The Project
Ecologies of Cannabis Cultivation in Spain
ECCE-CANN examines cannabis cultivation in Spain through a relational approach. The project investigates how cultivation is connected to the circulation of cannabis, knowledge, technologies, materials, labour, resources, markets, infrastructures, and forms of regulation.
Rather than treating cultivation, markets, regulation, and material environments as separate domains, the project asks how these processes become connected, how they are reproduced, and how they change over time.
The research problem
Cannabis cultivation takes place within heterogeneous and changing legal, economic, social, and material conditions. Home growing, Cannabis Social Clubs, and commercial cultivation may differ in their organisation and purposes, but they can also share people, knowledge, technologies, labour, infrastructures, markets, and forms of legal uncertainty.
These connections are often difficult to capture when cultivation, markets, regulation, and environmental relations are examined as separate analytical domains.
ECCE-CANN therefore starts from a different question:
How are the different relations through which cannabis is cultivated, circulated, consumed, and regulated connected, and how do these configurations change over time?
Cannabis Ecologies
A relational framework
Cannabis Ecologies is the central analytical concept of the project.
It does not refer simply to the physical environment in which cannabis cultivation takes place. Nor does it designate a bounded ecosystem surrounding the cannabis plant.
Instead, Cannabis Ecologies refers to historically constituted configurations of relations through which cannabis is produced, circulated, consumed, and regulated, and through which these processes continually reshape one another.
These configurations may connect:
- people and plants;
- cultivation practices and technologies;
- knowledge and skills;
- labour and capital;
- land, water, electricity, and other resources;
- places and infrastructures;
- markets and forms of exchange;
- institutions, laws, and regulatory practices.
The relevant relations may extend across different places and periods. A cultivation site, for example, may depend on technologies produced elsewhere, knowledge circulating between growers, infrastructures shaped by previous forms of land use, markets extending beyond the local setting, and regulatory categories produced at different institutional levels.
The local therefore remains important, but it is not assumed to be a self-contained analytical unit.
Cannabis Ecologies as a relational framework: processes are connected through historically changing configurations, which the research traces by following transformations, the product, and connections.
From domains to configurations
The project does not propose cultivation, markets, regulation, environment, or material practices as separate components of a Cannabis Ecology.
These processes can be distinguished analytically, but they become part of a particular ecology when their relations are consequential for one another.
Similarly, home growing, Cannabis Social Clubs, and commercial cultivation are empirical forms of cultivation, not three separate ecologies.
They may be connected through the circulation of people, knowledge, technologies, labour, resources, markets, and practices. The task of the research is to identify these connections empirically rather than to assume their boundaries in advance.
What makes a configuration an ecology is therefore not simply the number or diversity of relations it contains, but the interdependence of those relations in the reproduction and transformation of the processes they connect.
How we research Cannabis Ecologies
The project develops three complementary methodological principles.
Follow transformations
Rather than treating people, plants, materials, or technologies as fixed objects, we examine the processes through which they are transformed.
Cultivation, for example, involves transformations connecting seeds, plants, growing media, water, electricity, technologies, knowledge, labour, and cultivation spaces.
The question is not simply what elements are present, but how they become involved in processes of making and change.
Follow the product
Following cannabis and its material forms makes it possible to trace connections between cultivation, processing, exchange, distribution, and consumption.
The movement of cannabis can reveal relations that would remain invisible if research remained confined to a particular cultivation site.
Following the product can also reveal how circulation feeds back into production: changes in demand, prices, markets, or distribution can alter cultivation practices and their organisation.
Follow the connections
The circulation of seeds, growing materials and practical knowledge connects cultivation practices to commercial infrastructures and markets. These connections extend beyond the places where cannabis is grown.
The project follows the connections through which apparently local practices become linked to wider markets, technologies, infrastructures, institutions, forms of labour, and historical processes.
These connections may involve people, materials, knowledge, technologies, resources, or regulatory interventions.
Following connections allows the research to move between particular cultivation sites and the wider configurations in which they are embedded, without assuming in advance where the boundaries of the relevant ecology lie.
Research questions
The project addresses a set of interconnected questions:
- What relations organise particular forms of cannabis cultivation?
- How are cultivation practices connected to production, circulation, consumption, and regulation?
- How do knowledge, technologies, materials, labour, and resources move between places and actors?
- How are different forms of cultivation connected to one another?
- How do markets and forms of exchange reshape cultivation?
- How do regulatory interventions alter existing configurations?
- How do cultivation practices themselves affect the interpretation and implementation of regulation?
- How are cannabis ecologies reproduced, transformed, and reconfigured over time?
Empirical research
ECCE-CANN investigates cannabis cultivation through three interconnected empirical fields.
Home growing
The project examines domestic cultivation as a set of practices embedded in everyday life, household economies, material environments, knowledge, technologies, and local contexts.
Commercial cultivation
Commercial cultivation makes visible connections among production, labour, technology, investment, markets, infrastructures, and regulatory arrangements.
These empirical fields are not treated as isolated categories. Their connections and possible transitions between them are themselves an object of research.
Research methods
ECCE-CANN combines several methods in order to reconstruct these configurations from different perspectives.
The project brings together:
- ethnographic research;
- qualitative interviews;
- documentary analysis;
- judicial and legal analysis;
- comparative research;
- and the analysis and integration of qualitative and documentary materials.
The combination of these approaches makes it possible to move between situated practices and wider historical, institutional, economic, and regulatory processes.
Research in Spain
The main fieldwork is conducted in Andalusia, with particular attention to local contexts in which different forms of cultivation and social organisation intersect.
The project also incorporates comparative research on Cannabis Social Clubs in Catalonia and documentary and judicial materials that allow the development of cannabis cultivation and regulation to be examined over longer periods.
The geographical focus is therefore not intended to define a closed research object. Rather, particular places provide starting points for following relations that may extend beyond them.
From cultivation to ecologies
The central proposition of ECCE-CANN is that cannabis cultivation cannot be fully understood by examining cultivation alone.
Cultivation is connected to the movement of plants and products, the circulation of knowledge and technologies, the organisation of labour and resources, the operation of markets, the material transformation of places, and changing forms of regulation.
The project therefore studies the configurations of relations through which these processes become connected and are transformed over time.
This relational perspective provides the conceptual basis for the project’s empirical research and for its analysis of cannabis cultivation in Spain.