthen the independent and autonomous governance of Amazonian populations, revitalize the articulation between movements, social organizations, and academics, and define a common agenda against the multiple current crises (social, economic, and climate).
The main topics tackle in the FOSPA have been divide in 4 intercorrelated houses, each one define as an autonomous and living spaces to foster the dialogues, articulations and collective proposals which are:
- Casa de territorios libres de extractivismo para una Amazonía con derechos;
- Casa de la Soberanía y Libre Determinación de los Pueblos y Nacionalidades Indígenas;
- Casa de Economías para la vida y la justicia climática: de la deuda y el extractivismo a la transición y economías transformadoras;
- Casa de la Resistencia de Mujeres y Diversidades
XII FOSPA is an opportunity to focus on the main threats that have social-environmental impacts on the Amazon Region and to concentrate collective efforts on defining common strategies to implement mandatory territorial results through concrete and common plans of action against extractivist capitalism. For the Centre of Excellence Jean Monnet on Just Fossil Fuel Transitions, participation in FOSPA is of central importance, reaffirming the Centre’s commitment to building bridges between academia and grassroots resistance, supporting just and inclusive pathways toward fossil fuel transition that respect territorial rights, self-determination, and the socio-environmental justice demanded by Amazonian peoples.
Official website of XII FOSPA: https://fospaecuador.com/
