Presentation by J. Mario Siqueiros, February 2019, at a STEPS Seminar at the Institute of Development Studies. More information: https://steps-centre.org/project/pathways-network/

1. Agency and social-ecological system (SES)
pathways: The Transformation Lab in the
Xochimilco SES
J. Mario Siqueiros
Lakshmi Charli-Joseph; Hallie Eakin; Rebecca Shelton;
Beatriz Ruizpalacios; David Manuel-Navarrete

2. Xochi team
Azael,Flora, Ana Bertha, Rubén, Uriel, Sara,
Enrique, Laura, Darío, Federico, Paty

3. The central idea
● We argue that the cause of the sense of
despair, anxiety and indifference among
Xochimilco’s inhabitants is the loss of a life-
world due to social and ecological degradation.
● At its core, the loss of life-worlds in Xochimilco is related to a system level depletion of the
opportunities for people to relate meaningfully to others and to the environment: i.e. loss of
agency. We believe that there is a set of reasons behind this loss, all of them related to a
systemic process of alienation from the place and from the inhabitants own agency.
● A life-world may not be recovered or restored but new possible and desirable life-worlds can be
imagined, aimed and enacted. From a 4E and phenomenological perspective, we suggest that
this can be done, as we implemented it in a T-Lab, by recovering agency through finding new
effective ways to connect habits and skills with social-ecological features.

4. Theme
● We argue that the loss of a life-world due to social and ecological degradation is the cause of the sense of
despair, anxiety and indifference among Xochimilco’s inhabitants.
● At its core, the loss of life-worlds in Xochimilco is
related to a system level depletion of the opportunities
for people to relate meaningfully to others and to the
environment: i.e. loss of agency. We believe that there
is a set of reasons behind this loss, all of them related
to a systemic process of alienation from the place and
of the inhabitants own agency.
●
A life-world may not be recovered or restored but new possible and desirable life-worlds can be imagined,
aimed and enacted. From a 4E and phenomenological perspective, we suggest that this can be done, as we
implemented it in a T-Lab, by recovering agency through finding new effective ways to connect habits and
skills with social-ecological features.

5. Theme
● We argue that the loss of a life-world due to social and ecological degradation is the cause of the sense of
despair, anxiety and indifference among Xochimilco’s inhabitants.
● At its core, the loss of life-worlds in Xochimilco is related to a system level depletion of the opportunities for
people to relate meaningfully to others and to the environment: i.e. loss of agency. We believe that there is
a set of reasons behind this loss, all of them related to a systemic process of alienation from the place and
from the inhabitants own agency.
● A life-world may not be recovered or restored but new
possible and desirable life-worlds can be imagined,
aimed and enacted. We suggest that this can be
done, as we implemented it in a T-Lab, by recovering
agency through finding new effective ways to connect
habits and skills with social-ecological features.

6. Summary
1. Is Capitalism, the only game in town?
2. Theoretical background
3.T-Lab
4. Xochimilco’s critical case of Solastalgia
5. T-Lab: reframing the system and reframing
agency
6. Conclusions

7. Capitalism, the only game in town
● Capitalist realism
– There is no alternative
to capitalism
– Capitalism is more a
political project than
an economic one
By MACBA CC BY-SA 2.0 https://bit.ly/2Sz4D7E

8. Capitalism, the only game in town
Neoliberalism has
pushed towards the
idea that there is no
other option but
Capitalism, and that
everything is fix and
given.

9. Capitalism, the only game in town
● Neoliberal agenda:
– Annihilation of consciousness:
● Class consciousness
● Psychedelic consciousness

10. Capitalism, the only game in town
Psychedelic consciousness: Reality
is malleable, that actually nothing is
given and we can transform it.
Colin Hoskins/Stockimo/Alamy https://ind.pn/2HYIJXd Daniel Kramer 1964 https://goo.gl/8SqaCB

11. Capitalism, the only game in town
Darwin C. (1837) First Notebook on
Transmutation of Species
● The notion of ‘psychedelic
consciousness’ appeals
immediately to agency. It
appeals to the fact that we
can conceive the set of
possible transformations, so
to speak, the possible
pathways to choose from.
Moreover, that, we as
agents can transform the
human or the social-
ecological realm.

12. Theoretical Background
How can these ideas be made operative in order
to analyse the situation of the people of
Xochimilco?

13. Theoretical Background
● Phenomenology
● 4E approach to cognition
– Embodied, embedded, extended, enactive.

14. Theoretical Background
Why phenomenology and a cognitive approach?

15. Theoretical Background
Cognition: it is about how an organism gets
engaged with the environment (Clark 2003)
Phenomenology and the 4E approach are about
the relationship between an individual and its
environment –specially from the first person
perspective.

16. Theoretical Background
● Three concepts:
– Agent-Environment System
– Life-world
– Habits
– Skills

17. Theoretical Background
● Agents and the environment form a single
dynamical system.
● Such systems form a Life-world (Husserl 1970;
Schütz; Ihde 1990; Ingold 2000): the world that
is meaningfully experienced by an agent and its
community.

18. Theoretical Background
● The connection between agents and the world
has two important interdependent components:
– Affordances (Gibson, 1979; Chemero 2003, 2013)
– Habits (Barandiaran & DiPaolo 2014)

19. Theoretical Background
● Affordances are meaningful features of whole
situations in which an agent is engaged.
– Affordances are meaningful because they emerge
from a history of interactions over which the agent
has developed skills to perceive and act.
– The execution of these skills are meaningful when
they produce changes in the environment that make
sense to the agent.

20. Theoretical Background
Habits (skills bundle
together):
– We often do one thing in
mostly the same way, that
actually is a display of
many interrelated skills.
– Social and cultural habits
are socially transmitted
and learnt and we have
many institutions devoted
to that purpose.
– Habits, also bundle
together to form a Life-
world.

21. Theoretical Background
● Agency:
– Agency is an emergent property of an individual and an
environment.
– An agent is an individual who can display or enact its
habits effectively and in a meaningful way for itself in
relationship with an environment.
– Agents display “regional identities” or, in terms of Pierre
Bourdieu, agents are defined according to their field of
action. Someone can be a farmer, an academic and an
gender rights activist and for each of these -there is a set
of habits.

22. T-Lab:Transformation Laboratory
Xochimilco by Federico Contreras, T-Lab participant

23. T-Lab:Transformation Laboratory
● Fundamental role of agency in transformation processes
● How to create spaces that foster transformation
● Criteria and methods that contribute to how to identify,
build, and measure agency
● Re-conceptualizing the way of relating in socio-ecological
systems (e.g. Mezirow 2000, Scott 2003)
● T-labs –Dominant domain to be challenged; Diverse
perspectives that see the problem in a different way;
Agency, institutional context to act, partnerships; Window
of opportunity; Social-ecological component

24. T-Lab:Transformation Laboratory
● Research question:
– How can theory on transformation be operationalized through
transdisciplinary interventions designed to foster collective agency?
● Hypothesis:
– By creating a space where processes of re-framing the system,
reflecting on the individual and group capacities take place and
creating relationships based on trust –meaningful social
relationships.
● Objective:
– To explore the conditions favourable for the emergence of individual
and collective agency to address a wicked sustainability challenge.

25. T-Lab:Transformation Laboratory
● Participants:
– Farmers -Chinamperos
– Urban irregular settlers
– Academics

26. T-Lab:Transformation Laboratory

27. T-Lab:Transformation Laboratory
Total surface area: 118 km2 (8
% of the total Mexico City area)

28. T-Lab:Transformation Laboratory
● Since pre-hispanic times, Xochimilco has supplied food &
water
● Rapid desiccation in 20th century
● 1950 all water artificially supplied from treated wastewater
● Recognition - importance of wetlands in sustainable city
functioning: Flood regulations, livelihoods, ecosystem
services in general.
● Considered one of the most diverse and productive
agricultural systems known to date.

29. T-Lab:Transformation Laboratory
Urban sprawl 1950-2000

30. T-Lab:Transformation Laboratory
● Area: 12,517.8 ha. 20% is urban soil and 80% soil of
conservation (21.3% is the Natural Protected Area;
58.3% is conservation land, including rural
communities).
● Declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site - 1987
● Ramsar site no. 1363 “Sistema lacustre ejidos de
Xochimilco y San Gregorio Atlapulco” - 2004
● Natural Protected Area (Área Natural Protegida con
carácter de Zona de Conservación Ecológica “Ejidos de
Xochimilco y San Gregorio Atlapulco”) - 2006

31. Xochimilco’s critical case of solastalgia
and sense of loss
● The loss of the
ecosystem, farming
traditional practices, and
the aesthetics of
Xochimilco were themes
always present during
our T-Lab.
● To some extent, this
sense of loss was also
shared by urban settlers.
Ovaciones, April 14, 2018 https://goo.gl/WnjVb3

32. Xochimilco’s critical case of solastalgia
and sense of loss
● 3 values:
– Self-sufficiency
– Identity
– Landscape
aesthetics
Photos by Marisa Mazari

33. Xochimilco’s critical case of solastalgia
and sense of loss
● Participants relate the loss of these aspects:
– Low self-esteem
– Depression
– Alcoholism
– Anxiety

34. Xochimilco’s critical case of solastalgia
and sense of loss
● Our argument is that the experience referred by
the participants in the T-Lab is linked to 2
factors:
– Alienation from the place.
– Alienation from their own agency.

35. Xochimilco’s critical case of solastalgia
and sense of loss
● Our argument is that the experience referred by
the participants in the T-Lab is linked to 2
factors:
– Alienation from the place.
– Alienation from their own agency.

36. Xochimilco’s critical case of solastalgia
and sense of loss
● Alienation from the place due to top-down policies:
– The place has systematically been taken away from its
inhabitants.
– Historically Xochimilco has been subjected to Mexico City: Food
and Water but for some time there was enough for everybody.
– Population has never been part of urban planning and
development.
– Tourism is an extraneous force that inhabitants cannot control.
– Many ecological projects have been implemented despite
residents and farmers. E.g. introduction of carp fish.

37. Xochimilco’s critical case of solastalgia
and sense of loss
● Alienation from the place due to top-down
policies:
– People is simply not part of the plan of the region,
either they were not part of the planning process.
– Neither they are part of the future of the place.
– The place do not belong to them.

38. Xochimilco’s critical case of solastalgia
and sense of loss
● Alienation from their own agency:
– Events at different scales:
● The implementation of policies
– i.e, introduction of carp fish;
● Practices and use of the place at regional scale
– i.e. using the wet land as a deposit for construction debris;
● Immigration and irregular urbanization
– Wastewater in the channels
● Intensive farming
– Use of pesticides and agrochemicals

39. Xochimilco’s critical case of solastalgia
and sense of loss
● Alienation from their own agency:
– Stakeholders identify the causal factors of Xochimilco as
exogenous, although they cannot pinpoint exactly what or
who are those causes.
– Agency drive that is changing Xochimilco is somewhere else
but in themselves.
– Power structures and the current socio-economic and
political system seems to be acting and reaffirming this
situation all the time.
– The sense of loss and despair, as well as the sense of lack
of agency, is caused by a constant process of alienation.

40. Xochimilco’s critical case of solastalgia
and sense of loss
● The reasons behind:
– Xochimilco’s degradation is a wicked problem, there is
simply no unique cause behind it.
– Degradation is systemic and it happens at every possible
level:
● It is cause by the construction industry and its alliances with the
organized crime,
● It is degraded by the absence of Law enforcement due to political
reasons, and
● It is also degraded by the chinamperos non-sustainable practices
or irregular settlers throwing wastewater to the channels.

41. Xochimilco’s critical case of solastalgia
and sense of loss
● The reason behind:
– From our phenomenological and 4E perspective degradation
of the environment has two important implications:
● Traditional” affordances are disappearing, that is, that the
opportunities for action that emerge from the interaction between an
agent skills and habits and the properties of the environment have
started fading away.
● Affordances disappear because the properties of the environment
are constantly degraded.
● E.g., agrochemical pollution in the water in the channels may pollute
the soil of chinampas preventing from certain traditional farming
practices to be executed

42. Xochimilco’s critical case of solastalgia
and sense of loss
● The reason behind:
– If environmental features disappear, then
affordances fade away and psychological and
socio-cultural skills and habits are irrelevant and
ineffective.

43. Xochimilco’s critical case of solastalgia
and sense of loss
If affordances are not there to allow habits to be
enacted, the relationship with the environment
becomes meaningless: i.e., nothing that I do,
turns in the way I expect and in the way that I was
taught.

44. Xochimilco’s critical case of solastalgia
and sense of loss
The degradation of the environment, the
disappearing of affordances, and the irrelevance
of skills and habits represent the end of a life-
world and the alienation of our own agency.

45. T-Lab
Mark Fisher argued that the capitalist system
works to naturalise itself as the only way to go.
Moreover, “its ideological purpose is to forestall
any imagination of a different future . . .” (Meagan
Day 2018).

46. Xochimilco’s critical case of solastalgia
and sense of loss
When the links get broken (affordances), and
when most or all links are broken, there is no
other way than to think that the way things are,
are meant to be that way: There are no pathways!
The individual has been alienated from its own
agency.

47. Xochimilco’s critical case of solastalgia
and sense of loss
● Examples:
– Nothing new has been tried since the 1970’s.
– There are many groups working in the area with
minimal impact –on the rural or the urban repeating
the same formula over and over again-.
– Many work locally but are affected globally.
– Beliefs mismatch with actions.

48. T-Lab
● In retrospective:
– By reframing the system and agency we tried to:
● Identify new or previously not seen contexts with
affordances that would allow skills and habits to be
enacted
– And by doing this,
● Re-allocating agency back to it the participants as well as
to reconnect with the environment meaningfully.

49. T-Lab
● This implied the use of
different methods.
– These tools supported
re-framing as well as
processes of reflexivity

50. T-Lab
● Results
– Co-created interest in “building bridges” by recognizing that there
is shared socio-ecological 'destiny'.
– Engagement for a new collaborative project among core
participants based on the idea of exploring new pedagogy aiming
at creating bridges and community between the two worlds, with
water as the connector.

51. T-Lab
● Insights
– Reframing
● Agency re-allocation (from exo to endo).
● Problem domain: shift in discourse/narrative - more systemic,
affective view/understanding, owning the problem domain.
– New reciprocal empathy among chinamperos and urban
residents towards both sides precarious life.
– New connections and collaboration among participants.
– The participant’s realisation that T-Lab was a space of
experimentation and for the construction of social fabric.

52. Conclusions
● The sense of loss and despair result from not
being able to connect effectively with the
environment.
● Missing affordances that support a Life-world
may lead to a feeling of being trapped.
● T-Lab may have contributed to the identification
of new affordances that would open-up possible
pathways of action for some people of
Xochimilco.

53. Thank you!
Email: jmario.siqueiros@iimas.unam.mx
Twitter: @jmsiqueiros