Ecological pluriversality and convivial ecologies: a perspective on epistemological tensions in environmental sociology

This paper seeks to contribute to the broader debates in environmental sociology by proposing the framework of ecological pluriversality. Offered as a perspective, the framework is advanced not as an antidote to Northern theory but as a way of holding together challenges already animating the field in terms of relational epistemologies, more-than-human agency, and engagement with diverse knowledge systems without pan-Southern or pan-Indigenous essentialism. Environmental sociology has generated important internal critiques of nature–society dualisms, linear temporalities, and colonial legacies, yet these have not been consolidated into a single architecture capable of accommodating ontological multiplicity without collapsing into relativism. Drawing on Indigenous cosmologies, postcolonial ecological thought, and Southern relational epistemologies, particularly Arturo Escobar, Boaventura de Sousa Santos, and Mario Blaser, and placing these in dialogue with the multiple-modernities tradition, we develop convivial ecologies as an analytical category capturing relational, non-hierarchical human–environment interaction. We illustrate the framework by analysing the recent recognition of rivers as legal persons in New Zealand, Colombia, and India. We do not claim to resolve the field’s foundational debates; our contribution is integrative and generative, that honours the diversity of ecological worlds while retaining critical purchase on structural inequality and planetary crisis.