Through Participatory Action Research, the Instituto Latinoamericano de Agroecología (IALA, Latin American Institute of Agroecology) in Mexico is turning territorial knowledge into tools for education, community autonomy, and advocacy for public policies that recognize agroecology as a strategy to address the climate crisis.
For Mexico’s rural communities, the agricultural cycle is not governed by the Gregorian calendar. Planting and harvesting dates have been shaped over generations by the seasons, lunar cycles, equinoxes, and observation of the Milky Way.
Communities mark the closing and opening of these cycles through rituals, festivals, and traditional foods. February 2 is one example. The date, which coincides with the Catholic celebration of the Virgin of Candelaria, also marks, for many communities, the time to bless seeds. During the ritual, offerings are prepared: rosemary to protect crops from extreme weather and pests, and maize — a cornerstone of Mexican food systems — to ask for a good harvest.
In rural territories, this celebration represents much more than an expression of religious syncretism. It is a practice of resistance and sovereignty. During these gatherings, farmers exchange native seeds, strengthen systems of barter, and defend local varieties against the expansion of genetically modified seeds.
“Knowledge is alive in communities and in the practices of rural families, together with local itinerant educators. These practices sustain collective work, celebrate cultural identities, and support the defense of territory,” explains Álvaro Salgado Ramírez of the Latin American Institute of Agroecology in Mexico (IALA Mexico).
Ancestral knowledge as a tool for climate resilience
For generations, communities have read signs in their territories — the moon, the stars, the wind, the behavior of insects — to anticipate changes in the weather and decide when to plant. These observations go hand in hand with ancestral practices such as the milpa — in which maize, beans, and squash are cultivated together in a mutually supportive, balanced system — along with soil conservation techniques that retain moisture during droughts and the careful saving of native seeds. In the context of the climate crisis, this knowledge and practices have taken on even greater importance.
Yet these knowledge systems and the peasant economy itself face multiple pressures. According to IALA Mexico, the crisis has deepened over recent decades due to the effects of trade liberalization policies, the expansion of extractive megaprojects, the presence of organized crime, forced displacement, and an education system that has historically excluded much of the worldview and knowledge of Indigenous peoples.
Family farming accounts for 81.3% of Mexico’s agricultural units, but occupies only 13.8% of the country’s agricultural land, according to data cited by the World Bank. This distribution reflects the deep inequalities affecting Mexico’s rural areas.
Although Mexico has taken important steps to protect native maize — from the 2020 Federal Law for the Promotion and Protection of Native Maize to the March 2025 constitutional reform that bans the planting of genetically modified maize — civil society organizations point to a continued gap in public policies that explicitly recognize agroecology as a strategy for climate resilience and for strengthening local food systems.
This is where participatory action research (IPA is its Spanish acronym) plays a central role. Since 2024, IALA Mexico has led research as part of the Agroecology Fund-supported IPA-Global initiative, with the aim of developing epistemological and curricular approaches to the food systems of communities within IALA’s territorial networks, as tools for climate and policy advocacy.
To organize this knowledge, “we proposed creating a climatic, agricultural, community, or territorial cycle known as agro-festive cycles,” explains Omar Giraldo of IALA Mexico.
“These calendars bring together agricultural practices, lunar cycles, community seeds, and festivals, along with knowledge for dealing with agronomic problems and climate anomalies”.
As IALA participants put it, “the territory is the teacher, and learning happens in dialogue with it.”
“We reaffirm our commitment to the collective construction of a political-pedagogical project based on the leadership of our peoples, the recovery and sharing of our knowledge, and the creation of teaching and learning processes that enable young people to shape a future in their territories.”
— Excerpt from the Declaration of the Cuenca de la Independencia, January 2025
Education built from within communities
Founded in 2022, IALA Mexico is a collaboration of peasant organizations and networks of Indigenous communities that organized training in community agroecology, led and managed by farmer organizations themselves. Today, it brings together 23 peasant organizations across 45 municipalities in 10 states of Mexico. It is made up of 12 territorialized IALAs, a decentralized network of field schools that composed IALA Mexico’s Pedagogical Policy Commission (PPC), with representatives from each regional organization across five biomes. Rather than a central campus, learning takes place in the territories themselves: in plots, home gardens, forests, and community assemblies.
Using participatory action research methods, IALA documented knowledge and practices that remain alive across different territories. The process included the development of 11 inventories of agroecological knowledge and agro-festive cycles, as well as an analysis of their contribution to addressing climate-related challenges.
“Each process is different because it has its own social and historical conditions. We aim to design training programs in community agroecology, develop case studies, and then incorporate them into the Shadow Report, generating knowledge that can support public policy advocacy,” explains Giraldo. The Shadow Reports assess the state of agriculture and public policy in each territory and are intended to open dialogue with policymakers.
But documentation was only the first step. The knowledge gathered from communities also became the basis for designing 18 community agroecology training programs, including university-level programs, curricular components for secondary education in Indigenous communities, and programs for intercultural schools.
In Oaxaca, IALA Didza Kieru is working with the Autonomous Communal University to create a Bachelor’s Degree in Communal Agroecology in Guelatao. In the Sierra Norte of Puebla, IALA OIT is developing a Community High School program certified by UAP, with a focus on Totonac ethno-agroecology. In the Sierra Tarahumara, IALA Somos la Semilla que Resiste is moving towards a Bachelor’s Degree in Community Agroecology with different areas of specialization. And in Quintana Roo, IALA Náaybi Lu’um has developed a training program that has become a reference point for a broad network of groups working on Mayan agroecology.
Eleven of the 12 territorial IALAs completed the first phase of their Participatory Action Research processes and systematized their findings, and all 12 presented proposals for training in community agroecology. Through this process, communities have expanded dialogue among some 223 local knowledge holders, educators, peasant farmers, and young people.
The participation of women and youth is particularly important to ensure that this knowledge remains alive and can respond to changing social and climatic conditions. Each IALA has formed a women’s liaison group, and the process seeks to move from designing actions for your people to thinking with them, in community.
From community knowledge to policy advocacy
IALA Mexico also aims to use these results to inform communities’ own internal governance systems and the regulations and statutes of peasant organizations, drawing on rights recognized in Article 2 of the Mexican Constitution (on Indigenous autonomy and self-determination), the International Labor Organization’s Convention 169, and the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Peasants and Other People Working in Rural Areas.
During the research process, representatives of smallholder organizations, Indigenous peoples, and territorial networks also held the National Agroecology Assembly of La Vía Campesina Mexico and IALA Mexico and developed two declarations: the Declaration of the Cuenca de la Independencia, in January 2025, and the Declaration of Lachivixa, in September 2026.
In these declarations, communities call for the recovery of their own food systems, recognition of the central role of women and youth, and stronger community-led responses to the climate crisis. “Recovering our food means recovering our territories,” the Declaration of Lachivixá states. It also affirms: “Without women, there is no agroecology.”
The journey continues
The experience of IALA Mexico, therefore, offers a concrete pathway: research with communities, recognize their knowledge, document and systematize it, turn it into educational processes, and use it as evidence for policy advocacy.
For this initiative, the journey continues. The next steps will be to launch 12 regional community agroecology training processes (2026-2027), carry out a national campaign on peasant food systems as a response to the food system crisis,, strengthen the participation of women, youth, and children, expand the exchange of knowledge and experiences, and continue connecting these lessons to advance policy advocacy and build more resilient territories in the face of the climate crisis. As IALA puts it, the territory remains the teacher.