Who gets a say in building the future? Southeast Asia's Solution to a Rushed Climate Transition
There is a great deal of difficult news now, arriving on our phones at a pace that humans have not yet evolved to absorb properly. So when the news is finally good—for example, a graph trending upward to show more electric vehicles on the road, solar-powered irrigation systems, and coral reefs under protection—it is such a huge relief.
We deserve to celebrate these pockets of relief. People fought, probably for decades, for those numbers to move. We also owe it to them to pause and ask: who actually labored for this victory? What did it take? What did they sacrifice? How can we make sure their work is carried forward? It is likely that the more context we collect, the more inspiring stories we can share with our friends and allies.
In Southeast Asia, there are many inspiring stories like this, but they are currently overshadowed by an underexamined pattern: every celebrated climate win has a cost, and it is often paid for by people who had the least say in the plan.
We can, for example, admire Indonesia for becoming the world's largest supplier of nickel for electric vehicles—but only because we didn’t see that in a single year, the Makassar Legal Aid Institute counted at least nineteen (19) fatal incidents inside the smelters that process the metal. [1] It is also easy to celebrate the protection of rainforest in Cambodia's Cardamom Mountains, until it’s revealed that the Indigenous Chong communities that have lived there for generations experienced evictions and the destruction of their crops - years before they were ever consulted about the project. [2,3]
Shouldn't worker safety in those smelters be treated as essential to an effective energy transition, rather than an inconvenience that slows it down? Shouldn't the Chong communities be the first consultants in developing the forest conservation plan, rather than being intimidated into compliance?
These are the questions that many well-funded, well-intentioned projects often learn the hard way–if at all. Fortunately, the knowledge we need to change this already exists. They are alive in the rituals, folk customs, and the ecological management systems of Southeast Asia.
Asking before building
Long before the concept of “conservation” entered philanthropic boardrooms and policy conferences, many Southeast Asian and Indigenous communities had already developed their own systems for governing relationships with the land.
Among the Pgaz K'Nyau Karen of northern Thailand for example, newborns' umbilical cords are traditionally tied to trees within protected forests, establishing a lifelong obligation to care for that tree. The practice is documented in The Journal of the Siam Society, whose authors describe Karen stewardship as a cycle of "permission, atonement and thanksgiving" through which people regard trees as kin rather than resources to extract.
Meanwhile the 2026 documentary Jejak Wallacea follows several eastern Indonesian communities reviving traditional systems of environmental governance. One example is Kaombo, a customary marine stewardship practice that designates temporary no-take zones, regulates when and how marine resources can be harvested, and reopens fishing grounds only after ecosystems have had time to recover. Reflecting on the communities featured in the film, Angga Yoga, terrestrial program specialist at Burung Indonesia, says these efforts succeed because "the communities themselves design the mechanisms."
In both cases, the protection of nature becomes less about producing the fastest solution, and more about crafting the most attentive and collectively owned one. The work focused on asking properly.
Asking the Jobs that makesense Asia community
Inspired by these findings, we wanted to know what other stories haven’t yet made their way into academic journals or documentaries. We asked the Jobs that makesense Asia community: What customary practices or unwritten rules about the land, sea, forest, or seasons are still observed where you're from?
This paved the way for an enthusiastic dialogue with Nikki Santos-Ocampo, creative director of Balay Kasamtangan—a home in Mindanao, Philippines for culture bearers and the living traditions they safeguard. She has spent years listening to elders, artists, and Indigenous communities whose knowledge systems are often overlooked in mainstream conversations about climate innovation.
"Innovation, at its worst, can become an irreversible disruptor," she says in a voice message. She is describing a familiar pattern in environmental interventions: communities becoming sources of data or recipients of projects, rather than partners actively co-authoring them. Even the most well-intentioned or scientifically sound conservation effort, she cautions, can begin from the wrong premise—"coming into someone's ancestral home and saying 'we could do better' to the people who have literally been living there for generations."
In fact, even those who live closest to the land rarely speak as though they own it or fully understand it.
Nikki described the practices of the Manobo Lumagwasen-Ilentungen, where no one clears land, builds, or harvests without first asking permission from the land itself. In Cotabato, Philippines, children are traditionally introduced to the Pulangi river through ceremony, acknowledging the guardian believed to watch over it. Nikki’s friend had “[an] anecdote about how a child was once lost to the river because the parents did not do the ritual.”[4]
For this author, Nikki's stories bring to mind a morning spent with the Dumagat-Remontado along the Tinipak River of Rizal, in 2023. [5] The elders had just drafted initial plans for a cultural hub—a structure that could strengthen their claim to ancestral land as an impending dam construction threatened to evict them. Strategically, they had every reason to move forward as soon as possible. Instead, they sliced a stalk in half, planted it into the soil, and waited for its rings to tell them whether the land consented to being used this way. White sap if Yes; no sap if No.
In the meantime
Waiting and asking for permission can feel like a luxury we can't afford in the face of environmental emergencies already underway. But what if the pause is not seen as a delay, but as a threshold—a critical space to actually look around and recognize what's already on our side?
Perhaps resisting the rush will allow us to see our local communities and cultures as allies that have been carrying a key part of the puzzle all along. Perhaps it will allow us to receive the call to involve them not as a nostalgic demand to go back in time or reject modernity, but as release from the illusion that we are the only ones who can solve this.
We humans have already modeled our fastest trains after the kingfisher’s beak. We have already allowed the honeycomb to inspire our own architecture. [6] We have proven that we are capable of taking inspiration from the intelligences around us and design better systems accordingly.
Now, perhaps, we are being called to go beyond simply borrowing nature's ideas for our own benefit, and instead rejoin the web of actors that already sustains life—for the benefit of all life. As Nikki, the Manobo, the Dumagat-Remontado, the Pgaz K'Nyau Karen, and the coastal communities of eastern Indonesia remind us: this begins by recognizing that the land is not passively waiting to be managed or saved, but to be invited into a relationship with us.
RESOURCES
[1] Bohensky, E. L., et al. "Climate Knowledge Cultures: Stakeholder Perspectives on Change and Adaptation in Nusa Tenggara Barat, Indonesia." Climate Risk Management, vol. 12, 2016, pp. 17–31.
[2] Janine M. Benyus, Biomimicry: Innovation Inspired by Nature (New York: HarperCollins, 1997).
[3] Jong, Hans Nicholas. "In Eastern Indonesia, Communities Revive Customary Systems to Protect the Seas." Mongabay, May 2026.
[4] "The Manobo: Earth Stewards of Mindanao's River Valleys and Highlands Indigenous Peoples." Intercontinental Cry, icmagazine.org/indigenous-peoples/manobo/. Accessed 19 July 2026.
[5] Phatthanaphraiwan, Suwichan, and Alexander Greene. "Karen Environmental Stewardship of Natural Resources." The Journal of the Siam Society, vol. 111, no. 2, 2023, pp. 97–108.
[6] Rocha, Nazario. "'It Gives Life': Philippine Tribe Fights to Save a Sacred River from a Dam." Mongabay, May 2023.
[7] Santos-Ocampo, Nikki. Personal interview conducted via voice note. Balay Kasamtangan, 2026. Quoted with permission and reviewed prior to publication.
[8] Talavera, Sheldeen Joy. "Kaliwa Dam Project Set for 2028 Completion, MWSS Says." BusinessWorld, 11 Feb. 2026, bworldonline.com/corporate/2026/02/11/729708/kaliwa-dam-project-set-for-2028-completion-mwss-says/.