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Paper short abstract

Drawing on extensive fieldwork, this paper reads Garhwali women’s folklore as testimony and traditional ecological knowledge, examining how gendered narratives of labour, loss, and care articulate ecofeminist perspectives on sustainability and climate action aligned with SDG 13.

Paper long abstract

This paper is grounded in long-term ethnographic fieldwork among Garhwali women in the central Himalayan region of India and examines folk songs and oral narratives as forms of testimony through which environmental change, development, and gendered labour are articulated. Rather than treating folklore as cultural residue, the paper approaches these songs as repositories of traditional ecological knowledge that record shifts in forests, agriculture, water systems, and livelihoods over time.

Through an ecofeminist lens, the paper analyses how women’s narratives link ecological degradation with everyday experiences of care, subsistence work, and migration, revealing the uneven social costs of development and climate change. These oral testimonies challenge dominant sustainability discourses by foregrounding relational understandings of land, labour, and responsibility that remain marginal within formal climate policy frameworks. In doing so, they offer grounded perspectives on climate action that resonate with the principles of SDG 13 while remaining rooted in local life worlds.

By centering women’s voices, memory, and lived experience, the paper argues for the recognition of folklore as a critical site of knowledge production within climate debates. It contributes to discussions on Indigenous and community-based approaches to sustainability by demonstrating how Garhwali women’s narratives complicate technocratic models of climate governance and open up alternative ways of imagining environmental futures informed by care, reciprocity, and social justice.