 No one to spill it on my computer and I know that's going to happen. So, yes. How's everybody doing doing well. Excellent. Good. I'd like just to begin with a few thank yous. I'd like to thank the organizers, the organizing committee of the conference for inviting me to land Academy and iOS fair transitions. Thank you for your invitation and your hospitality and for the privilege and pleasure of speaking with you here today and attending the conference. So, thanks to Rick and Marit and Neil who I've met prior to commencing today and thanks for all your work in your hospitality. And we have visitors from all over. I'm from many different continents, and I'd like to begin by acknowledging your efforts to come a long way. So, and thank you for your attendance and for enriching our conversations. I hope the next few days are productive and stimulating. But most importantly, I hope they're happy for all of us. In the following talk. Let me do a few things. I'll address the aim of the conference which is quote the joint challenge of finding ways to make transitions fair and inclusive for human and non human life. By speaking to a few of the five guiding questions set out for us by the organizers. How could transitions be made fair for both human and non human life. What role is there for land governance actors and formal and informal institutions who will have a seat at the table and what knowledges are taken into account. How will non human interests be represented and could transitions be a lever for promoting equity. In these questions, I'm going to set out three provocations for us to think way across the conference. These provocations are the first land is alive. The second land transition is freedom work. The third is just transformation is very versa. I come to these three provocations in due course, I offer them as a means to pluralize epistemological ontological political and ethical approaches to land, land governance, and land transitions. I come to the conference, not as a transitions experts, nor as a land governance experts. In our conversation this morning in our little circle we had 1618 people, and there's wonderful expertise brought from students and scholars from community organizers from NGO participants so I'm very much in your hands. My comments here are an outsider if you like looking in to see what happens in this conversation, and what if any thoughts might be useful from my own expertise and my own interests for you. I've written recently about the politics of global environmental governance. And I expressed a concern about the risks as I see them a global and earth governance rationales and decisions universalizing structures and power inherited from, and which continue to reproduce colonial legacies. My critique provoked a defensive and robust response from some quarters, and we had a back and forth in the journal. So you can read about it in the annals of the American Association of geographers which is one of our geographers main journals. And if you can't access the papers due to the privatizations of knowledge. Just ask me and I'll be happy to give them to with this slide, I posed similar questions to those that I raised for in these in the papers on the global environmental governance. Those similar questions here for land governance and fair transitions. These are questions you're, you are all exploring in your conference, who sets the terms of what counts as inclusion, inclusion and transition into what. And are the institutions and imaginaries within which diverse actors and being included fit for purpose, or do dominant institutions and imaginaries reproduce many of the problems. Land justice and fairness seek to overcome. If they do reproduce forms of land injustice and unequal governance, then what imaginaries and institutions might be necessary for politics of land. We're familiar with the problem. Transition is across the threshold of power and into an institution, which is what transition means, etymologically, a movement across the threshold into a pre existing adaptive structure or form. Transition is into a nation state and intergovernmental organization or a framework for regulatory cooperation, like the UN or a bank or framework or land state redistribution scheme, or corporate apparatus predicated on defensive sovereignty of property, or extractivist economies of growth. The transition may be problematic. It may intend to be inclusive, but it may also not be sufficiently transformative for a precarious plan. Or it may set the conditions for what counts as inclusion, without understanding fundamental differences across life ways and needs. Let's put it in terms of question three of the conference, who will have a seat at the table. But the table itself is problematic. Then transition isn't about environmental justice, or about ecological thriving, or about political accountability and responsibility. Concern about the politics of inclusion is mirrored in contemporary efforts by post colonial settler states to incorporate indigenous worlds into their governance apparatus. This is an example of contemporary Canada where I am from originally in Canada recognition and reconciliation for past and present bronze is normatively framed by dominant political institutions. Reconciliation is about recognizing a version of indigeneity that can be imagined and known by a state colonial framework. The traditional framework of the state of the state seeks to reconcile past and present bronze by transitioning indigeneity into a settler imaginary of Canada. The movement is across the threshold of a colonial apparatus, which leaves the state adopted, but largely unchanged. But indigeneity and indigenous relationships to people and land are profoundly changed. Canada's colonial history requires reading contemporary approaches to reconciliation against the dispossession of native or indigenous people's lives and lands settler colonial myths and tropes about land in Canada have been long predicated on Terra Nullius, the triumphant, the triumph of nationhood over forbidding wilderness and capitalist developments or improvements. These rationales govern the continued violence of dispossession. As we know, however, such stories displace indigenous relationships with land and place in the context of reconciliation, operative normative frameworks preclude the transform the transformation of national settler imaginaries. In this influential book, Red Skin White Masks, the Yellow Nines DNA Scholar of the Land of Poletar puts it this, Canada's legal and political understanding of reconciliation renders indigenous assertions of nationhood consistent with the state's unilateral assertion of sovereignty over native people's lands. In other words, the terms of what counts as reconciliation in our context, perhaps transition into inclusive governance are defined by the colonial state. Dispossession of land remains the goal of settler colonialists. The point, however, is at the center of indigenous place-based practices. Coulthard and numerous other indigenous scholars whose work has come enormously to the fore in contemporary scholarship argues that indigenous struggles are struggles, not only for land, but also deeply informed by what the land as a mode of reciprocal relationship, which is itself informed by place-based practices and associated forms of knowledge. This is a contrast about living our lives in relation to one another and our surroundings in a respectful, non-dominating and non-exploitative way. Coulthard terms this ethical framework provided by place-based land practices and associated forms of knowledge, grounded normativity. In acting literally well up from the land relations, the land itself is the legal guide. Mary Graham, a Kongu Mary scholar from Australia puts it simpler still, the land is the law. Hers is what we in the Western philosophical tradition would call an ontological claim. Land itself is the guide. Frameworks for governing are not applied to land. The framework is the land and we inhabitants within land look to land for our normative grounds. In contrast to Western concepts of land, land from an indigenous perspective is not merely a resource available for human use. In preparing for the conference I read up on how some land use transitions literatures define land. A recent 2021 review by Long et al from over 20 years of land use transition research from 1987 to 2020, which analyzed 8,564 records defines land as follows. The spatial carrier of anthropogenic activities, the most basic production factor of socioeconomic development, and the most fundamental survival resource for urban and rural residents. Compare this to the characterization of land for indigenous peoples is articulated by Coulthard. Land occupies an ontological framework for understanding relationships. Or consider pre scholar and geographer and show days characterization of land. Land is an animate being a relative of food provider, and a teacher of law and governance to whom we are accountable. Both Coulthard and David draw on an echo the famous Zeus scholar by Deloria junior who argued that Western philosophical conceptions of meaning and value differed in a fundamental respect. The famous world views Deloria argue hold their lands places as having the highest possible meaning, and all their statements are made with this reference point in mind. Most Western societies by contrast he argued tend to derive meaning from the world and historical or developmental terms, thereby placing time as the marriage of essential importance. The philosophical differences become crucial when negotiating frameworks and processes for governance between indigenous and indigenous worlds. There's a terrain of incommensurability to the epistemic and ontological terms of discussion. In other words, we can't make the world the same, we can't make them comparable, because they're fundamentally income. Their imaginaries and institutions cannot be made for the same. Let's illustrate this by returning to the metaphor of the table for a moment. Recall one of our conference questions who will have a seat at the table and what colleges are taken into account. The question of thus far posed in the context of transition as reconciliation is, what if the table itself is problem. Inclusion around a faulty table is still a faulty table. We assume that the table is an apt model for negotiating questions of transition and governance. It certainly is the dominant model for how we in the global north. Think about negotiation and discussion regarding governance and transitions of energy, land, planets, and the like. But there are other models. Palavres are a key socio political institution in pre colonial and contemporary post colonial Africa. Palavres are an assembly where issues are freely debated and important decisions concerning communities are taken. The purpose of the Palaver is to resolve latents and overt conflicts in certain highly specific situation. These decisions usually gather under a Palaver tree where everyone has the right to speak and air their grievances or those of their group. Palaver and English today has a pejorative meaning that's come out of this original meaning. The English word Palaver refers to an unnecessarily drawn out trouble or bother something involving much TDM talk or negotiation. Every word Palaver drives from the West African Portuguese pigeon Palavera, which referred to making a dialogue or a conference between tribes people and traders. In West African English it colloquially refers to a dispute or a quarrel that requires arbitration. The arbitration arbitration happens in a lot of reports a lot of houses a lot of rooms are under Palaver trees. Palavres are institutions which are or have been practiced in multiple Sun Saharan West and Central African countries. And if we're she the rights of Palavres, they are spaces for open communication by which persons are integrated into the life and expectations of their communities. These spaces can be physical. That's when community members gather under the ancestral tree, but more importantly it's the psychological and social space for open communication. Masamba Apollo calls it speech that liberates within the Palaver discourse was thus raised into a system of jurisdiction and government. Palaver is a practice that supports a community as well being, even through difficult times, making it an excellent resource for pursuing successful post conflict resolution and recognition. Palaver is the tables to make a point about institutional imaginaries for governance and decision making. And make it also to foreground the relational context within which dialogue and discussion about governance is made. The relational space of the Palaver is a practice, as Flirkeshi denotes, that grounds itself often quite literally living relations with the land. The tree is often at the center of the place building work of the Palaver. The tree too is a participant in the discussion. It may be an ancestral tree, one that's been there for a long time, but also this is crucial, it may be kin, a literal ancestor. The tree is also a gathering agents of shade, comfort, support and sustained spatial presence, a dynamic of space as well as time, within which people gather as a part of the grounding relations from which norms are learned, debated and decided. Take the transition governance imaginary to the institution of the Palaver and ask the question, who will gather at the Palaver and what knowledges are taken into account. I guarantee you will have a different answer or set of answers than if we invoke the imaginary of the table at a table. If we actually go and sit under a tree and see possibly for days, in your rubah, a car or a bula, and listen and everyone present gets a chance to speak, what imaginaries and frameworks might emerge. The outcomes may not be necessarily better or worse, but they'll be different because they will have been shaped by how cool tar remember trained land as an ontological framework for understanding relationships. Which brings me to my first provocation. Land is alive. It's not particularly provocative. Of course it's alive. There are trees, animals, insects, air, oceans, all living or filled with life. But what if, unlike how we often approach land in dominant northern political narratives, where land is an abstraction made of separate living parts. What if we approach land as a living whole, much like as a beehive is a super organism. In a beehive, the organism of land is not a community of individual parts, but an interacting and intra dependent whole of which humans are simply apart. How many of us particularly debates in the global north about land governments or transition narratives foreground this presumption and principle this imaginary for when asking about where to begin with the politics of land. Do we begin with the characterization provided by Daedalus that land is an animate being a relative of food provider and a teacher of law and governance to whom we're accountable. Do we begin with the premise that land is as many indigenous people and scholars are doing King. What would happen if we began an approach to land governance with kinship as the organizers and principal. These indigenous and non indigenous scholars have recently asked this question. The approach to the non human or more than human as King comes partly in response to the enormous shift in recent decades within the social sciences and humanities. It's sometimes called post humanism, sometimes materiality studies, or broadly the ontological term, that is, return to the ways by which human and non human sociality is a product of relational agencies, the forces of human and non human action and interaction that make up complex assemblages of social life. And ontological terms have over the past 30 or so years begun to question move quite far along questioning humanists are anthropocentric understandings of what humans are. They questioned humanist method are the idea that human share a universal nature or a species identity and essential humanity that we are exceptional and radically different from other elements. On the one hand, and from machines on the other, and that humans are ultimately free subjects who can determine around history, above the rest of nature. The enormous explanatory and analytic shift in critical scholarship seeks to de center liberal humanist arrogance. The reasons for the shift are many. They're primarily about challenging human exceptionalism, but they're also about challenging the individualist notion of rational agency, the nature culture binary that sits at the heart of modern humans exceptionalism. The introduction of liberal humanism and crucially the continued ways by which liberal narratives of reason and freedom are themselves built from modern practice that raises the colonialist exclusion. Liberal humanism after all depends on these colonialist exceptionalisms that raise certain kinds of human to those counted as rational or democratic. To recognize that such narratives and rationales would sit for better or worse at the heart of liberal democratic governments transitions are the same governments transitions and frameworks that underpin dominant modern political discussions with land. In contrast, relational approaches argue instead for how, in the words of the famous Jamaican scholar Sylvia winter. The human is meted are winning a hybrid being, both by us and locals, or as I've come to recently defined in bias and myth. John says, by largely ontology and sociogeny together. Most human and ontological accounts which challenge the falsity and negative effects of the nature culture binary positive instead of what's called a relational ontology, a scheme magic of which you can now see on the screen. Consider how each of these models produced different imaginaries of land. On the left, you can see a Euro modern ontological schematic that begins in a separation of nature and culture. This is the model that dominates contemporary political approaches to environmental governance, because in part it dominates contemporary institutional politics. On the right is a relational schema, where in no grounding separation exists between nature and culture. Instead of flat ontology was not beginning by accepted. Land on the left is the thing separate from human reason. On the right, land would be the relation out of which humans emerge as one feature among many. On the left, land would be subject to politics or culture. On the right, things like songs and tools and stories are forces that define on an equal footing with rocks and plants and wind, how humans become self conscious. On the left, the question of politics is contained within a debate between culture a culture B and culture C. This approach is best universally applied to nature or land. We see this all the time in shifts in political cultures, different political dynamics, and how that's going to affect land governance decision. On the left, culture is used to exclude certain people and ideas as closer to nature and therefore basic. On the right, rationales, immersion from the plural relationships are used to explain hierarchies of meaning and value. What you need to imagine in this diagram is that on the right, the interactions are dynamic and moving in their complexity. So they're not fixed that they're constantly dynamic and moving. On the left, nature and culture are also dynamic. But the modern world view begins with their conceptual separation as their starting point. Contemporary posthumous and ontological accounts that cite as their touchstones Western European philosophical traditions and theories. And theorists like Bruno Latour and Gilles Deleuze and Donna Haraway and others. Do not typically, although Haraway might be the exception, posit relational worlds as kin. They may recognize that the tree at the center of the Palaver and acts what emerges as political, but they don't normally go as far as claiming the tree to be a literal hence, or a member of the family. These indigenous scholarships have come forward to critique the ways relational ontology is derived in Western frameworks, often reproduced colonial logic. Simply by their exclusion of indigenous ways of knowing indigenous scholarships argue that indigenous peoples have almost begun in and with relationality. As that is what the West we call it's ontological starting points. Why not they ask, begin with indigenous worlds, instead of Western ontological accounts. So to return to our Palaver tree is the space for addressing how to make transitions there and includes. Let's look at the problem through the question for the conference. How will non human interests be represented. What are now sitting around the tree and how can they be heard. Perhaps if we begin by translating a somehow separate domain of the land or nature more broadly into the terms of culture, we do a certain practical or conceptual violence to the non human life. Nature or land is universalized in this model, as an other to culture and culture is similarly limited as the other to nature. We begin in the cessificities by which particular place relations constitute meaning with particular relationships and crucially with knowledge systems and people expert in this place. Then non human interests are not represented as something separate from human understanding. They become rather co immersion with the relationships of land and its meanings themselves. We begin with the assumption that non human interests are somehow separate from human interests, as though human interests are exceptional to the interests of plants or jaguars, then representing them is a problem. But if we begin in the complexity of a relational place where interests are co emergent dynamics of becoming together. And representing interest is not about understanding separate beings, as though their interests are distinct from one another, but about the relations that make up flourishing of the place, the land, which is make up the politics of driving. So here I come to my second provocation. Land transition is freedom work. How do we do this relational politics. So before you're drawing on the work of post human and indigenous scholarship that relational approaches to land understand land itself as the source of politics and the guide of governments. The work of living well, which, after all, is what the work of politics is all about derives from cultivating an attention to the constitutive relationships that encourage thriving relationships that in the words of abolition, referred Ruth Wilson Gilmore, make life precious. As Wilson Gilmore often says, for life is precious, life is precious. Our political responsibilities she argues are to care for and to build sustaining worlds that literally make us. What relational approaches advocate is a politics of connection to living relations, rather than, if you will, a freedom from connection and responsibility, or an attempt to prioritize political principle for political practice. The political work of freedom, equity, equity, sustainability and sovereignty for Wilson Gilmore, as it is also for indigenous approaches is to build place based relationships from grounded normative practices. Place for Gilmore is more than a locality. It entails the entire ensemble of people in the bonds among them. Consider again the relationality of the Palaver as a governance place to build such a column rather than the perhaps more conceptual and remove table as a metaphor for guiding approaches to institutionalize government. The responsibility to the physical building a place relationships from the tree in the center is credited on care and thrive for the trees relationship is grounded in that particular land is placed and across in such a time. Wilson Gilmore phrases this positive place building work in her dictum freedom is a place. The freedom is not the remote for her freedom is not the liberation from constraints that the responsibility to carry. Wilson Gilmore has long been known as one of the chief advocates of prison abolition in the United States, but also elsewhere. While it is about the removal of carceral geographies like prisons jails and surveillance and about opposing economies as abandonment fosters abolition through world building abolition geography challenge into the general notion that territory is alienable and exclusive. It demands that we attend to reciprocal relationships between people and land. It's an abundance politics that emerges from specific relations that build the politics from specific places. Recently within geography, the concept of abolition ecology which evolved from Gilmore's work has theorized the ensemble of human and more than human relations. Hayden and Ibarra right about recognizing deeper racialized ways that nature has always been unevenly socially produced through relations with Empire settler colonialism and racial capitalism. Abolition ecology entails understanding the ways that reciprocal man relations are often synonymous with liberation struggles and as such about building intuitions and processes that are explicitly focused on the political ecological imperative of access to fresh air clean water sufficient land, milleration of toxic chemicals and beyond. That's the effort is to counter racialized and plantation logics that can be reproduced and dominant institutionalized approaches to governance and transition. We might read the flowering of black land and agro ecological collectives in North America as examples of these place world forms of grounded normative practice in the effort of liberation. What is interesting about these forms of land transition that oppose the segregation of land from black and racialized people is that while joined up there very much of politics of land from below from actually garden from actually growing. These are examples of on the land or on the ground change rather than institutional change for people are turning to real forms of practical change. Similarly, land back is an indigenous led decentralized and ground up movement across North America that seeks sovereignty and indigenous governance and returning people to land relations and for finding their place in the systems of life. As Beverly Jacobs an indigenous law professor at the University of Windsor explains indigenous laws are always about responsibilities from them to land. It's constitutive relationships and reciprocates both land back and black lead agro ecological initiatives are examples of urban and rural land based place worlds for bottom up freedom work constitutes the normative political ground for governance and transition. So this is an example we might take one that we mentioned briefly in the session this morning with the land in our names lion, which is a UK based organization. The inequities of land tenure in the UK or 50% of the land in the UK is owned by 1% of the population and 99% of the land is farmed by Roman that is farmed is farmed by white farmers, and they're seeking to use this organization as a means to address reparation and reparation responsibilities through growing food. And so beginning in a different kind of place, then through the institutional apparatus is a kind of policy chip or policy chip. So I come to my third provocation to finish. Just transition requires pluriversal transformation. If we begin as I've been arguing with specific grounded place based land relations and they're human ensembles as practical and political geographies with your eyes and situated land governance and just land transition. Then we're facing with the political power. Place worlds do not seek to rationalize a universal approach to the judicating just transition. They emerge from specific ensembles and situated relations. All are focused on building flourishing and thriving for life is precious life is precious and breathing as a place. They're not concerned with top down institutionalized frameworks for land quality. What we're faced with and said is a plurality of place roads, a world of many. In the terms of decoloniality were faced with the pluriverse. Pluriversality is a concept that's been around for some time and decolonial scholarship pluriversality renounces the conviction that the world must be conceived as a unified totality, in order for it to make sense. Pluriversality views the world instead as an interconnected diversity, a world in which many worlds coexist. So notion and decolonial analysis differences as I've suggested already are not simply a function of cultural perspectives on one world that lies outside us, but are constitutive enactments of multiple material worlds that human and non human entanglements making perform the pluriversal argument is not abstract or esoteric. It's a practical one that contests the reductive extract of this logic of contemporary world territorialization. Its ontological emphasis resists what John law terms the one world world, a world that privileges itself as the arbiter of explanation and reproduction and which rendering itself legitimate precludes the possibility of other horizons and ways of life. An analytic option here emphasizes ontological plurality of land, so as to recognize the many different enactments and sets of relations that constitute possibilities of life. As John law writes, if we live in a single container world within a universe in which nature has a definite and natural form. You might imagine a liberal way of handling the power saturated encounters between different kinds of people and our interpretations of the world. But if we live instead in a multiple world of different enactments, if we participate in a pluriverse, then there will be there can be no overarching logic or liberal institutions diplomatic or otherwise to mediate between the different realities. Instead, there are contingent more or less local and practical engagements. And that's it. The ground of politics and action comes not from a removed ability to adjudicate or discriminate frameworks, but from the actual relations that constitute possibilities of lively. Care, flourishing, thriving, etc. The ground for just or fair relations is then a politics of so called is not then sorry is not then a politics of separation and decision. But the actual situated positions of living, breathing, eating, loving, disputing that come from earthbound from land ecologies of care. The fostering transformative relations of care is the political responsibility of land governments and just transition. And so I end maybe with a fourth provocation that came to me a few just this morning, where I was like I was thinking about transitions is the language of transition sufficient to meet the demands of a contemporary land politics. It's something it's just a bit more transformative. Is there a difference between the transition, when we shift the transition into institutions, or do we need something much more radical than the language, the transition can provide, and perhaps transformation is a different way of conceptualizing political responsibility. So I'll end there. Thank you very much for your attention in a sweaty. All right. I think there is.