Towards an Academia of the common good: our chapter in La veta verda i roja

Javier del Campo and Adrià Auladell, postdoctoral researcher at the Institut de Biologia Evolutiva, have written a chapter for La veta verda i roja (Manifest Llibres, 2026), a collective book in Catalan in which more than thirty voices from across the Països Catalans lay out the debates needed for an ecosocial transformation. 📗🌍

La veta verda i roja, edited by Marta Guillaumes and Sergi Cot, is the second volume of a project that began with El fil verd i roig in 2024. Its chapters cover biodiversity, mobility, water as a common good, the coastline, green taxation, waste, the rural world, art and culture as agents of change, the role of scientific research, climate migration, militarism, and the geopolitics of climate, with a prologue by Projecte Singulars and an epilogue by Salvador Pueyo.

Our chapter, built around the idea of an Academia of the common good, asks what the role of universities and research centres should be in the climate crisis. Beyond generating and transmitting knowledge, we argue that Academia has a third, unavoidably political task: bearing witness to the truths it establishes, so that they can inform collective decisions. Four decades of corporatisation have pushed that task aside in favour of productivity, “excellence”, and fundraising, leaving researchers overloaded and institutions with little capacity to act. Rather than reinventing Academia, we propose walking that road back, towards a de-corporatised institution that puts knowledge in common. Concretely, this means building formal bridges between research and policy (initiatives such as the Oficina Nacional de Asesoramiento Científico and the Oficina C are promising first steps), democratising the governance of universities and research centres, including how careers are evaluated, and connecting with organised civil society so that what we know can become a force for change.

The book was presented on 23 September at La Setmana del Llibre en Català in Barcelona, in a conversation with the editors and Salva Pueyo. It is available from Manifest Llibres and Virus Editorial.

The chapter and the book are in Catalan.