Finding the Middle Ground: The Role of (Mis)Understanding in Creating a Shared World of Concern

This chapter examines how individuals and communities construct a shared world of concern in contexts of institutional complexity, with particular attention to the role of misunderstanding and distortion in this process. Drawing on a long-term ethnographic study of the rural community of Guapiruvu in Brazil’s Atlantic Forest, the analysis highlights how local farmers and squatters engaged with a Brazilian NGO in the implementation of the UN’s Agenda 21 programme. We show that community participation did not stem from consensus but from a “middle ground” where actors, often misinterpreting each other’s values and histories, forged new arrangements that nevertheless advanced their respective aims. By tracing the violent and exploitative history of land dispossession and capitalist incorporation in Guapiruvu, we demonstrate how sedimented experiences, grievances, and emotional “scorch marks” shaped the evaluative capacities of residents as they negotiated environmental sustainability alongside struggles for social justice and self-determination. The case reveals that institutional processes are neither determinative nor synchronized: persons are not passive recipients of institutional logics but reflexive agents whose responses are conditioned by embodied histories, vulnerabilities, and aspirations. Misunderstanding, rather than undermining collaboration, can itself become a productive resource for institutional innovation, enabling new practices such as the establishment of the Cooperagua cooperative. In so doing, the chapter extends theorization of the middle ground, advancing an understanding of human–nature relations and institutional inhabitation that foreground the entanglement of values, emotions, and interests in the pursuit of collective futures.