Hope in Action:

Community-Engaged Scholarship and Practice for

Integral Ecology, Environmental Justice

and Sustainability

4^th Biennial International Transdisciplinary Conference

August 19-23, 2026, Switzerland

Bringing Scholarship and Practice into Dialogue for Environmental Justice

From 19 to 23 August 2026, the Lassalle-Institut brought together researchers, practitioners and community leaders in Zurich for its 4th Biennial Conference on Environmental Justice. Under the theme “Hope in Action”, the conference explored how community-engaged scholarship and practice can contribute to integral ecology, environmental justice and sustainability.

At the heart of the gathering was a shared question: how can hope become credible in practice in the face of ecological degradation, social inequality and uncertainty? Across the conference, hope emerged not as passive optimism, but as a practice rooted in relationships, responsibility and concrete action. And the discussions illustrated that environmental justice requires academic knowledge, experience and lived realities to inform one another.

Conference participants listen to Peter Rožič SJ introducing the day's programme in the main conference venue, the aki.  

Hope as a practice

In his opening keynote, Emmanuel Katongole reflected on hope as something that carries both a wound and a gift. Hope, he argued, is work: fragile, communal and potentially transformative. Drawing on the Bethany Land Institute in Uganda, he showed how integral ecology links ecological regeneration with food security and social responsibility.

Pedro Walpole stressed listening and participation: communities should help shape responses to environmental and social challenges, not merely receive support. Walpole himself has worked closely with Indigenous communities in Mindanao, Philippines, for more than 30 years, supporting community-led efforts in culturally grounded education, sustainable livelihoods, land stewardship, and forest and watershed management. At the center of his keynote was a simple conviction: the Church's mission is lived out walking closely with those who suffer and enabling marginalized communities to participate fully rather than merely speaking about them. In this regard, he enabled representatives of several indigenous communities of South-East Asia to take part in COP 30 in Belem, Brazil in 2025.

Emmanuel Katongole and Pedro Walpole SJ reflect on hope as a communal practice rooted in participation, accompainment, and concrete action.

Where science meets practice

Community-engaged research formed another central strand of the conference. Iris Stewart-Frey and Allan A. Báez Morales illustrated how scientific work can become a resource for solidarity and the common good by connecting research with the needs and experience of communities. Iris's own work in California's Central Valley exemplified this: partnering with about 15 organizations, students and community members to test well water for nitrate contamination and turn that science into policy support and thereby helping marginalized communities secure their human right to clean drinking water.

A wider insight ran through the conference: transformation begins where expertise meets local knowledge and research is carried out with, rather than only about, communities.

Hope grows through participation

The conference also sharpened an important insight: hope becomes credible when communities can genuinely shape decisions, when responsibility is shared and when institutions sustain collaboration. The diversity of cultures, generations and professional backgrounds, together with shared conversations and encounters, created a space in which different forms of knowledge could meet with respect and curiosity.

For the Lassalle-Institut, “Hope in Action” reaffirmed the importance of creating spaces in which people from different backgrounds can think and act together. As Raymond Williams put it, “To be truly radical is to make hope possible rather than despair convincing.”

The conference strengthened one conviction that accompanied the days in Zurich: hope becomes transformative when it is practiced together.

Participants of the "Hope in Action" conference during an excursion to the Zürichberg.

We are deeply grateful to all participants and keynote speakers, to partner institutions and to our task force members Iris Stewart-Frey, Mélodie Honen-Delmar, Peter Rožič, Alberto Irezabal, Tobias Karcher, and Louis Kremser.