Mountain social-ecological resilience requires transdisciplinarity with Indigenous and local worldviews.

Addressing the shocks of global crises requires that scientists, policymakers, and Indigenous Peoples and Local Communities work together to enable communities to withstand and adapt to disturbances. On the basis of our experiences in the Andes, we propose the '10-step cycle of transdisciplinarity' for designing projects to build social-ecological resilience in mountains.

Whose Knowledge, Whose Development? Use and Role of Local and External Knowledge in Agroforestry Projects in Bolivia.

Agroforestry often relies on local knowledge, which is gaining recognition in development projects. However, how local knowledge can articulate with external and scientific knowledge is little known. Our study explored the use and integration of local and external knowledge in agroforestry projects in Bolivia.

Knowledge and valuation of Andean agroforestry species: the role of sex, age, and migration among members of a rural community in Bolivia.

Background: Agroforestry is a sustainable land use method with a long tradition in the Bolivian Andes. A better understanding of people’s knowledge and valuation of woody species can help to adjust actor-oriented agroforestry systems. In this case study, carried out in a peasant community of the Bolivian Andes, we aimed at calculating the cultural importance of selected agroforestry species, and at analysing the intracultural variation in the cultural importance and knowledge of plants according to peasants’ sex, age, and migration.

Can Andean medicine coexist with biomedical healthcare? A comparison of two rural communities in Peru and Bolivia.

Background: It is commonly assumed that indigenous medical systems remain strong in developing countries because biomedicine is physically inaccessible or financially not affordable. This paper compares the health-seeking behavior of households from rural Andean communities at a Peruvian and a Bolivian study site. The main research question was whether the increased presence of biomedicine led to a displacement of Andean indigenous medical practices or to coexistence of the two healing traditions.

Distribution and transmission of medicinal plant knowledge in the andean highlands: a case study from peru and bolivia.

This paper presents a study of patterns in the distribution and transmission of medicinal plant knowledge in rural Andean communities in Peru and Bolivia. Interviews and freelisting exercises were conducted with 18 households at each study site. The amount of medicinal plant knowledge of households was compared in relation to their socioeconomic characteristics.