CONVERSATIONS: Bridging Knowledge Divides: Learning from the Frontlines of Climate Action

(Dr. Jowel Canuday delivered this piece during the “Unheard Voices of Climate Action Conversation” on 20 February 2026 at the Arete, Ateneo de Manila University. The forum was organized by ADMU’s Tagpuan Center for Dialogue, Research, and Collaboration, and MindaNews. MindaNews presented documentaries on climate action efforts of communities from the highlands of Upi in Maguindanao del Norte and Gumitan in Davao City, to the islands of Siargao in Surigao del Norte and Taganak in Tawi-Tawi).

Perhaps I should start by introducing Tagpuan Ateneo, one of the convening institutions of the conversation on Climate Action today. Tagpuan is the Center for Dialogue, Research, and Collaboration of the Ateneo de Manila University.  It is a three-year old center tasked by the University Board of Trustees to think and work out ways of raising collective capacities in bridging sharp societal divisions through scholarship and practical work. 

Our hope is to convene critically important conversations to find common ground and pursue shared solutions through common action. With dialogue and collaboration as cornerstone of action and framework of communication, Tagpuan Ateneo seeks to facilitate engagements with potential to general real-world impact on the most divisive and urgent challenges to the country and democracy. Tagpuan views dialogue and collaboration as a learning process, where we find opportunities to co-create with partners nuanced interventions to bridging societal and cultural divides.

In its early formation, Tagpuan collaborated with a civil society group called No Box Philippines in convening law enforcers, government, non-government, and international institutions to discuss in an interactive sight and sound setting the circumstances of people whose everyday life is touched by drugs.

A Tagpuan Fellowships program gathered fellows and partners in an action research that help facilitate open, brave, and discerning discussion and dialogue-based arts exhibits on the LGBTQIA situation within and among church workers, church volunteers, and the clergy in a Metro Manila parish in the spirit of synodality. 

In 2025, Tagpuan helped convene a multi-sector policy reform conversation among senior officers of the ministries of education, social services, health, Indigenous Peoples, and  civil society groups in the Bangsamoro Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao to help address deepening crisis in Early Childhood Care and Development. The exercise partly informed a policy reform paper, which Tagpuan produced with The Asia Foundation for the Second Congressional Council on Education of the Philippine Congress.

Two weeks ago, starting from this very room, Tagpuan Ateneo organized a bridging conversation among local government and BARMM ministries officers to address the governance gap and structural issues on early childhood care utilizing the power of arts and play. 

Today, we are collaborating with MindaNews, the online news organization based in Davao City, a digital interactive discussion and exhibition about what we consider as a deep chasm in our society in cultural and political terms. This is the divide between indigenous and community knowledge in marginalized regions of the country on one end and that of the centers of education and communication in political capitals such as Metro Manila on the other end.

The “Unheard Voices of Climate Action” project of MindaNews featured four journalistic and creative video documentaries of high-impact initiatives pursued by indigenous, coastal, and mountain dwelling communities in addressing climate change consequences. These are frontline actions of public interest but relatively less known not only to the wider community but also to academic and scholarly sectors.

At this point, I should disclose that while serving as director of Tagpuan Ateneo, I am also very much part of MindaNews serving as one of its leaders. I, working then as a journalist based in Davao City, helped found the institution 25 years ago with a group of then younger journalists (though several of them a tad bit senior than I am – but I’m just saying). With that position, I had the privilege of seeing through the MindaNews materials first hand as it was pieced together.

My early access to the materials, however, made me realize as an educator, an academic, and purveyor of dialogue, the value of the documentary to be brought into a wider and interactive arena of public conversation in a community such as the Ateneo and its partners.

Together with the colleagues at Tagpuan Ateneo and fellow faculty at the Ateneo de Manila, we viewed the lives and acts featured in the MindaNews films and photographs as a potential ground by which we can share thoughts  on longstanding but less acknowledged grassroots climate actions. These arts-based reports of indigenous and local wisdom open areas of solidarity with underrepresented communities that have been pushing the tide of climate impacts even as they disproportionately bear the devastating effects of climate change.

Through Unheard Voices of Climate Action, Tagpuan with MindaNews and Arete foster multi-sectoral, transdisciplinary dialogue on climate action by centering indigenous knowledge and local practices in Mindanao. We bring these knowledge into conversation with science, educational, policy, technological, and creative practices to advance inclusive and collaborative climate solutions.

With hope, I look forward to a meaningful conversation around these issues not as a goal but perhaps as a starting point of continuing engagements.

(Jose Jowel Canuday is the director of Tagpuan Ateneo Center for Dialogue, Research, and Collaboration of the Ateneo de Manila University. He also serves as president and chief executive officer of the Mindanao Institute of Journalism, the publisher of MindaNews. Canuday teaches research at the Ateneo and  holds a doctorate in social and cultural anthropology from the University of Oxford.)