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Paper short abstract

Inter-local cooperation is often seen as an administrative tool. This paper reframes inter-LGU alliances as epistemic actors that produce territorial climate knowledge excluded by technocratic climate governance, with implications for climate justice and Loss and Damage.

Paper long abstract

As climate governance becomes increasingly institutionalised through adaptation and Loss and Damage mechanisms, authority over climate knowledge has consolidated within technocratic systems that privilege standardized metrics, expert-led assessments, and nationally mediated funding architectures. These arrangements marginalize territorially grounded and collectively produced forms of knowledge, raising critical questions of epistemic justice.

Drawing on long-term research on inter-local cooperation (ILC) among local governments in the Philippines, this paper conceptualizes inter-LGU alliances not merely as coordination mechanisms but as epistemic actors. Through joint planning, shared risk assessment, and area-based governance across ecological and jurisdictional boundaries, ILCs generate territorial knowledge of climate risk, loss, and response that is relational, historically situated, and politically negotiated.

Despite their relevance, such knowledge remains largely illegible within dominant climate governance and climate finance frameworks, particularly Loss and Damage architectures that prioritize projectized, quantifiable, and externally validated evidence. This disjuncture constitutes an epistemic rupture between how climate impacts are governed at the subnational level and how justice claims are recognized internationally.

By reframing inter-local cooperation as a site of epistemic intervention, the paper contributes to debates on climate justice, decentralization, and epistemic authority in the Global South. It argues that recognizing territorial governance institutions as legitimate knowledge producers is essential to advancing more plural, just, and transformative climate futures.