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Presentation short abstract

External actors with the resources to advance movements opposing false climate solutions rarely move beyond symbolic solidarity. Drawing on six green-extractivist conflict sites in Indonesia, the Philippines and Thailand, we theorise the solidarity trap as constitutive of these conflicts.

Presentation long abstract

This paper interrogates a paradox at the heart of contemporary climate justice: external actors holding the resources, networks and institutional access that could materially advance Indigenous and grassroots movements opposing false climate solutions tend, in practice, to remain bounded to moral endorsement and symbolic gesture. Drawing on a multi-country research consortium working across six community sites in Indonesia, the Philippines and Thailand, we argue that this pattern (what we term the solidarity trap) is constitutive of green-extractivist conflicts rather than a remediable failure of communication. Green extractivism, the system that uses climate crises to legitimise extraction and renders Indigenous territories as sacrifice zones, selects for the kinds of solidarity it can metabolise without altering its operations. Communities articulate alternative ontologies such as "living space" against "environment", custom-based territorial defence, and rotational farming temporalities that the apparatus of donor cycles, regulatory categories and FPIC procedures cannot receive without dissolving its own framework. The trap is therefore the structural mismatch between the depth of community knowledge and the bandwidth of weak-tie external relationships through which solidarity travels. We distinguish three communicative patterns often conflated by outsiders: narrow framing as ontological refusal; strategically narrow messaging under surveillance; and narrowly strategic messaging produced by under-investment in infrastructure that operates outside the apparatus. Partial escapes are possible through community-controlled methodologies, cross-regional movement architectures, and ethnographic refusal of research itself, but the apparatus reconstitutes itself faster than relational infrastructure can be built inside it.