Contesting Power, Creating Care Alliances: Feminist Potentials of Indigenous Community Assemblies

Climate assemblies have emerged globally as a prominent democratic innovation for addressing climate governance deadlocks. Their defining feature—sortition—promises fairness, inclusiveness, and equal opportunity for everyday people to participate. Yet recent debates have highlighted important criticisms: sortition risks privileging an atomised, decontextualised citizen who deliberates outside the social and political relations that structure everyday life and may struggle to translate individual deliberation into collective action rooted in local realities. In response to these critiques, the Global Assembly project has begun to experiment with community assemblies, a decentralised, territorially grounded model designed to complement rather than replace sortition-based mini-publics. Community assemblies resemble public hearings, participatory budgeting, and climate activism in that they embed deliberation within the social, cultural, emotional, and material infrastructures of communities. They offer a pathway to democratise climate governance not by abstractly selecting individuals, but by enabling communities to collectively define priorities, articulate knowledge, and mobilise action. This paper examines how the concept of community assemblies was enacted in eight Indigenous territories in Brazil, six led by Indigenous women from distinct biomes. These pilots offer a rare opportunity to analyse democratic innovations emerging from within communities rather than imposed externally. Drawing on grounded normative theory, in-depth interviews, participant observation, and image analysis, the paper reconstructs how Indigenous women interpreted, adapted, and transformed the idea of a “community assembly” in light of their political histories, territorial struggles, and gendered experiences. The analysis identifies four key findings. First, community assemblies became arenas for contesting power relations, as Indigenous women challenged external hierarchies, such as white-dominated local institutions, and internal patriarchal structures within their own communities, echoing feminist theories of counterpublic formation and power redistribution. Second, they served as intergenerational infrastructures of climate democracy, where elders, adults, and youth deliberated collectively and generated new initiatives, embodying feminist insights about more-than-human relationality and the political relevance of care and reproduction. Third, the assemblies enabled the appropriation and contestation of dominant political grammars, as participants reinterpreted state climate-policy categories through Indigenous epistemologies, thereby resisting epistemic injustice and colonial knowledge hierarchies. Fourth, community assemblies operated as spaces of material, emotional, and spiritual care, facilitating healing practices, ritual, solidarity, and alliance-building democratic capacities often neglected in institutional designs but central to feminist democratic theory. Taken together, these findings demonstrate that democratic innovations can be feminist when they are embedded in territorial relations, attentive to care infrastructures, and capable of redistributing power while sustaining counterpublic agency. At the same time, the Indigenous pilots reveal the challenges of realising these ideals: women organisers carried heavy gendered responsibilities, faced acute time and resource constraints, and often worked under economic precarity, all of which limited what the assemblies could achieve. Even so, they offer a concrete alternative for reimagining climate participation beyond the limits of sortition-based.