ECCE-CANN

Ecologies of Cannabis Cultivation in Spain

Photo: Maja Dumat / blumenbiene, “Nutzhanf”, CC BY 2.0. Cropped for this website.

Cannabis Ecologies

ECCE-CANN approaches cannabis cultivation through a relational perspective. Rather than treating cultivation, markets, regulation, environmental relations, and material practices as separate domains, the project examines the historically changing configurations of relations through which they become connected.

These configurations bring together people, plants, materials, knowledge, labour, technologies, places, markets, infrastructures, capital, and institutions.

Explore the research framework

Researching cannabis cultivation

The project examines these relations through three interconnected empirical fields of cannabis cultivation in Spain.

Home growing

The project examines practices of domestic cultivation and the relations through which cultivation becomes embedded in everyday life, knowledge, material arrangements, and local contexts.

Cannabis Social Clubs

Cannabis Social Clubs provide a particularly important setting for examining the relations between collective organisation, cultivation, knowledge, regulation, and contested forms of legality.

Commercial cultivation

Commercial cultivation makes visible the connections between cultivation, labour, technology, investment, markets, infrastructures, and regulatory and legal arrangements.

These are not treated as separate ecologies. They are empirical fields through which the broader configurations studied by the project can be traced.

Research approach

ECCE-CANN follows the relations through which cannabis cultivation is organised, reproduced, and transformed.

The research pays particular attention to:

  • the transformation of cultivation practices;
  • the movement of cannabis through different settings;
  • the circulation of knowledge, technologies, materials, labour, and resources;
  • the connections between cultivation, markets, consumption, and regulation;
  • and the ways in which these configurations change over time.

The project

ECCE-CANN combines ethnographic research, qualitative interviews, documentary and judicial analysis, and comparative research to investigate the changing configurations surrounding cannabis cultivation in Spain.

Learn more about the project

Project information

Funding: Spanish State Research Agency (AEI)
Reference: PID2025-174907NB-I00
Duration: 2026–2029