Introduction: The Problem of Invisibilization

Across South Asia, adolescent girls are frequently portrayed as passive victims of climate change—displaced, malnourished, and silenced. While these vulnerabilities are real and urgent, the dominant narrative obscures their agency. Adolescent girls are not merely surviving climate shocks; they are innovating and shaping collective responses. Yet their contributions remain systematically peripheral in climate governance, funding allocation, and research frameworks. This invisibilization is not incidental—it is structural.

Theoretical Lens: Feminist Political Ecology and Intersectionality

Feminist Political Ecology (FPE) offers a critical lens to understand how gender, power, and environment intersect. It challenges technocratic framings of resilience and foregrounds relational agency and situated knowledge. In South Asia, where caste, class, ethnicity, and religion mediate access to resources, intersectionality becomes essential.

For instance, girls from Dalit, Adivasi, or Muslim communities in India face compounded exclusions—not only from climate adaptation programs but also from the epistemic spaces that define what “resilience” means. As Reetu Sogani’s work on gender approaches in climate-compatible development in India illustrates, without intersectional design, climate programs risk reproducing the very inequalities they seek to address (UN Women/CDKN, 2016).

Evidence of Agency: Girls Leading Climate Action

Across South Asia, adolescent girls are already leading climate justice efforts—often without formal recognition. In Bangladesh, girls trained under BRAC’s climate-adaptive livelihoods program have taken up composting, aquaculture, and sweet potato cultivation, not just as survival strategies but as economic empowerment tools (BRAC Institute of Governance and Development, n.d.).

In Nepal and Pakistan, youth-led climate campaigns are gaining traction, with girls organizing community clean-ups, awareness drives, and even legal petitions. The Asia Youth Climate Justice Camp held in Dhaka in 2025 brought together adolescent activists from Bangladesh, Nepal, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, and Timor-Leste to demand grant-based climate finance and community-led adaptation strategies (Oxfam in Asia, 2025).

These are not isolated anecdotes. They are signals of a paradigm shift. These instances of leadership underscore that adolescent girls are not waiting to act—they are already driving climate response. The question, then, is how climate programs and governance structures can transform to recognize, resource, and amplify this leadership.

Methodological Critique: Who Designs, Who Validates?

Climate programs in South Asia frequently rely on externally designed toolkits, standardized indicators, and donor-driven validation protocols. These frameworks often quantify outputs—such as program reach or material distribution—while neglecting the more complex shifts in agency, power, and knowledge that girls experience. The central question remains: who decides what counts as impact?

In Bangladesh, BRAC’s initiative to co-design training modules with adolescent girls demonstrated the possibilities of participatory validation. The outcomes extended well beyond technical livelihood skills to include enhanced agency, intra-household negotiation power, and community leadership—dimensions of resilience that conventional metrics usually ignore. Such examples highlight that evaluation is not a neutral or technocratic exercise but a deeply political practice that determines whose knowledge is recognized and whose remains invisible.

From a Feminist Political Ecology perspective, this reliance on externally imposed metrics reproduces unequal power relations in knowledge production, privileging technocratic expertise over lived, gendered knowledge systems.

Yet across South Asia, these participatory models remain exceptions. Validation processes routinely exclude girls’ voices, relying instead on top-down definitions of success. This exclusion is not simply a methodological shortcoming—it constitutes epistemic injustice by denying adolescent girls recognition as legitimate knowledge producers.

To move towards epistemic justice, alternative validation practices are needed:

• Participatory Action Research (PAR): Girls co-design and test adaptation strategies, shaping both research and outcomes.
• Storytelling and Narrative Methods: Testimonies, digital diaries, and oral histories validate impact in ways that reflect lived realities rather than external checklists.
• Community and Deliberative Mapping: Girl-led mapping exercises visualize vulnerabilities and coping strategies, embedding local knowledge into planning systems.
• Peer Validation: Outcomes are recognized within girls’ networks and collectives, affirming solidarity, leadership, and shared political voice—dimensions often missed by donor assessments.

Adopting such approaches transforms evaluation from an extractive practice into a collaborative process of knowledge-making. It ensures that adolescent girls are not positioned merely as recipients of climate programs, but as co-architects of the epistemic frameworks that determine what resilience, adaptation, and justice mean in their contexts.

Transformative Pathways: From Tokenism to Justice

If we are serious about climate justice, adolescent girls must be reframed not as “at-risk populations” but as “at-promise leaders.” This requires moving beyond token participation toward systemic transformation across design, finance, governance, education, and knowledge production. The Adolescent Girls Agenda for Action in South Asia (UNICEF ROSA, 2024) underscores this imperative, calling for multi-sectoral strategies that center agency and leadership rather than vulnerability.

• Participatory Design: Programs must be co-created with girls, not simply for them. Their lived experiences constitute data, and their aspirations should guide strategic priorities.
• Climate Finance Justice: As the Oxfam youth delegation emphasized, climate finance must be understood as a justice claim, not benevolence. Funds should flow directly to community-led initiatives—circumventing bureaucratic bottlenecks that delay or dilute financing—so that girls can scale their locally grounded innovations.
• Narrative Power: Development communications must reposition girls as agents of change, rather than objects of pity. This discursive shift is not cosmetic; it is political. Narratives of leadership reconfigure how institutions allocate resources, how policies are framed, and whose knowledge is legitimized.
• Governance Inclusion: Adolescent girls must be embedded in decision-making bodies—climate planning committees, school eco-clubs, and local adaptation councils—transforming governance from an exclusionary exercise to one of shared authority.
• Climate Justice in Education: Initiatives like India’s Mission LiFE and MY Bharat eco-clubs are promising entry points, but they need to evolve into platforms for climate justice pedagogy. As UNICEF India (2025) notes, youth eco-clubs are expanding across the country, yet their potential for climate justice education remains underutilized. Schools must foster critical environmental literacy alongside leadership training to prepare adolescent girls as political actors.
• Epistemic Recognition: Girls must be recognized not only as beneficiaries but as theorists of resilience and justice. Research should move from extraction to co-production, generating knowledge products where girls’ analyses inform climate science, policy, and pedagogy.

Taken together, these pathways signal a shift from tokenistic participation toward structural transformation. They demand that adolescent girls in South Asia be recognized as central actors in shaping climate justice, not as afterthoughts or symbolic inclusions.

Toward Epistemic Justice

Adolescent girls in South Asia are not passive recipients of climate interventions—they are already leading adaptive practices, community mobilizations, and justice movements. What is required is not their “empowerment” but the dismantling of structural barriers that render their leadership invisible. Recognizing adolescent girls as climate justice actors means shifting the locus of authority: from institutions that seek to manage their vulnerability to the girls themselves, who are theorizing and practicing resilience in ways that are deeply situated, relational, and just.

To achieve this, climate policy and programming must embrace epistemic justice—the principle that adolescent girls are not merely sharing “voices” to be listened to, but producing knowledge that must be acknowledged as authoritative. This is not only an ethical imperative but a strategic one: without centering their insights, climate action risks replicating the inequalities it attempts to solve.

In reframing girls as at-promise leaders, South Asia has the opportunity to model a transformative climate justice approach for the world. The challenge is not to create space for them to lead—they are already exercising leadership across communities and movements—but to recognize, resource, and reconfigure systems that allow their leadership to shape the future of adaptation and justice.

References

• BRAC Institute of Governance and Development. (n.d.). Impact of skills development initiatives for adolescents on climate-adaptive livelihoods in South-Western Bangladesh. BRAC University. Retrieved from https://bigd.bracu.ac.bd/study/impact-of-skills-development-initiatives-for-adolescents-on-climate-adaptive-livelihoods-in-south-western-bangladesh
• Oxfam in Asia. (2025, August 15). Asia’s youth rise and demand climate justice including finance. Oxfam International. Retrieved from https://asia.oxfam.org/latest/press-release/asias-youth-rise-and-demand-climate-justice-including-finance
• UN Women, & Climate and Development Knowledge Network. (2016). Gender approaches in climate compatible development: Lessons from India. UN Women. Retrieved from https://wrd.unwomen.org/sites/default/files/2021-11/CDKN_India-Gender_report_WEB.pdf
• UNICEF India. (2025, July 11). India’s youth and climate change. UNICEF. Retrieved from https://www.unicef.org/india/stories/indias-youth-and-climate-change

UNICEF Regional Office for South Asia. (2024). Adolescent girls agenda for action in South Asia. UNICEF. Retrieved from https://www.unicef.org/rosa/reports/adolescent-girls-agenda-action-south-asia