By Siuchieh Sandra Tai
At COP30 in Belém, I navigated as both climate activist and anthropologist, discovering that the most transformative encounters happened not in negotiation halls, but under trees—where those excluded from formal power found each other and imagined different futures.
In November 2025, I flew to Belém, Brazil, for COP30 as a master’s student in Culture, Justice, and Environment at LSE’s Anthropology Department. I came to observe how Taiwanese NGOs build presence and legitimacy in international climate spaces where Taiwan officially doesn’t exist, pursing commitments to climate justice, just transition, and gender equity while navigating the complexities of exclusion from formal diplomatic recognition.
The flight itself became my first fieldnote. Somewhere over the Atlantic, our plane made an emergency landing in Spain’s Canary Islands. I looked around, expecting panic. Instead, passengers calmly continued working on their PowerPoint presentations—all climate-related. In that suspended moment between crisis and continuation, I understood something visceral: we’ve learned to witness catastrophe while performing normalcy. Most passengers knew the earth had breached 1.5°C. We knew major emitters were boycotting negotiations. We knew COP30’s sponsors included the fossil fuel companies destroying the Amazon we flew to discuss. Yet here we were, finishing our PowerPoints, performing our small parts in what many dismiss as theatre.
Being Taiwanese at COP: The Impossible Geography
My Taiwanese fellow civil society actors and I moved carefully through these spaces. Before entering any official venue, someone would remind us: “Don’t say ‘Taiwanese’ or ‘Taiwan national’ until we’re home.”
This creates strange cognitive dissonance. Taiwan is a robust democracy with 23 million people, our own government, five direct presidential elections. As the world’s biggest semiconductor producer and an island nation vulnerable to intensifying typhoons, our climate actions matter globally. Yet we are systematically excluded from signing the Paris Agreement or participating in COP negotiations—blocked by a larger power that has never governed us but claims us as its territory.
Our knowledge is welcomed. Gender, Indigenous knowledge systems, climate resilience—our specialties sit squarely in the official agenda. But our political existence must remain unspoken. We participate in panels, network with partners, contribute expertise, all while performing strategic invisibility about nationhood.
Taiwan is contributing but not enjoying rights to participate, receive equal information, have our work recognised. Though not a Paris signatory, Taiwan has its own climate strategy, net-zero goals for 2050, and provides climate adaptation support to our diplomatic allies—small island states like Tuvalu, Palau, the Marshall Islands, among the most vulnerable to climate change.
The organisation I primarily followed connects corporate donations with social welfare organisations and Indigenous communities to install solar panels, enabling energy autonomy and income generation. Recently they’ve trained mothers as energy auditors and young women as climate activists, some of whom attended COP. It’s practical work reflecting a clear belief: climate action should centre those typically underrepresented.
With help from North American civil society organisations who understood Taiwan’s predicament, this group secured Blue Zone badges—granting access to the restricted negotiation space where nation-states convened—and co-hosted an official side event on youth, women, and indigenous leadership in climate solutions. The theme position Taiwan as contributor to solutions, not supplicant seeking for recognition.
“A space for climate guardianship”—a backdrop poster of ANMIGA at the federal university hosting the “COP village,” which housed a dedicated camp for Indigenous peoples. Credit: Siuchieh Sandra Tai
Who Responded: A Pattern Emerges
Months before COP, this group reached out worldwide to civil society organisations and climate-gender practitioners. The response pattern surprised me, then made perfect sense. It was predominantly Indigenous peoples’ organisations from Latin America and Southeast Asia who replied eagerly. Especially Indigenous women’s groups. And grassroots organisations working in mountains and forests, far from capitals.
Perhaps they recognised in each other something unspoken: shared marginality. Those working from peripheries—geographically, politically, epistemologically—seemed to understand instinctively what it meant to navigate spaces not designed for us. To claim legitimacy without formal recognition. To insist on being seen despite structures of erasure.
Mexican Mountains: Where Climate Meets Cartel Violence
I met the team from Alianza Juvenil por la Sostenibilidad (AJUVES) at a crowded restaurant near the Green Zone. They work on mountain biodiversity conservation in Mexico.
One young woman lived in a town controlled by the world’s largest drug cartel. She mentioned this casually, the way you might mention traffic. There’s a curfew every night.
“People back home ask me why I do this work,” she said. Her smile was bitter. “They say: ‘Climate? That’s such an apolitical issue. So disconnected from the violence and death on our streets every day.'”
She looked directly at me. “But they’re wrong. They’re intimately connected. Industrial agriculture, land privatisation—these created the poverty that feeds the drug trade.”
Another pause. “But how do you talk about climate to people already impoverished by these structures? When people don’t know where tomorrow’s meal is coming from, how can they care about something that seems so distant?”
Her words cut through every abstraction I’d brought with me. Climate crisis is never separate from the material conditions of daily life: our gender, our ethnicity, our bodies, our negotiations with violence and survival.
Under the Tree: Meeting ANMIGA
The most transformative encounter happened at a state university partnering with COP. The organisation I was following had arranged to meet ANMIGA—The National Articulation of Indigenous Women Warriors of Ancestry—a coalition of Indigenous women from Brazil’s seven biomes.
“This is the best meeting room,” someone said when we arrived, gesturing to a large tree. Everyone sat beneath it. Two mothers at the circle’s edge held infants, occasionally interjecting—reminding me of the organisation’s approach, creating spaces where mothers can participate with their children.
Four ANMIGA members introduced themselves, each from radically different ecological and cultural worlds: Sandy Yusuro, Satere-Mawe from Amazonas rainforest. Eline Pureza, Pankararu from Pernambuco’s dry Caatinga forest. Jynhpo Kaingang from Rio Grande do Sul’s southern forests. Samara Vatxun, Xokleng from Santa Catarina’s Atlantic Forest fragments.
Each introduction followed a pattern I hadn’t seen elsewhere at COP. First, their name in their native language. Then tribal affiliation—some tribes still unrecognised by the Brazilian state. Then their biome, the ecosystem they’re part of. Then the specific oppressions they’ve experienced. Then the rights they’re fighting for.
Name, collective, environment, struggle—presented as inseparable parts of being.
These identities are profoundly political. Not cultural artifacts to preserve in museums, but living political positions forged through invasion, colonisation, land theft, systematic erasure of languages and relationships with land.
Sitting there, I wondered: Does gender function similarly? Does being from Taiwan—a nation that cannot speak its name—constitute a similar political ontology? We’re both more vulnerable to climate change, yet refuse victimhood. We both know what it means to speak truths power doesn’t want to hear.
“How do you see this year’s COP?” we asked. “Which groups are being included, excluded?”
“Fortunately,” Sandy said, “under Minister Sonia Guajajara’s leadership, we have more participation than ever. But realistically? Only about 15% of Indigenous peoples can enter the Blue Zone. Most of our exchange, storytelling, resistance—it happens in Green Zones—where civil society gathered to advocate and network—and in spaces outside the official venue. But the few who get into the Blue Zone? They convene with us out here. They carry our voices in.”
After our conversation, they invited us to visit the ancestral house multiple tribal groups had built together on campus. Women asked us to remove shoes and socks. “Feel the earth,” someone said. I felt mud, cool and damp, beneath my feet.
Inside sat five majés—healers who use medicinal plants and prayer for both body and spirit. They birth the community’s children. “We also heal land,” the lawyer told me through translation.
Then female shamans began singing and drumming. “We came to Belém to tell our story…”
They sang for us, but not for us—I understood this somehow. Our presence occasioned this moment, but they sang to themselves, to each other, to something beyond all of us. Articulating relationship with land through sound.
As the lawyer translated, I noticed friction—not failures exactly, but productive gaps. The women spoke of healing bodies, minds, and lands literally, not metaphorically. The translator would pause, try different words, approximate. Some things remained untranslatable. Maybe that’s not a problem. Maybe that incompleteness keeps something open that perfect understanding would close.
Under the trees where Taiwanese civil society groups and ANMIGA met to exchange knowledge and experience. Credit: Siuchieh Sandra Tai
The Third Space
President Lula called this the “Indigenous COP.” 2,500 Indigenous participants attended, a historic breakthrough. Yet contradictions multiplied. The summit nearly collapsed before delivering final agreement. Adaptation funding tripled to $120 billion annually, yet delayed until 2035. All nations agreed to a Just Transition Mechanism—a victory civil society celebrated, yet without attached funding. Fossil fuels weren’t mentioned in the key decision. Despite COP being sited in the Amazon, no significant deforestation measures made it into the agreement.
Meanwhile, Brazil simultaneously proclaimed Indigenous participation while drilling for oil at the Amazon’s mouth.
Yet amid these contradictions—breakthroughs and disappointments, visibility and erasure—something else was taking shape.
Under the tree at the ancestral house, women in slippers listened to shamans sing. ANMIGA members shared their own agenda—not one handed down from negotiation halls, but emerging from seven biomes, multiple struggles, collective refusal. A third kind of space kept opening. Not the centre. Not the periphery trying to get in. Something else entirely—defined by its own terms.
What brought us together—Taiwanese climate activists and Indigenous midwife-shamans, Mexican youth defending mountains amid cartel violence—wasn’t sameness. It was recognition of each other’s struggles, visions, refusal to accept the world as given.
The conversation under that tree wasn’t about demanding inclusion. It was about exchanging knowledge between people who’d already done the work—created movements, preserved ecosystems, kept communities alive despite everything designed to erase them.
Reflection: Incantations at the End of the World
Flying home, I kept thinking about that emergency landing. About passengers calmly finishing PowerPoints while crisis unfolded around them. About performing normalcy amid catastrophe.
Many dismiss COP as mere theatre. But I left Belém convinced performance is precisely the point.
Stefan Aykut and his co-researchers call this “incantatory governance.” Contemporary climate politics relies fundamentally on performative dimensions—signals, narratives, ritualised moments designed to align actors’ expectations toward low-carbon futures.
What I witnessed under that tree, Marisol de la Cadena would call “alter-politics”—politics that exceeds state recognition, rooted in excess, partial connections, careful negotiation with earth-beings. What I witnessed was people performing desired worlds into being. When Mexican youth protect mountain biodiversity amid violence. When Indigenous women sing land relationships. When negotiators fight to include “human rights,” “gender,” “care” in official texts. When Taiwanese activists navigate the impossible geography of being present yet unnamed.
These performances create normative orders, declare what worlds we desire.
Climate crisis is fundamentally entangled with identity—our names, genders, lands, bodies, visions of what worlds should become. The Amazon made this tangible: defending rivers is defending ourselves. Struggles for recognition are struggles for humanity’s heart.
That third space I kept noticing—self-defined, mutual, rooted in both place and solidarity—might be where real solutions grow. Not identity as division, but identity as ground from which we recognise each other, discover profound interconnection, speak desired worlds into being.
We perform for each other. And in that performance—incomplete, contested, contradictory—we find courage to continue.
References
Aykut, Stefan C., Edouard Morena, and Jean Foyer. 2021. “‘Incantatory’ Governance: Global Climate Politics’ Performative Turn and Its Wider Significance for Global Politics.” International Politics 58 (4): 519-540.
de la Cadena, Marisol. 2015. Earth Beings: Ecologies of Practice across Andean Worlds. Durham: Duke University Press.
* A previous version of this essay was published by the LSE Activism, Influence and Change Blog
