Initiatives and Resistance Towards Sustainable Development from Various Countries and Sectors of Society: Successes and Challenges

This session welcomes papers for presentation that describe and analyze initiatives, projects, or forms of resistance from grassroots, people's organizations (such as indigenous communities, workers, peasants, women, migrants), NGOs (non-governmental organizations) against extractivism, and environmental destructions caused by the global expansion of capitalism in various regions and countries of the world, especially in the Global South. Sustainability has economic, political, social and cultural dimensions and often people's forms of resistance address these various components bringing their demands for change on various levels of social transformation -- from the local, to national, to global. As well, their targets of collective actions may include various nodes or centers of power that can include local governments, national state bureaucracies, transnational corporations, international organizations. At times the people's resistance and initiatives are met with state violence from authoritarian neoliberal regimes that are more protective of the bureaucrat capitalist class whose economic interests are more aligned with global capitalism. Nonetheless their resistance persists attesting to the hope that there are sustainable and more just alternatives.