🌱 Deep Dive: From Citizens’ Assemblies to Soil Challenges

SoilTribes bootcamps go beyond technical knowledge; they are spaces where soil literacy meets existing soil policies, climate assemblies tackling soil-related challenges, and social movements experimenting with new models of stewardship and innovation. In this sense, the SOILTRIBES Bootcamp is not starting from scratch. It builds on the voices of citizens who, through assemblies across Europe, have already mapped the turbulences that threaten soils and pointed towards new pathways of care and resilience.

What Citizens Are Asking For

In France, citizens demanded an end to the artificialisation of soils and called for the crime of ecocide to be recognised in law. In Spain, the national assembly highlighted desertification, erosion, and the overuse of water in agriculture, urging strong regulation of irrigation and the recovery of native species. Catalonia’s assembly focused on cover crops and legumes to restore fertility, the creation of a land registry to bring idle soils back into production, and limits on urban expansion. In the UK, participants insisted on the restoration of peatlands and wetlands, alongside payments to farmers who store carbon in soils. In Mallorca, citizens confronted the direct pressures of tourism and land speculation, calling for regenerative agriculture, tax penalties on uncultivated land, and reforms of the territorial plan. Lisbon and Barcelona assemblies looked at the urban dimension: how to unseal pavements, create permeable soils, and transform streets, rooftops, and neighbourhoods into living infrastructures of resilience.

Taken together, these assemblies offer a shared agenda. Citizens consistently ask for soils to be protected and restored, for agriculture to shift towards agroecology and food sovereignty, for cities to become greener and more permeable, for water and soil to be governed together, and for data and incentives that make these commitments binding.

Challenges as Living Responses

The Bootcamp’s ten selected challenges can be read as living responses to these democratic demands. Educational gardens in Greece and eco-literacy programmes in Valencia echo the assemblies’ call for soil literacy in schools and communities. The project in Ancona to reclaim urban sealed soils is a direct translation of what French, Barcelona, Lisbon, and Mallorcan citizens demanded: an end to sprawl and a new era of permeability. Cover crops in Cluj, erosion barriers in Granada, and regenerative farming in Lower Silesia resonate with recommendations from Catalonia, Spain, the UK, and Mallorca to confront erosion and desertification through agroecology. Systemic projects such as the permaculture platform in the Etna Valley, the peri-urban hub in Málaga, or refugee-led soil stewardship in Kakuma extend assembly proposals for food sovereignty, access to land, and peri-urban regeneration. Even the Europe-wide prototype for soil data finds its grounding in assemblies that asked for transparent monitoring, carbon accounting, and governance tools strong enough to hold institutions accountable.

Clusters of Convergence

Seen in this light, the Bootcamp crystallises several clusters of convergence. Education and literacy form the cultural soil from which stewardship grows. Urban de-sealing responds to the need for climate-resilient cities. Regenerative agriculture provides shared answers to erosion and desertification. Food sovereignty links soil care with justice and democracy. And soil data creates the backbone for a new politics of accountability.

The Challenge of Implementation

Citizens’ assemblies on climate have been clear and ambitious in their recommendations. They have called for a halt to the artificialisation of soils, for regenerative agriculture, for the recovery of idle land, and for new models of food sovereignty. Yet translating these proposals into reality has proven difficult. Policies stall in parliaments, urban planning regulations are diluted, and farming subsidies often remain tied to the very models assemblies asked to reform. Even where laws exist, enforcement is inconsistent. The danger is that soil democracy becomes technified — reduced to carbon metrics, monitoring dashboards, or digital registries that track degradation without changing the underlying political economy of land use.

This tension between citizen imagination and institutional inertia is the space where SOILTRIBES Bootcamps intervene. They go beyond technical fixes, creating encounters where soil literacy is woven into existing soil policies, where assemblies’ proposals are stress-tested through experimentation, and where social movements bring in practices of stewardship that resist being reduced to data points.

Nadie atraviesa la región sin ensuciarse (2015), Regina José Galindo. Performance cited by Moran, Foto by Jorge Chirinos and Alan Gutierrez

Soil as a Commons, Democracy as Care

And yet, beyond Europe, other realities remind us of the unfinished work of citizen participation. In a recent interview, Azucena Morán pointed to the contradiction faced by many communities in the Global South: while they are often required to participate in obligatory consultations on how the soil of their territories is used, they are excluded from decisions about what lies beneath — the minerals claimed by states and corporations. This reveals how legality can be entangled with extractivism, and how the boundary between “soil” and subsoil is both legal and symbolic, carrying deep implications for the autonomy of peoples. Bringing such reflections into our collective imagination is part of envisioning decolonial designs for citizen assemblies, where the definition of soil, its depth, and its meaning are not imposed from outside but emerge from the lived realities of those who inhabit the land.

The SOILTRIBES Bootcamp is therefore more than a technical exercise. It is a democratic laboratory where challenges, assemblies, and movements come together, where practical experimentation amplifies deliberative recommendations, and where soil is reclaimed as a commons. By bridging educators, governments, civil society, and businesses, the platform embodies a deeper promise: that caring for soils is inseparable from caring for democracy itself.