Part 1

• An Ecofeminist Reading of Marine Systems: Moken Women’s Relational Knowledge, Food, and Multispecies Care May Aye Thiri University of Tokyo

  This study offers an ecofeminist reading of marine systems by centring the relational knowledge practices of Moken women in the Andaman Sea region who live across Thailand and Myanmar. It argues that Indigenous ecological knowledge is not a discrete or extractable body of information but an intangible, lived system that is sustained by everyday food practices, gendered labour, cultural meanings, and multispecies relations. The study draws on observations and interviews conducted as part of the author’s Blue Justice research project with Moken women across four island sites, including foraging, fishing, and food preparation in intertidal, nearshore, and tourism-affected coastal spaces. Moken women play a central role in sustaining households through food gathering, preparation, and redistribution. Their practices are guided by situated and embodied knowledge of tides, seasons, species behaviour, and marine habitats, developed and transmitted through daily engagement rather than formal instruction. Women’s foraging practices rely on embodied knowledge, including sensing tides, heat, and changing marine conditions through the body, and on tool use oriented toward minimising harm to both marine species and the forager herself. These practices enact multispecies care by regulating how, when, and what is gathered, maintaining ecological relations rather than maximising extraction. This knowledge is inseparable from relations of care that extend across human and non-human life, regulating how marine resources are accessed, shared, reused, and conserved. The study highlights how women’s food practices function as forms of multispecies care and ecological governance, even as they remain marginalised within dominant marine management, conservation, and tourism frameworks. The use of “leftovers” from marine and tourist economies is examined as a critical site where unequal resource distribution, redirected bioenergy, and care-based survival intersect. It argues for more inclusive approaches to marine sustainability that recognise Indigenous women’s knowledge practices as essential to both ecological resilience and social justice.

• Beyond the Grid: A Scholar-Artist Approach to Multisensory Counter-Mapping with Sea Nomads in Southeast Asia Di Fang In-Depth-Space/Independent

  This research examines counter-mapping as a methodology to engage with alternative knowledge systems that remain largely absent from mainstream climate governance frameworks. Building on fieldwork with sea nomads: the Sama-Bajau in Omadal, Sabah, Malaysia (2024) and Orang Laut in Bintan, Riau Islands, Indonesia (2025), this study conceptualizes counter-mapping not merely as a representational tool, but as a process capturing spatio-temporal, multi-species, and multi-sensory dimensions of knowledge-scapes.
  This research showcases three interdependent and mutually reinforcing counter-mapping experiments. First, participatory mapping with Sama-Bajau children reveals unconventional spatial logics, including the absence of land-water boundaries, a temporal playground shaped by tides, and the centrality of boats and marine biotas. Overlaying oral stories highlights their perception of the ocean as a fluid, moving territory, challenging rigid, land-based marine governance frameworks. Second, deep listening session with Orang Laut knowledge holders demonstrates sonic knowledge as part of life at sea, crucial for navigation and fishing, and connecting to more-than-human species.
  Foregrounding sound shifts analytical focus from vision-dominated epistemologies and introduces a layer for understanding environmental change largely absent in climate governance. Third, the essay film, as a non-traditional genre that weaves diverse materials, uses its multisensory form to challenge the static qualities of conventional maps and the territories they represent. Moving between images, sound, and text, it captures situated spatio-temporal characteristics of knowledge systems, allowing multiple registers to coexist while holding tensions without reducing socio-ecological complexity.
  Ultimately, these practices expose a critical disconnection between fixed frameworks of marine governance and relational ways of knowing among sea nomads. Governance models that rely on static, visual, and data-driven representations risk overlooking how marine environments are experienced and navigated, leading to interventions that are misaligned with socio-ecological realities. This research argues for approaches to climate governance that engage knowledge as dynamic, situated, and multisensory rather than as static data.

• From knowledge-scapes to adaptive spaces for grassroots climate governance in Southeast Asia Castella Jean-Christophe Institut de Recherche pour le éveloppement Dumrongrojwatthana Pongchai Chulalongkorn University Mahanty Sango Australian National University McCarthy John Australian National University

  As climate change intensifies across Southeast Asia, the dominant governance response privileges techno-managerial solutions that systematically marginalize the situated knowledge of rural communities, who are the most vulnerable to its effects. Knowledge systems forged through generations of experimentation and largely invisible to mainstream climate adaptation frameworks are produced, reproduced, and contested across multiple scales. We argue that tracing the knowledge-scapes embedded in adaptation practice offers a critical counterpoint, revealing the institutional nodes, relational networks, and epistemic resources through which local actors construct adaptive responses to climate precarity.
  Grounded in ongoing research in Nan Province, northern Thailand, and in comparative cases across the Mekong region, the paper traces how local knowledge-scapes emerge from the negotiation of competing epistemologies: scientific, indigenous, and experiential. In Nan, farming communities have developed sophisticated agroecological systems that integrate biodiversity management, soil and water conservation, and livelihood diversification. In this paper we map the knowledgescapes underpinning adaptive spaces where farmers, civil society actors, and researchers co-produce alternative livelihood systems.
  We analyse adaptive spaces as relational configurations where grassroots actors leverage situated knowledge and micro-adaptations to respond to climate and agrarian pressures and push toward transformative change. Rather than extracting local knowledge into academic frameworks, participatory research approaches based on role-play games create conditions for communities to articulate, validate, and act on their own knowledgescapes in dialogue with scientific and policy actors. Effective grassroots climate governance therefore rests on the patient recognition and weaving together of diverse knowledge systems already at work in adaptive spaces.
  Such epistemic recognition, i.e., creating the conditions under which locally held knowledge is legitimised, connected, and capable of influencing governance requires from transformative researchers and practitioners to cultivate a quality of presence, attentiveness, and relational humility. A reflexive engagement with knowledge politics is instrumental in connecting place-based knowledge systems with broader policy processes.

• Climate Governance as Hydro-social Governance: Fishers’ Knowledge, Peatlands, and Livelihood Adaptation in the Mahakam Floodplain Etik Sulistiowati Ningsih Mulawarman University

  Climate governance in peatland regions is commonly framed through carbon storage and emission reduction. However, in peatland floodplain landscapes, environmental change is experienced primarily through changes in water systems, fisheries, and seasonal hydrology. This paper argues that climate governance in floodplain environments operates as hydrosocial governance rather than carbon governance alone. Based on qualitative research in the Mahakam floodplain, Indonesia, this study examines how fishers’ knowledge, livelihood practices, and local institutions shape everyday forms of climate governance.
  The findings show that climate variability is experienced as hydrological change, which reduces access to fishing grounds, affects livelihoods, and contributes to institutional change and the erosion of local ecological knowledge. In response, communities develop adaptation strategies such as seasonal fishing practices, collective resource management, and kolam jebak, which function as both livelihood strategies and local governance mechanisms. This paper shows that climate governance in floodplain regions is embedded in everyday livelihood practices and community institutions, and that governing climate in floodplain landscapes is inseparable from governing water, fisheries, peatlands, and livelihoods.

• Firebreaks as indigenous knowledge system and cultural practice: an emerging counternarrative in forest fire governance Chaya Vaddhanaphuti Chiang Mai University Diana Suhardiman KITLV Saw Paul Sein Twa Twa Karen Environmental and Social Action Network (KESAN) Saw Sha Bwe Moo Karen Environmental and Social Action Network (KESAN)

  This paper studies Karen Indigenous approaches in forest fire governance, contextualized in rotational farming practices and embedded in Karen communities’ cultural norms, values, and life philosophy. It presents the Kaw way of governing as Karen communities’ strategies to sustain their livelihoods and key element to tackle the problem of uncontrollable forest fires. Putting firebreak application as Karen communities’ Indigenous knowledge, it challenges the dominant narrative of the politics of blame, which positions burning from rotational farming, also known as swidden agriculture, as a key decisive factor causing (uncontrollable) forest fires and the transboundary haze and air pollution problem. We argue that rather than viewing burning from rotational farming practices as the source of problem, policy makers should embrace Karen communities’ Indigenous knowledge surrounding firebreak application as a central part of the solution in regional forest fire governance. It compares Karen communities’ knowledge and cultural practices surrounding the organization and application of firebreaks in the Salween Peace Park, Kawthoolei, Karen State, Myanmar, with the way farmers applied prescribed burning in Mae On District of Chiang Mai Province in Northern Thailand.

Part 2

• Is Adaptation Always Strategic? Co-Animating Knowledge-Scapes among the Orang Rimba, Indonesia. S.M. (Butet) Manurung University of Amsterdam

  This paper traces the knowledge-scapes of the Orang Rimba of Sumatra through a collaborative stop-motion practice I conceptualize as co-animation. Engaging with debates on grassroots climate governance, I examine how place- based knowledge is (re)produced through everyday practices, storytelling, and intergenerational relations within changing forest environments. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and co-created films with Orang Rimba youth, I explore how environmental change -manifested in forest transformation, shifting hunting practices, and contested land relations- is not simply adapted to but lived and negotiated as an ongoing and at times uncertain process of becoming.
  Rather than approaching knowledge as a set of adaptation strategies, the paper highlights how it emerges through tension, reflection, and collective sense-making, including moments of refusal and engagement. I also present a co- created stop-motion film, Game for Sale, which shows how Orang Rimba negotiate environmental change. Co-animation, as both method and epistemic practice, offers a way to trace these dynamics and shows how knowledge is relational, situated, and shaped by broader institutional and political conditions. In doing so, the paper contributes to discussions on knowledge-scapes and grassroots governance by foregrounding how communities experience and make sense of environmental change.

• Seer and Fire: Navigating Sama-Bajau Knowledge System in Contemporary Marine Resource Governance Wengki Ariando KITLV

  The Sama-Bajau communities are currently reshaping their knowledge systems to navigate the challenges of a post-sedentarization landscape. Despite settling along the coasts of insular Southeast Asia, they continue to face state-led marine resource governance frameworks that often marginalize their cultural identity and criminalize their traditional maritime practices. Grounded in multi-sited fieldwork conducted between 2023 and 2025 across Indonesia (Wakatobi), Malaysia (Semporna), and the Philippines (Batangas, Cebu, and Sitangkai), this reserach seeks to dismantle the terrestrial hegemony of contemporary marine resource governance. By repositioning the sea not as a geographic void but as a vibrant assembly of human and non-human interactions, the research illustrates through the lens of traditional ecological knowledge, the Sama-Bajau’s role as seers within a multidimensional knowledge system that spans the horizontal (seascapes and islands) and the vertical (ethnometeorology and the oceanic depths). Additionally, this research analyzes the dual ontological nature of fire within the Sama-Bajau knowledge system. While the fire knowledge system serves as a sophisticated tool for resilience and grassroots climate adaptation, it is simultaneously weaponized by states and dominant land-based populations as a mechanism for political control and forced displacement. Ultimately, this research advocates for a fundamental shift in Southeast Asian marine resource governance, offering an alternative paradigm that honors the fluid ontologies of those who truly call the ocean home.

• Priest’s Robe, Rituals, and the Loss of Knowledge-scapes in Highland Java, Indonesia Adrian Perkasa KITLV Diana Suhardiman KITLV

  The Jimat (amulet) Klontongan and the Antakusuma priest robe are integral to the Karo ritual of the Tengger community in Java, Indonesia. The Karo ceremony is a significant ritual alongside the renowned annual Kasada celebration, celebrated by the community residing in this highland. This study examines the importance of Tenggerese cultural treasures, particularly the Jimat Klontongan and Antakusuma robe, and their function within the Tenggerese knowledge-scapes. The robe functions as a ritualistic icon and an early warning mechanism for the society, demonstrated by its irregular conduct preceding calamities like volcanic eruptions and the Covid-19 outbreak. This paper uses written records from the 1800s to 1900s and oral history to show how the removal of cultural treasures, which are vital to the Tenggerese community’s knowledge, especially through dealings with colonial officials and museums, leads to a loss of important knowledge and authority, making it more difficult for them to face outside challenges, including adaptation to changing environmental conditions, during both colonial and post-colonial times. This paper also addresses the question of cultural restitution, which is important not only for restoring past injustices but also for recentering knowledge that has been prolonged neglected.

• Strategic Living in the Disrupted Mud Hatib Kadir KITLV

  This presentation demonstrate how Papuan lowland coastal communities sustain their more than human livelihoods amid ongoing environmental disruptions driven by sand mining, embankment, land reclamation, and the concretization of shorelines. Focusing on urban coastal zones in Papua, this presentation explores climate crises from the lens of “patchy Anthropocene”, particularly in muddy littoral environments where fishing and foraging practices are embedded. Drawing on Tim Ingold’s concept on “sentient ecology,” the presentation argues that knowledge in these environments does not reside in abstract information but emerges through embodied engagement with dynamic coastal ecologies. Fisherfolk develop skills and sensitivities through continuous involvement with tides, sediments, mangroves, and species such as ikan bubara, ikan bulana, mangrove crabs, and clams. These relations constitute an indivisible organism–environment totality, where perception is cultivated through what Ingold calls an “education of attention.” The presentation demonstrate that coastal disruptions do not simply degrade ecosystems but transform the very conditions under which such perceptual and relational knowledge is produced. Sand extraction alters seabed morphology, embankments disrupt tidal flows, and reclamation redefines access to fishing and foraging grounds. As a result, fishers must recalibrate their sensory attunement and practical skills to shifting ecological patterns. In this context, disturbance is not external to life but intrinsic to it; however, its acceleration through infrastructural interventions risks turning manageable perturbations into ecological and livelihood crises. By foregrounding human–nonhuman entanglements in a disrupted coastal landscape, this presentation contributes to the tracing scapes for grassroots climate change, by reframing knowledge as a situated, embodied practice rather than a static condition.

Show Paper Abstracts

Abstract

Keywords

• Indigenous Knowledge
• Indigenous youth
• Indonesia
• Karen ontology
• Myanmar
• Orang Rimba
• Sama-Bajau
• climate governance
• co-animation
• co-creation
• colonial
• counter-mapping
• ecofeminism
• ecological history
• ethnometeorology
• fire knowledge system
• food system
• forest fires
• forest governance
• grassroots climate governance
• highland
• hydro-social governance
• knowledge-scapes
• local ecological knowledge
• marine governance
• marine justice
• marine resource governance
• multisensory
• peatland floodplain
• relational ecologies
• rotational farming
• sea nomads
• small-scale fisheries
• social-ecological systems
• spatio-temporal knowledge
• stop-motion