Sheroic journeys

Vietnamese women's eco-trekking tales for climate action

Project summary

The Challenge

Ethnic minority and Indigenous women in Vietnam are facing climate change and development challenges that threaten their heritage and livelihoods.

The Approach

An ambitious action-focused, place-based approach, underpinned by a commitment to co-creation and enhancing critical climate literacy.

The Outcome

Ethnic minority and Indigenous women have sustainable livelihoods and become agents of change, preserving the environment, their rights and practices.

Lead academics

Funded by

Innovative climate action

We are supporting women in Northern Vietnam to use their lived experiences and Indigenous knowledge of nature conservation to develop sustainable livelihoods and act on climate change.

The Challenge

Hoang Lien National Park in Northern Vietnam is one of the most bio-diverse communities in Vietnam, however, the region faces many challenges due to climate change, making conserving these natural assets increasingly difficult. Intensive agriculture and large-scale tourism developments are also threatening the livelihoods and traditional ways of living amongst the region's ethnically diverse communities, particularly women.

Our challenge is to work with Indigenous and ethnic minority women in the Hoang Lien National Park buffer zones and support women-led, eco-trekking as a sustainable livelihood.

Women can then become agents for change in preserving the natural environment and their indigenous rights and practices.

Our research questions

What are the risks from climate change and non-sustainable development faced by ethnic minorities and Indigenous women in this region?
How can involvement in eco-trekking conserve the natural environment and preserve and protect the rights and cultural practices of ethnic minority and indigenous communities?
How can participatory and creative approaches, including storytelling, address these challenges, fostering climate consciousness, promoting environmental stewardship, and facilitating the co-creation of community-based solutions?
How can the stories of the women be harnessed to inform and influence public engagement alongside government adaptation and planning to reduce climate vulnerabilities and resilience in this region and beyond?

The Approach

Because of the commitment to co-creation, our research is designed to involve an ongoing process of knowledge exchange and learning.

Professor Lisa Jones

The research uses de/anti-colonial and indigenous methodologies, placing the worldviews of those participating centre stage. This acknowledges the damage that the imposition of Western paradigms of knowledge production may have on the research and the communities in which we operate.

Instead, the project employs an ambitious action-focused, place-based methodological approach underpinned by a commitment to co-creation and the enhancement of critical climate literacy. The project uses participatory action research techniques to encourage sharing of traditional and indigenous knowledge and creative storytelling. This new knowledge informs eco-trekking experiences and through this, the women taking part in the research become involved in climate action.

This approach builds on previous work, focusing on youth-led climate action in the Lao Cai province and brings together the social sciences, arts, humanities and environmental sciences. This is research conducted ‘with’ not done ‘to’ communities which recognises lived experience as expertise, especially of traditionally underserved, underrepresented and under-resourced communities

The Impact

For thousands of years, storytelling has been used to educate, inform, and entertain. We foreground storytelling due to its power as a catalyst for transformative change. We utilise a solution-orientated storytelling focus, advocating for stories of hope framed from a climate action rather than a problem/challenge perspective.

The research will develop an understanding of how women contribute to climate action, stewardship and preservation of the natural environment in and beyond Hoang Lien National Park. This is through adopting and promoting sustainable livelihoods and passing on and preserving Indigenous knowledge and practices for future generations.

This project will develop and sustain eco-trekking/eco-tourism initiatives that not only offer more sustainable alternatives to mass tourism but play an important role in educating tourists about both their impact on a changing climate as well as raising awareness of and advocating for the preservation of natural assets both within and beyond Vietnam.