Call for papers: Herbal Medicine and the Struggle for the Commons in Latin America

Theme: Herbal Medicine and the Struggle for the Commons in Latin America

Call Opens: 27 November 2025

Submission Deadline: 31 March 2026

This call aims to compose a special issue of Saúde em Debate, titled Herbal Medicine and the Struggle for the Commons in Latin America. The issue is edited by Cebes (Brazilian Center for Health Studies) in partnership with ObservaPICS/VPAAPS/Fiocruz (Observatory of Traditional, Integrative and Complementary Knowledge and Practices in Health, at the Vice-Presidency of Environment, Health Care and Health Promotion of the Oswaldo Cruz Foundation), with the collaboration of the People’s Health Movement (PHM).

The purpose of this publication is to foster reflection and debate on the processes of institutionalizing herbal medicine, as well as the diverse knowledge and healing practices that activate them within Latin American health systems. We seek to highlight the frictions, alliances, and divergences that emerge at the crossroads between the pharmaceutical agenda, public health, and the pathways—sometimes enabling, sometimes obstructing—toward consolidating collective rights in the region.

CONTEXT

To what extent does the recognition and promotion of herbal drugs and herbal medicine (aligned or not with biomedicine, and in dialogue or not with so-called “traditional medicines”) strengthen the pluralization of citizenship, the production of rights, and the autonomy of Indigenous peoples, quilombola communities, montubios, riverine populations, and peasant communities? How are the agendas of self-identified traditional people absorbed and transformed by state logics, or alternatively, how do they adapt to the normative machinery of the State?

This special issue welcomes ethnographies, case studies, public policy analyses, and theoretical reflections that examine how plural knowledge systems and healing practices contest institutional spaces and place pressure of the pharmaceutical agenda in Latin America. We invite original contributions in English, Spanish or Portuguese that illuminate the potentials and ambiguities involved in the production of identities, rights, and citizenship around the institutionalization of herbal drugs and herbal medicine in the Latin American context.

From diverse analytical frameworks, we seek to explore political and technological alternatives to centralized models of pharmaceutical production and power. We value localized and context-specific experiences such as Farmácias Vivas linked to Brazil’s National Policy on Medicinal Plants and Phytotherapeutics; community-based productive centers for medicinal plants in Bolivia; and the sujetos de sabiduría de la medicina ancestral-tradicional working within the Ministry of Public Health of Ecuador, among many others. We are particularly interested in critical reflections on the limits of these experiences, especially when confronted with the challenges of health regulation, regimes of knowledge appropriation, and the ways in which identity, ethnicity, and difference are governed through public policies.

THEMATIC AXES

   Institutionalization, Public Policies, and Regulatory Disputes
   Identity, Belonging, and Recognition
   Citizenship and Collective Action
   Sociobiodiversity Rights

GENERAL GUIDELINES

This special issue will receive unpublished articles resulting from research conducted by authors who may be faculty members, students, activists, among others.

A maximum of two articles per author will be published, with only one as the lead author. Articles accepted but not included in this special issue may be published in regular issues of the journal.

Articles accepted for this special issue will be exempt from publication fees, due to financial support for scientific production provided by the Brazilian Ministry of Health through the Department of Pharmaceutical Services of the Secretariat of Science, Technology and Innovation in Health.

Manuscripts must be submitted through the Saúde em Debate website: https://saudeemdebate.org.

For manuscript preparation, please follow the Instructions for Authors available at: https://saudeemdebate.org.br/sed/about/submissions .

In the submission form, under “Pre-evaluation Discussion/Comments to the Editor”, authors must explicitly state that the manuscript is submitted to the special issue Herbal Medicine and the Struggle for the Commons in Latin America and indicate one of the thematic axes.

THE SUBMISSION DEADLINE IS 31 MARCH 2026.