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Building on reinvigorated scholarly debates on the concept of value, this paper examines forms of valuation that coexist with and challenge those typically associated with capitalist natures. Based on archival, ethnographic, and interview data, we analyze a historical case of the Venezuelan Society of Speleology (SVE) that since 1967 has been exploring and mapping the country's caves. Its results are published in a national cave survey that the group manages. Not only is each cave entry the representation and materialization of the group's volunteer efforts. Each is also part of a relational regime of valuation by which all caves are worth mapping. The survey's classificatory logic not only transforms underground value, it also acts as boundary object bringing together diverse actors and promoting the SVE's collective ethos, at least in theory, of valuing all members. The survey is the fulcrum of distinct regimes of valuation, wherein value and values are two sides of the same coin. The spaces where these value/s are enacted matters, suggesting the critical contributions that geographers can make in understanding the spatial qualities that contribute to—or hinder—the materialization of certain regimes of valuation over others. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Throughout the process of transformation since 1999 known as the Bolivarian Revolution, harsh class and food system contradictions have unfolded in Venezuela, pitting against one another the forces of the pervasive consumer culture favoring imported foods, the input-intensive Green Revolution agricultural model that represents a state-led push toward food self-sufficiency, and an emerging agroecological paradigm pushed forward by grassroots movements who have seized political openings through the largely supportive policy environment. The Bolivarian University of Venezuela, itself a product of the revolutionary process, founded the Program Degree in Agroecology (PDA) in 2004 to expand agroecological practices and knowledge, based on alternative pedagogical approaches. Over the next decade, over a thousand PDA graduates have come to occupy institutional spaces and productive projects in urban and rural areas, contributing to vertical and horizontal agroecological scaling. PDA graduates and educators play a key role in the growing movement of urban agriculture that confronts the economic crisis. The PDA has created key mediators in the form of human talent for territorializing agroecology and institutionalizing pro-peasant policy in Venezuela. As a political outlier, Venezuela is an important case for studying the strategies for territorializing what we refer to as socially committed, situated agroecology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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