Iokiñe Rodríguez

Iokiñe Rodríguez is a Venezuelan sociologist, with an M.Phil. in Environment and Development from the University of Cambridge, England, a Ph.D. in Development Studies from the University of Sussex, England and a post-doctorate from the Centre of Social Studies of Science at the Venezuela Institute of Scientific Research (IVIC). She has dedicated most of her professional life to the study of socio-environmental conflicts, with a special interest on politics of knowledge and indigenous peoples’ environmental knowledge systems. She has worked extensively in Canaima National Park, Venezuela as part of interdisciplinary and multi-institutional research teams studying environmental conflicts and helping to strengthen the capacity of the Pemon indigenous people to enter into dialogue about environmental change and sustainable development with other park actors. She has also carried out action research on local knowledge of fire with the Wapishana and Makuxi indigenous peoples in Guyana and works in close collaboration with Latin American Institutions seeking to develop a regional specific conflict transformation approach to environmental conflicts, focusing on issues of power, environmental justice, equity and intercultural dialogue. This last work had involved training, developing methodological and conceptual frameworks and assessing on-going experiences on environmental conflict transformation across the region. She is co-founder of Grupo Confluencias, a consortium of Latin American conflict resolution practitioners, researchers and institutions actively engaged for more than 10 years in their different countries developing processes of environmental conflict transformation, and who have been working together since 2005 in the development of a platform for deliberation, joint research, and training in this topic. Iokiñe is currently a Senior Research Fellow at DEV-UEA were she collaborates in the Conservation, Justice and Markets Project, coordinating research activities in Bolivia and Venezuela, and forms part of the Global Environmental Justice Group.