Presentation short abstract

Environmental defenders face attacks, criminalisation, and violence. Even "sustainable development" and climate action projects generate injustice, often reframing defenders: from nature's guardians to terrorists and state enemies—protectors yet 'green transition' opponents simultaneously.

Presentation long abstract

Environmental defenders face continued physical attacks, criminalisation, and atmospheres of violence, often by state and non-state actors who seek to silence them. These violences and human rights violations surround not only expansion of extractive frontiers but also so-called ‘sustainable development’ and ‘climate-action’ initiatives linked to ‘green transitions’ arising from a climate coloniality that often depends on critical minerals harvested from Indigenous territories, land-grabbing or other forms of forced displacement of local peoples. This presentation draws on a review of case studies and event ethnography of COP30 and the Peoples Tribunal Against Eco-Genocide (Belém, Brazil, November 2025) to focus on the climate injustices and violences arising from climate action globally, with an emphasis on case studies from Southeast Asia. In particular, it focuses on the shifting sands of how environmental defenders are framed: from being lauded as guardians and protectors of nature to being labelled as terrorists and enemies of the state, framed as criminals. In cases of climate action projects, where the project is framed as ‘green’ from a global perspective yet leads to local injustices, environmental defenders who protest their expansion can be simultaneously framed as both protectors and enemies of the environment. These contradictory framings lead to increasingly complex atmospheres of violence wherein previous alliances with environmental agencies and NGOs are eroded and collective protection strategies become increasingly crucial for survival.

Presentation short abstract

This study shows how shifting extractive and conservation regimes in Central Kalimantan undermine Indigenous women’s environmental activism, revealing how swidden bans, criminalisation, and land pressures erode resistance while women sustain agency through care, alliances, and everyday practices.

Presentation long abstract

This research examines how shifting extractive and conservation regimes—implemented across different temporal periods by actors with competing worldviews—have simultaneously deepened and weakened environmental defenders’ activism in the upper Kapuas River, Central Kalimantan. In the early 2010s, the community had a history of collective resistance against oil palm encroachment on their swidden food lands, defending their territory despite threats of criminalisation. Following the 2015 haze crisis, the Indonesian government enacted a sweeping ban on swidden farming under the pretext of peat fire prevention. This ban has intensified livelihood precarity and eroded collective resistance, leading many women and youths to seek work elsewhere. By the 2020s, private plantations had occupied remaining community lands, and defenders were targeted under peatland fire regulations. Narrated by a woman environmental defender, this research draws on oral history interviews and live-in ethnography to show how shrinking civic space unfolds not only through legal and physical violence but also through the displacement of Indigenous women from practices that sustain life and care. The findings show that harms stem not only from extractive industries but also from conservation interventions, which can similarly criminalise and dispossess communities. The narrator refuses pressure to relocate or convert her land, defending swidden farmers’ rights, and challenging misconceptions about fire use. She sustains agency through emancipatory practices such as alliance-building with non-state actors and emergent strategies rooted in livelihood work. The study contributes to debates on the slow, incremental violence experienced by Indigenous women living at the intersection of extractive and conservation regimes.

Presentation short abstract

This paper shows how FPAR enabled mutual transformation among researchers and communities in Poco Leok and Wawonii, rebuilding trust and articulating needs amid criminalisation and conflict, and offering an ethical, anti-extractive approach to reclaim civic space.

Presentation long abstract

This paper reflects on the use of Feminist Participatory Action Research (FPAR) in two Indonesian conflict zones—Poco Leok in East Nusa Tenggara, where geothermal development is framed as a climate solution, and Wawonii in Southeast Sulawesi, where nickel mining drives the global energy transition. In both places, environmental defenders face criminalisation, surveillance, and deepening horizontal conflict, conditions that have also produced a profound mistrust of “research” itself. Against this backdrop, FPAR offered not merely a data-gathering methodology but a relational, ethical, and transformative practice.

Drawing on field experiences, we argue that FPAR reconfigures knowledge production within politically constricted environments. Rather than reproducing extractive logics that mirror the very false climate solutions under critique, FPAR creates a process where community members and researchers examine difficult experiences together, rebuild trust, and surface the intersecting vulnerabilities that shape their resistance. The transformation that occurs is mutual: peer researchers confronted hard truths about what they need to sustain their struggles, even when articulating these needs carried emotional risk, while the research team was challenged to unlearn extractive habits and reimagine their role within movements under pressure. By centring care, reciprocity, and co-analysis, this paper demonstrates how FPAR becomes both a methodology and a form of praxis that helps reclaim civic space—modestly, yet meaningfully—within landscapes marked by authoritarian ecologies of extraction.

Presentation short abstract

Examining how CPR governance in Thailand's north and south has become a site of struggle. State-corporate actors reframe communities as ecological threats, legitimising repression through technocratic climate narratives while communities resist through cultural revival and solidarity networks.

Presentation long abstract

This paper examines the political ecology of shrinking civic space in Thailand through two contested common-pool resource (CPR) frontiers: Karen highland forests in Ban Klang and Muslim coastal fisheries in Sakom–Chana. Drawing on participatory action research under the Guardians Under Pressure study, the analysis shows how CPR governance has become a site where state authorities, private developers, and local stewards struggle over sovereignty, legitimacy, and meaning. While communities assert collective governance grounded in customary law, cultural identity, and spiritual ecologies, state and corporate actors reframe forests, coastlines, and fisheries as commodities for conservation markets, infrastructure expansion, and "green" climate solutions. These hegemonic framings—rooted in technocratic, Global-North-oriented climate narratives—depoliticise CPR conflicts by portraying local stewards as ecological threats. This discourse legitimises criminalisation, SLAPP lawsuits, administrative harassment, and surveillance against community movements, while fuelling internal fragmentation through elite co-optation, generational divides, and disinformation campaigns.

Despite intense pressures, communities resist through revitalising customary practices, invoking cultural and religious identity, mobilising youth networks, forging inter-community solidarity, and producing counter-narratives that challenge dominant knowledge and representations. Yet long-term collective stewardship remains precarious. The paper argues that deconstructing hegemonic climate and conservation narratives is essential for reclaiming CPR governance, protecting environmental defenders, and enabling more just socio-ecological futures in Thailand and beyond.

Presentation short abstract

Indigenous movements may undermine their own effectiveness by relying on weak-tie networks for narrow messaging. This "solidarity trap" leaves external allies with moral support but lacking contextual depth to take meaningful action, despite possessing resources that could advance movement goals.

Presentation long abstract

We examine a paradox in contemporary Indigenous activism: movements may inadvertently sabotage their effectiveness by relying on weak-tie networks to communicate narrowly focused messages that fail to leverage existing relationships for substantive change. While scholarship celebrates weak ties for information diffusion, Indigenous movements face a distinct challenge when external actors receive only singular, issue-specific messaging that lacks strategic breadth necessary to activate meaningful alliance. Drawing on three cases of Indigenous movements opposing false climate solutions, we demonstrate how narrow communicative strategy produces "the solidarity trap": a configuration where external actors—positioned at geographic, social, or institutional distance—remain structurally incapable of contributing beyond moral support and symbolic gestures. Despite possessing resources, networks, and institutional access that could materially advance movement goals, these actors remain underutilised because weak-tie relationships do not provide the contextual depth, strategic nuance, or relational trust necessary for substantive intervention. This self-limiting pattern stems from protective impulses to control Indigenous narratives, assumptions about external audiences, resource constraints prioritising broad but shallow outreach, and insufficient attention to relational architecture required for effective alliance-building. The consequences are significant: external actors express solidarity but cannot challenge unjust contexts; movements exhaust themselves generating sympathy but not strategic support. We argue effective alliance requires strategically deploying strong-tie relationships for depth and weak-tie relationships for breadth, recognising that context-changing intervention demands relational infrastructure enabling external actors to become genuine political partners rather than distant witnesses.

Presentation short abstract

This paper shows how climate-framed development projects generate anticipatory violence and social fractures long before implementation, as communities navigate anticipated gains, losses, and harms shaped by longstanding extractive histories and the evolving logics of capitalist expansion.

Presentation long abstract

This paper examines how longstanding extractive logics generate profound social disruption in customary communities well before development projects are fully implemented. Drawing on ethnographically informed case studies in three Southeast Asian sites, we show that the anticipation of intervention—especially when framed as a climate solution—produces anticipatory violence: the pre-emptive reorganisation of social and political relations around projected gains, losses, and anticipated dispossession. Extending scholarship on stalled or withdrawn land deals, we argue that these dynamics are not new but reflect a conjuncture in the ongoing mutation of capitalist expansion, shaped by earlier extractive histories and national development trajectories that condition how communities interpret contemporary proposals.

We conceptualise these latent processes through “the unseen,” referring to planned or partially initiated projects that signal future extraction, and “the Unseen,” capturing disruptions to customary-based, land, and social relations. Across our cases, anticipatory pressures take shape not only through preliminary on-the-ground activities but also through policy designations, corporate presence, and communities’ experiential knowledge of extractive harms in neighbouring regions. These dynamics fracture community life as pro- and anti-project factions emerge around promised compensation, projected opportunities, and feared harms—well before any extensive construction or land conversion occurs.

Our findings challenge development studies’ focus on implemented projects and measurable impacts. By attending to what is partial, proposed, or known through communities’ own interpretive frameworks, we show how extractive rationalities exert power through speculative futures, generating development violence in advance of complete project realisation.

Presentation short abstract

Indigenous communities face new threats from "green transition" projects in the Philippines. Renewable energy and carbon trading schemes violate Indigenous rights and self-determination while perpetuating historical extraction. These initiatives, promoted as climate solutions, cause displacement and

Presentation long abstract

The climate crisis created an urgent need for global solutions. The idea of "transition" has captured the imagination as a solution for a world in peril—from renewable energy to carbon capture. At the epicentre of this pivot are Indigenous communities and their struggles against escalating green-grab projects masquerading as part of the global transition project.

This presentation examines how renewable energy initiatives and carbon trading schemes fashioned as “transition solutions” continue to perpetuate historical extractive models in the Philippines. Promoted as urgent climate action by global North interests, these projects often violate Indigenous self-determination and the right to Free, Prior, and Informed Consent (FPIC), creating the hazards of displacement, increased militarisation, and the erosion of Indigenous agroecological practices. This condition reveals a paradox: the very communities who serve as stewards of ecological health are the ones being systematically threatened and disempowered.

We argue that for Indigenous peoples, protecting the environment is an inseparable element of their cultural identity and a sacred duty to their ancestral domains. We call attention to how the dominant global transition project creates new forms of pressures that sustain the pervasive political ecology of fear. By interrogating the strategies by which the state and corporate entities deploy "transition" tactics, we highlight the mechanisms that suppress dissent. We posit that the resistance of Indigenous guardians represents a pivotal struggle against resource securitisation, ultimately determining whether a truly equitable socio-ecological future or the commodification of our environment and of the transition project will be achieved.