By Taís Sonetti-González, Ana Paula Dutra de Aguiar, Fernanda Henn Souza de Oliveira, Rosivania Jesus Batista, Luciana F. C. Ferreira da Silva, Dentina Cruz da Silva, María Mancilla García, and Mairon G. Bastos Lima
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This study investigates how Indigenous Peoples and other Traditional Communities in Western Bahia, Brazil, understand and practise sustainability in their daily lives. Western Bahia is a region where rapid agricultural expansion, deforestation, and water use conflicts place significant pressure on local territories and lifestyles. For the communities involved in this research, sustainability is intertwined with how they relate to land and water, remember their ancestors, care for one another, and preserve traditional livelihoods such as artisanal fishing and agroecological farming.
Researchers and community members, including three women leaders who are co-authors of this article, collaborated over several workshops. These meetings combined storytelling, drawings, simple exercises to envision possible futures, and group discussions. Together, we discussed what has changed in their territories, what should be preserved, and what they hope for future generations. These activities fostered safe spaces to share experiences, concerns, and aspirations for their communities’ futures. Through poems and other artistic expressions, community members illustrated how spirituality, nature, and community life are deeply interconnected.
By listening to these expressions and discussing them together, we re-examined the global Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) from the perspective of the participating communities. The SDGs are a set of goals agreed upon by countries at the United Nations to guide action on issues such as poverty, hunger, water, and climate change. The communities’ contributions offer a different way of thinking about these goals from many top-down, indicator-focused approaches. They emphasise care, connection, memory, and justice as central to any meaningful understanding of “sustainable development”.
In this way, communities demonstrate that global sustainability efforts must be more inclusive and rooted in the knowledge, science, values, and daily realities of those most impacted by environmental and social injustices. The study emphasises the importance of making space for many different ways of understanding and coexisting with the Earth, as well as of seriously considering diverse forms of knowledge when determining how to create more sustainable futures.
Relational Thinking 