Description
Amid growing attention to various forms of climate adaptation, the transformative role of women’s collectives particularly from the Global South has rarely been examined in depth. This paper aims to fill this gap by systematically analyzing how Kerala’s(South-Indian Coastal State) pioneering women’s collectives like Kudumbashree, Thanal, Fibrent, and coastal panchayat initiatives are leading climate adaptation by leveraging grassroots innovation, local knowledge, and participatory governance. The core research question is: What strategies and mechanisms have enabled these diverse organisations to transition from local climate resilience projects to shaping scalable, policy-ready models of adaptation, and how can their successes be translated globally?
The methods would include interviews, impact assessments, and workshops by employing feminist political ecology and participatory action research as methodology. These will include women groups, elected female leaders and research allies. Through the triangulation of these approaches, this paper aims to gauge the extent to which the models of Kerala, such as wetland conservation, agroecological food systems, zero-waste practices, climate-resilient micro-enterprises and gender-mainstreamed policy, enhance community resilience and adaptive capacity. These will be evaluated in terms of impact, replication and incorporation into policy.
This research addresses an international research gap. Women groups in Kerala have been successful in responding to the disaster, ecological recovery, and sustainable livelihoods, but they are still ignored in the mainstream climate adaptation models. The research provides solutions to pressing demands of locally based yet globally applicable climate-resilience plans by fully documenting these models and creating practicable blueprints to policy makers and funders.
