Everyday political geographies of community‐building: exploring the practices of three Zimbabwean permaculture communities

Permaculture is an approach to sustainable design thinking, agriculture, and community, as well as a globalized movement. This article explores how different practices and processes of permaculture have generated different political registers of “community,” at three permaculture sites in Zimbabwe. Speaking to recent online media that asks “Is permaculture political?,” as well as to the academic literature critiquing localized environmental initiatives as “postpolitical,” the article adopts a feminist political ecology (FPE) framework to discuss two modalities in which the geographies of community-building can be registered as political. First, I look at how subjectivities and intracommunity power relations have been reshaped through participatory practices of governance, taking on entrenched gender- and age-based power relations in particular. Second, comes the idea of community as a more-than-human ontology. An FPE analysis offers an original perspective on how permaculture has become actualized in the Zimbabwean context. The research approach built on Gibson-Graham's calls to engage performatively with examples of diverse economies and aimed to serve the efforts of these communities in a small way, by celebrating and documenting their activities and creating public media outputs. Contributing to the literature on permaculture, as well as to debates around community-based environmental movements, an FPE perspective frames these community-building efforts in terms of everyday political practices and performances. I conclude that while FPE draws attention to these everyday politics, permaculture practitioners actualize them and in doing so, make a much-needed contribution to cultivating, or “worlding” diverse, more-than-human economies.