Tracing Evolutionary Pathways in Grassroots Climate Governance: Connecting Past, Present, and Future Inter-Scalar Adaptation Strategies in Southeast Asia

TRACE aims to amplify grassroots forces in climate governance to spearhead systematic transformations and just transitions. It pushes for a paradigm shift in climate governance, with Southeast Asia as a key site to adaptation strategies. Through reframing and reconceptualization of climate adaptation as geographies of knowledge, culture, and agency, TRACE will develop groundbreaking transdisciplinary concepts, frameworks, research methodologies, and tools for knowledge co-creation, power co-production, and agency shaping in climate governance. TRACE centrally puts co-creation of knowledge, co-production of power and culture, and agency as key praxis in climate adaptation and climate governance. It highlights the need to decipher past knowledge on adaptation and connects these with present and future adaptation strategies through archival, oral history and ethnographic research. It looks at evolutionary pathways of local institutions, their institutional arrangements, and adaptation practices as key building blocks for holistic, inclusive, and just climate governance. TRACE unpacks the underlying plural knowledge systems (e.g. traditional local knowledge, technological interventions) that inform ever-changing adaptation practices of farmers’, foresters’ and fishermen’s families across spatio-temporal scales, and vice versa. Climate adaptation as geographies of knowledge, culture, and agency is contextually rooted in four distinct yet interrelated socio-ecological systems across Southeast Asia. This is a region with diverse socio-ecological systems and wide range of knowledge systems, where grassroots forces in climate governance are present and hold great potential for the formation of inter-scalar climate adaptation networks. These socio-ecological systems are: 1) upland cultivation in Laos; 2) irrigated agriculture in Indonesia; 3) forest conservation in the Thai-Myanmar borderlands; and 4) sea nomads’ fishing territories in the Philippines.