Since COP26 in Glasgow, the issue of direct funding for Indigenous Peoples and Local Communities (IPsLCs) has increased as the climate solution, and as the answer to the climate crisis has threatened globally. In Asia, there has been growing direct funding support to IPsLCs, as shown by the research; they are guardians for the rest of the tropical forest in the world. Direct funding refers to the mechanism of delivering financial resources directly to IPsLCs-led organizations, communities, and projects, bypassing traditional intermediaries like government agencies, international NGOs, or UN agencies. It is a strategy designed to reduce bureaucratic hurdles, ensure funds reach the frontline, and empower IPsLCs as decision makers and leaders in climate action rather than merely recipients. This panel will discuss and theorize direct funding for IPsLCs in Asia including Indonesia as a practice of decolonial refusal within the ruins of extractive development.
This panel asks: What does it mean to refuse development not merely rhetorically but infrastructurally? How does control over financial flows enable alternative political ontologies of land, value, and care to emerge within landscapes already damaged and dominated by monocultures, mining, and carbon markets? And how do such refusals operate from within, rather than outside, extractive capitalism?
Engaging “Post-Extractive Ecologies and the Ruins of Development,” this panel approaches decolonial refusal as generative rather than oppositional. Anthropological attention to IPsLCs-led redistribution, regenerative livelihoods, and territorial defense demonstrates how direct funding can materialize post-extractive ecologies in damaged environments. The colonial experience and operations of extractivism make Indonesia and some countries in Asia an important locations to examine how refusal transformed the function of finance from an instrument of extraction into a medium for sustaining diverse futures beyond colonial-development teleologies.