1. This study examines sustainable development from the cosmovisions of Indigenous Peoples and other Traditional Communities (IoTCs) in western Bahia, a region in the Brazilian savanna of the Cerrado. It adopts a feminist decolonial and post-development approach to address issues of epistemic violence.
2. Employing participatory arts-based research, this study incorporates poetic and thematic co-analysis using participant-voiced poetry. This approach centres on community voices and contextual narratives of co-production, as well as the presentation of findings.
3. Our analysis shows that their understanding of sustainability is deeply rooted in cultural identity, spirituality and traditional practices such as family farming and artisanal fishing. These practices highlight their relational and community-oriented ways of living, deeply entangled with nature.
4. While the communities recognised the strategic value of the sustainable development goals (SDGs) for communicating their practices to a global audience, they found the framework insufficient in capturing the relational and context-specific dimensions central to their understanding of sustainability. This suggests the need for a reinterpretation of the SDGs.
5. This study introduces a new use of decolonial analyses to highlight the limitations of applying global, linear development models to diverse local contexts, using the case of the SDGs. It advocates for policies that recognise the pluriversal nature of sustainability, actively include marginalised perspectives and critically challenge epistemic hegemony.
6. By advocating for a re-inhabitation of the SDGs, this research highlights the importance of integrating relational and context-specific understandings of sustainability, ensuring that global frameworks respect and embrace diverse cosmovisions and practices.

This paper examines transformations in social-ecological system through the process-relational perspective (PRP), using the concepts of the “real-possible,” the existing reality, and the “actual-virtual” potentials that exist beyond current hegemonic thinking and practices—framed within the Latin American feminist concept of Nepantla, which refers to a liminal space of transition, ambiguity, and transformation where multiple perspectives, identities, or worldviews intersect. Focusing on Western Bahia in the Cerrado, Brazil’s critical agricultural frontier facing intense sustainability challenges, this study underscores the importance of recognizing and integrating coexistent realities to enhance sustainability efforts. Over six months of fieldwork in the region, interacting and living with local actors, Indigenous Peoples and Traditional Communities, our research utilized the PRP approach, offering deep insights into the perspectives and experiences of diverse actors in Western Bahia. This strategy highlighted that the production of phenomena is the result of a simultaneous entanglement between the researcher, the researched, the context, the script, the data, and the process of conducting participatory action research. Furthermore, this study highlights the often-overlooked spiritual dimension vital for Indigenous Peoples and Traditional Communities, as it deeply shapes their ways of life and perspectives on sustainability. By engaging with relational ontologies, we contribute to the conceptualization of transformations as ongoing, performative, and continuously unfolding processes. Moreover, we highlight the novelty of our research by advancing relational methodologies that honor liminality as a generative space —where multiple worldviews coexist, collide, and compost into new possibilities. We argue that embracing ontological plurality is essential for nurturing radical transformations in contested places like Western Bahia.

The vulnerability of the Amazon has widely increased with the COVID-19 global pandemic and with the dismantlement of environmental protection policies in Brazil during the Bolsonaro administration. By contrast, local initiatives focusing on sustainable production, conservation, enhancing local people’s quality of life, and supporting a more inclusive economy have emerged throughout the region and are building resilience in face of these disruptions. They represent seeds for transformation towards more sustainable trajectories from the ground up. In this context, women play a significant role, but their actions and voices are poorly understood, studied, or even considered. In this article, we use a novel approach to engage and highlight women’s experiences by connecting decolonial and process-relational perspectives. Decolonial and process-relational thinking are closely linked in many ways, including in that they embrace difference as a mode of experiencing social-ecological relations. One particular aspect of this link is the shared focus on liminal thinking or thinking from the borders, what we call ‘betweenness’. In our decolonial praxis, we highlight women’s perspectives on their particular and diverse ways of life in the Amazon as they confront diverse pressures. To this end, we collaborated with 39 women from Santarém and neighboring towns in western Pará through participant observation, semi-structured interviews and facilitated dialogues. We discuss their perspectives on regional transformation, particularly the expansion of large-scale agribusiness around rural communities, and their understanding and responses to these changes. We reflect on the mutual learning experience resulting from the transdisciplinary engagement between researchers and collaborators.