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.