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On a remote island in the South Pacific, the Lavongai have consistently struggled to obtain development through logging and commercial agriculture. Yet many Lavongai still long to move beyond the grind of subsistence work that has seemingly defined their lives on New Hanover, Papua New Guinea, for generations.

Following a long history of smaller-scale and largely unsuccessful resource development efforts, New Hanover became the site of three multinational-controlled special agricultural and business leases (SABLs) that combined to cover over 75 percent of the island for ninety-nine-year lease terms. These agroforestry projects were part of a national effort to encourage “sustainable” rural development by tapping into the growing global demand for agricultural lands and crops like oil palm and biofuels. They were supposed to succeed where the smaller-scale projects of the past had failed. Unfortunately, these SABLs resulted in significant forest loss and livelihood degradation, while doing little to promote the type of economic development that many Lavongai had been hoping for.

It is within this context that We Stay the Same grounds questions of hope for transformative economic change within Lavongai assessments of the inequitable relationships between global processes of resource development and the local lives that have become increasingly defined by the necessities and failures of these processes. Written in a clear and relatable style for students, We Stay the Same combines ethnographic and ecological research to show how the Lavongai continue to survive and make meaningful lives in a situation where their own hopes for a better future have often been used against them as a mechanism of a more distantly profitable dispossession.
 

Weaving a Fabric of Unity shares the story of FUNDAEC (the Foundation for the Application and Teaching of Science), a non-governmental organization found in Cali, Colombia in 1974, and highlights five decades of stories, learning, and insight from key individuals central to shaping its evolution. The book outlines FUNDAEC’s unique conceptual and methodological approach, which is focused on the releasing of human potentialities and the integration of theory and practice so that a population may carry out action and research related to its social, economic, and cultural life. Weaving a Fabric of Unity brings the reader on the journey of how the organization created one of Latin America’s most innovative curricula in rural development. It shares how FUNDAEC’s focus on raising up individuals and communities dedicated to the promotion of community wellbeing supported its efforts to organically scale over the last few decades. The program now reaches hundreds of thousands of students across Colombia, and is being adopted in over a dozen countries to support diverse populations working towards the collective realization of a dignified future.