Presentation short abstract

This paper examines DURBAR, a youth- and girl-led climate governance platform in coastal Bangladesh, showing how participatory praxis transforms girls from ‘beneficiaries’ to agents of adaptation, reshaping knowledge, power and resilience in climate governance.

Presentation long abstract

Across coastal Bangladesh, climate change and disaster risk governance are embedded in everyday negotiations of power, gender relations, and uneven access to decision-making. This paper examines the DURBAR initiative, a youth- and girl-led and locally rooted climate governance platform, as a political ecology praxis that reconfigures agency and transforms research–policy hierarchies. Drawing on participatory action research, co-creation and iterative consultations with youth activists, it investigates how young people move from being framed as “vulnerable beneficiaries” to becoming knowledge-producers, institutional actors, and catalysts in adaptation processes.

DURBAR engages adolescent and young women in three intersecting arenas - participatory learning, policy dialogues, and community resilience planning. The programme mobilises storytelling, peer-to-peer learning and lived-experience testimonies to surface climate-justice narratives. These practices reveal everyday climate impacts such as erosion, salinity intrusion, water scarcity and slow-onset ecological loss, while also questioning whose knowledge counts in defining “resilience.”

The paper argues that feminist, youth-centred praxis offers a way to re-imagine expertise and build collective agency in the margins of climate governance. Rather than positioning participatory methods as add-ons, DURBAR embeds them into an unfolding community transformation where knowledge circulates across youth, researchers, policymakers, NGOs and local institutions. This process foregrounds the politics of recognition, accountability and scale, generating new imaginaries of adaptation and justice.

Ultimately, the paper proposes that youth- and girl-led political ecology is both a methodological and normative intervention: it decolonises who speaks for climate impacts, challenges extractive hierarchies, and expands resilience beyond infrastructural solutions toward lived, situated and relational transformation.