Critical extension and Agroecology: common topics for working with peasant movements and social organizations

Abstract

Over the last few years, agroecology has gained strength as a solid response to environmental and social degradation in the rural sector. In Latin America, its development is mainly related to peasant organizations. Likewise, critical extension in rural areas is closely linked to popular rural sectors and technicians of civil society organizations and institutions committed to them. This approach arises as a counterpoint to the conventional models of extension, in which the latter is considered as an educational process. At present, there is a multiplicity of university extension projects linked to rural social organizations.

This paper seeks to analyze the meeting points between agroecology and critical extension. For this purpose, it explores links between the theoretical frameworks of both approaches and their territorial approaches. It is concluded that the knowledge dialogue takes a central dimension in extension processes with an agroecological approach. In this regard, both topics base their practices on peasant knowledge recognition, critical academic production, the understanding of power relationships and disputes between actors in territories, and a critical dialogic link between scientific and popular knowledge and the search for social reality transformation. Consequently, the theoretical, epistemological, practical and propositive principles of critical extension and agroecology become tools that feed back to each other, focusing on the knowledge dialogue as a way of enabling social transformation processes.