Equating the Non-economic: Revisiting Loss and Damage and Learning from Southeast Asia

A significant direction that current climate change movements consider is ‘loss and damage.’ This popularly began when scholars rethink mainstream financing to respond to climate change impacts on developing countries. However, to account for the non-economic is crucial to community experiences and perspectives. This chapter will answer the question: how do narratives and sentiments work in an issue that is highly technical and expert-oriented such as climate change? By illustrating the observations from a workshop in Bohol, Philippines, we argue that grassroots communities better express non-economic loss and damage in narratives or sentiments beyond accounting for monetary losses from the destruction of properties and resources. The main lesson from the workshop directs us to consider loss and damage financing that better pushes for responding to the non-economic rather than replicating the mainstream climate adaptation facilities. This further informs the discussions on identifying appropriate alternative measures and directions in thinking about addressing losses and damages from a participatory, grassroots-led, and genuine standpoint.