Feminist Transnational Solidarity: An Antidote to Ecocide

Published by AWID in 2025, this zine grew out of sharing circles with climate activists from Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean between June and October 2023. It takes “ecocide” as a starting point without reducing ecological crisis to environmental indicators or resource management. Participants place ecological destruction within relationships among land, livelihoods, migration, biodiversity and social life: what is damaged is not only an ecosystem, but also the communities whose ways of living, remembering and organizing depend on it.

The zine’s feminist perspective is clearest in its refusal to cast “women” as a single category of climate victim. It attends to women and LGBTQIA+ people in fishing communities and other place-based livelihoods, and to the ways colonial relations, resource extraction and forced migration intersect. The point is not to collapse different experiences into one story of the Global South. Rather, apparently similar environmental pressures take different forms through particular histories, divisions of labor and political arrangements. Solidarity therefore cannot mean speaking for others; it requires understanding how differences are produced and letting local organizers define their own priorities.

The publication brings together distinct practices: sorghum in Indonesia as a response to questions of food and agriculture, agroecology in the Philippines, renewable-energy initiatives in Vietnam, and the protection of native seeds in Honduras. Each places ecological resilience in community knowledge and livelihood relations. These are not ready-made “best practices” that can be lifted out of context, and the zine does not present them as projects assessed against a common measure of success. Their editorial force lies in placing them alongside one another so readers can ask how seeds, energy, food and land are connected to decision-making power, the distribution of transition costs and the recognition of knowledge.

Nor does the zine reduce engagement with the state and grassroots action to mutually exclusive choices. Amasai Jeke, a participant from Fiji, frames the need both to engage state structures and to remain rooted in grassroots practice; the difficulty of securing long-term, flexible resources for alliances also remains visible. For FemRes, the value is not in romanticizing transnational solidarity but in noticing its material requirements: translation, resources and accountability. If funding and agendas continue to be set unilaterally by outside institutions, solidarity can reproduce the very power relations it opposes. Read it alongside our feminist perspectives on food sovereignty and Pollution Is Colonialism to connect land, knowledge and resource governance.

This is a concise advocacy zine synthesized from sharing circles, not a representative regional survey, a climate-science report or a standardized evaluation of the initiatives it describes. Its transnational narrative is best read with each example’s location and context intact, rather than as one universal experience of “women and climate.” AWID provides the full zine and project context.