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The vulnerability of the Amazon has widely increased with the COVID-19 global pandemic and with the dismantlement of environmental protection policies in Brazil during the Bolsonaro administration. By contrast, local initiatives focusing on sustainable production, conservation, enhancing local people’s quality of life, and supporting a more inclusive economy have emerged throughout the region and are building resilience in face of these disruptions. They represent seeds for transformation towards more sustainable trajectories from the ground up. In this context, women play a significant role, but their actions and voices are poorly understood, studied, or even considered. In this article, we use a novel approach to engage and highlight women’s experiences by connecting decolonial and process-relational perspectives. Decolonial and process-relational thinking are closely linked in many ways, including in that they embrace difference as a mode of experiencing social-ecological relations. One particular aspect of this link is the shared focus on liminal thinking or thinking from the borders, what we call ‘betweenness’. In our decolonial praxis, we highlight women’s perspectives on their particular and diverse ways of life in the Amazon as they confront diverse pressures. To this end, we collaborated with 39 women from Santarém and neighboring towns in western Pará through participant observation, semi-structured interviews and facilitated dialogues. We discuss their perspectives on regional transformation, particularly the expansion of large-scale agribusiness around rural communities, and their understanding and responses to these changes. We reflect on the mutual learning experience resulting from the transdisciplinary engagement between researchers and collaborators.

1. Research on social-ecological systems (SES) has highlighted their complex and adaptive character and pointed to the importance of recognizing their intertwined nature. 2. Yet, we often base our analysis and governance of SES on static and independent objects, such as actors and resources which are not well suited to address complexity and intertwinedness. This bias, which is largely implicit, has its roots in substance ontologies that have influenced most of contemporary science. 3. This paper argues that it is useful to critically reflect on this ontological grounding and develop SES research from a process ontological perspective. 4. Key insights are that process ontological concepts such as process, event and possibility space are able to overcome the dichotomy between the social and the ecological and allow for a conceptualization of continuous change (dynamism) that enhances our understanding of SES as truly intertwined and complex systems. 5. This will enable SES researchers to conceptualize problems as well as corresponding solutions in novel ways which will ultimately support the development of novel governance approaches, from rethinking the aims of policies from managing people towards managing relations between and among people and the natural system. 6. To fully tap the potential which comes with a change in worldview towards a process ontology, changing research approaches and ways of abstracting are required.

Agricultural systems are important for the livelihoods and food security of millions of people. At the same time, these systems are increasingly interconnected across scales and face the challenge of responding to multiple, and coalescing types of environmental, social, and economic changes. Previous studies investigated such responses to changes placing the focus on farmers and farming communities. In this study, we investigate the connectivity of farming systems to markets with the aim to understand the role of social relationships across the supply chain to influence responses to multiple types of changes. To this end, we conducted interviews with actors across a fruit supply chain in the Western Cape, South Africa, connected to global and national markets, using a participatory network mapping method. The most important changes mentioned affecting the production and trade of fruit in this region included: droughts, climatic changes, changes related to the COVID-19 pandemic, and other social changes. We identified three types of responses to these changes: i) responses concerning the dynamics of trade relationships (e.g., changing or maintaining trade relationships); ii) responses based on changes at the individual level (e.g., changes in farm management); and iii) responses based on social relationships (collaboration, knowledge transfer, financial assistance, and marketing coordination). Building on these four types of social relationships, we found that different social networks mediate responses to changes. These social networks include actors internal and external to the supply chains operating within and across scales. Networks of collaboration, knowledge exchange, and financial assistance show a positive correlation, where actors with an export orientation engage in multiple social relationships that enable responding to changes. However, we found limited participation of local market actors in these networks, besides their role in responses based on marke