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Presentation short abstract

This paper shows how FPAR reclaims civic space in Southeast Asia's green extractive frontiers by refusing extractive research logic, building knowledge sovereignty and mutual transformation where climate solutions enable violence.

Presentation long abstract

This paper explores how Feminist Participatory Action Research (FPAR) serves as both a methodology and a transformative praxis for reclaiming civic space in Southeast Asia's extractive frontiers. Drawing on six case studies across Thailand, the Philippines, and Indonesia, it examines communities resisting projects framed as climate solutions, geothermal expansion, nickel mining, and carbon markets. A central paradox emerges: civic space shrinks precisely where "green" development advances, leaving defenders facing criminalisation, surveillance, and violence, while generating deep mistrust of research itself.

Rather than reproducing the extractive logics embedded in these false climate solutions, FPAR repositions communities as knowledge producers and co-analysts. Through culturally embedded protocols, peer researcher models, and story circles, it creates confidential spaces to examine difficult experiences jointly, validate epistemologies excluded from official processes, and generate strategic evidence for litigation and advocacy.

The transformation is mutual. Communities build analytical, paralegal, and organisational capacities that outlast project cycles. Researchers are challenged to unlearn extractive academic habits and reimagine their role within movements under pressure.

Drawing on evidence from Karen rotational farmers, coastal Muslim fishing communities, Matigsalug Manobo and Cordillera Indigenous peoples, and Manggarai and Wawonii communities, the paper identifies four mechanisms through which FPAR creates breathing room: establishing confidential dialogue under surveillance; countering "degradation" narratives with community knowledge; rebuilding trust through reciprocity and cultural embeddedness; and centring intersectional vulnerabilities.

FPAR does not stop extractive projects. But it reclaims civic space, modestly, yet meaningfully, within landscapes marked by authoritarian ecologies of extraction.