Guardians Under Pressure: Southeast Asian Environmental Defenders
This project focuses on environmental defenders, and the civic spaces in which they work, in relation to land-use change justified by climate change mitigation and adaptation.
Background
This study looks at addressing the threats to, and informing the policies to support, environmental defenders and civic spaces affected by initiatives that use local natural resources to mitigate against climate change in Southeast Asia. Hegemonic notions of the globalised problem of the climate crisis often negate local and customary claims over natural resources and criminalise environmental defenders, while obfuscating intersectionality.
We use case-based ethnographic approaches in Indonesia, the Philippines, and Thailand in six to nine case studies to answer this question and frame our findings in relation to existing frameworks, platforms, and systems designed to protect environmental defenders and expand civic spaces using intersectional approaches.
Cases will include civic spaces and environmental defender contexts in land-use changes relating to mining, renewable energy, carbon sequestration, and haze controls, all positioned as climate emergency solutions.The findings will contribute to the understanding of the roles and risks for environmental defenders in Southeast Asia. Using a range of dissemination mechanisms ranging from academic to coaching implementers of existing systems, this project aims for wide applied and theoretical contributions and will directly inform and attempt to influence frameworks, policies and systems that directly affect civic spaces and environmental defenders.
Approach
The project is designed as a collaboration of diverse collaborators with both research and activist experience. The Dala Institute (Indonesia) will be the co-ordinating collaborator, facilitating the design, delivery and evaluation of the project, and co-ordinate the intersectional approaches and feminist theories within the study.
In each country there is a lead implementing collaborator; Auriga Nusantara (Indonesia) conducts investigative research, encourages policy changes to better manage natural resources and the environment, and advocates through legal connections and will implement the study in Indonesia. The RCSD University of Chiang Mai (Thailand) is a well-respected research institution with robust experience researching issues of natural resources and communities. The Legal Rights and Natural Resources Center (LRC) (Philippines) works on the recognition and protection of the rights of Indigenous peoples and upland rural poor communities to land and environment.
The team blends research and activist collaborators that will be responsible for each country and also contribute to the design, data collection, and output development for the project as a whole.
Documents
Dispatches
Research That Cannot End: Reflections on Relationships, Reciprocity, and Sustainability in Feminist Participatory Research
What happens when a research project cannot truly end, even though the project has been administratively closed? This is a risk that, apparently, one might face when carrying out feminist participatory action research. My team's research project is finished on paper, and the funding has stopped. But unlike other research or evaluation projects that I usually conduct, there is no sense of “relief” as usual. I felt sadness, mixed with deep emotion and joy, witnessing the achievements of our peer
Riset yang Tak Berakhir
Refleksi tentang Relasi, Resiprositas, dan Keberlanjutan dalam Penelitian Partisipatoris Feminis Disclaimer: * Semua kutipan dan informasi dalam tulisan ini telah mendapat persetujuan dari para peneliti sejawat. * Tulisan ini dibuat dengan menggunakan bantuan kecerdasan buatan Apa yang terjadi saat sebuah kegiatan penelitian tidak bisa berakhir meskipun secara administratif proyek sudah ditutup? Ini adalah sebuah risiko yang, ternyata, mungkin dihadapi saat sebuah tim melaksanakan kegiatan
Building Feminist PAR from the Ground Up: Solidarity and Radical Listening
By Rahayu Harjanthi (Senior Researcher at Dala Institute) Research shouldn’t begin with taking—it should begin with giving. This conviction guided our 18-month feminist participatory action research (FPAR) journey with environmental defenders across Indonesia, where zines became our first act of solidarity and radical listening rewrote our methodology. Yet my reflections began with a colleague’s transformative words: "This project has restored my faith in research. Now that I’ve experienced t