When conducting research in complex and power-laden contexts, we must consider how we, as researchers and humans, engage with and empathize with people’s lives and struggles. This requires flexibility in research design and actions that may diverge from conventional participatory and collaborative methodologies, instead calling for co-productive science that allows for the co-creation of materials and ‘sense-making’ alongside people actively shaping transformations. Our project “Environmental Policy Instruments across Commodity Chains (EPICC)” in Brazil, Colombia, and Indonesia has advanced our understanding of learning-based change processes by slowly enabling co-designed research, co-produced results, and the co-perception of impacts with those reshaping reality. Through an ongoing research installation, we aim to illustrate how our research questions have been altered and decentered by the realities and agency of people and social groups living in tropical areas profoundly affected by various forms of extractivism at the ‘origin’ of global supply chains. Changes in our perceptions are a result of the continuous and transformative work of people who are telling their stories differently. Engaging with these differences and reshaping methodologies is part of the process of incorporating territories into the analysis of the ecological, economic, political, and cultural transformations catalyzed by the operation of global value chains in climate and social biodiversity.