Since its first conference in 2018, MASSAMovement for Alternatives and Solidarity in Southeast Asia (South East Asia) has brought together communities, activists, and scholars across Southeast Asia, documenting over 60 case studies and building connections across borders. Ananeza (Angging) Aban has witnessed these developments first hand. Her commitment to grassroots learning began over two decades ago and has since evolved into an interconnected web of activism, community-led causes and academia.

For Angging, learning is a collective process shaped by struggle, resistance, and the everyday practices of communities. This learning happens particularly with those communities who are living at the margins of dominant development models. “Learning is forever,” says Angging. “It goes beyond academic institutions - it is learning with communities, learning from experiences, from the practices of peoples from below.”

As case studies accumulated through her work at the University of the Philippines’ Center for Integrative and Development Studies Program on Alternative Development, Angging and her colleagues and fellow activists began asking a new question: How do we move forward the learning process that would be foundationally rooted on the case studies about the peoples’ AlternativesAre activities and initiatives, concepts, worldviews, or action proposals by collectives, groups, organizations, communities, or social movements challenging and replacing the dominant system that perpetuates inequality, exploitation, and unsustainabiity. In the GTA we focus primarily on what we call "radical or transformative alternatives", which we define as initiatives that are attempting to break with the dominant system and take paths towards direct and radical forms of political and economic democracy, localised self-reliance, social justice and equity, cultural and knowledge diversity, and ecological resilience. Their locus is neither the State nor the capitalist economy. They are advancing in the process of dismantling most forms of hierarchies, assuming the principles of sufficiency, autonomy, non-violence, justice and equality, solidarity, and the caring of life and the Earth. They do this in an integral way, not limited to a single aspect of life. Although such initiatives may have some kind of link with capitalist markets and the State, they prioritize their autonomy to avoid significant dependency on them and tend to reduce, as much as possible, any relationship with them. that have so far been documented?

In response to that, MASSA was conceived. MASSA, or the Movement on Alternatives and Solidarity in Southeast Asia is derived from the word masa meaning masses or the people. The word masa is also used in Bahasa, Filipino, and Tetun, which are a few of the many languages used in the region.

Emerging from frustrations with state-led and elitist regionalism promoted by ASEAN, the MASSA represents a people-driven and people-led regional project. Instead of engaging in tokenistic dialogues with governments, MASSA focuses on people-to-people exchanges, collective learning, and strengthening movements through shared alternatives.

MASSA is young, fluid, and confronted with several challenges due to the politically dense climate and local conflicts in the region that interfere with its work. But its openness is also its strength. Learning continues through conferences, working groups, exchanges, and shared struggles - always shaped by the realities of people on the ground. Ultimately, its approach offers a powerful reimagining of learning and education: not as preparation for the system as it is, but as a collective process of building alternatives - together, from below.

One of MASSA’s most ambitious initiatives is the creation of a school for alternative development - made possible when a landless peasant movement, the Serikat Petani Pasundan in Indonesia offered to donate a portion of their reclaimed land for the project. Envisioned as a hybrid learning center, the school would serve marginalized students from across Southeast Asia, grounding them with lived struggle and ‘praxical’ reasoning rather than abstract theory.

For Angging, this is the natural outcome of amplifying learning from below: it is education that is collective, political, progressive, and rooted in community experience. “We are scholar-activists,” she emphasizes. “We do not just write and then leave. Learning has to lead somewhere - it has to build something.”

This understanding of learning illuminated her journey for over two decades, from grassroots activism to academic research and regional movement-building in Southeast Asia. Angging’s formative experiences at the regional level began in the early 2000s, and one of her exceptionally memorable engagements was her involvement in the Southeast Asia Peoples’ Festival in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. As a young activist and workshop facilitator during the festival, she was exposed for the first time to the diverse realities of communities across the region - many of them emerging from conflict, military violence and authoritarian rule, and deep structural inequality. “It was a breakthrough for me,” she recalls. “I was very young. It was my first exposure to a myriad of community issues and struggles in Southeast Asia. I felt honored to have glanced at the faces and heard the voices of the frontliners of these struggles.”

Cambodia was still navigating its post-Khmer Rouge transition, Timor-Leste had just won its independence from the Indonesian military occupation, and democratic struggles were unfolding across Southeast Asia. These encounters profoundly shaped her worldview. Learning, she realized, is fundamentally different when it springs from below - from people who are not only victims of violence and injustice, but also survivors and agents of resistance.

At the time, Angging did not see herself as an academic. She was first and foremost an activist, learning directly from social movements, from grassroots stories. Yet, these experiences planted the seeds for her work later: documenting, analyzing, and amplifying alternative practices that are often overlooked in mainstream research.

In academia, Angging explains, researchers are conventionally trained to focus on the problem, vulnerability, weaknesses, crisis, in other words, the ‘backwardness’ of communities. Research becomes a career tightly anchored on the quantity and impact factor of published manuscripts, rather than a longtime commitment towards transformative change. But her experiences taught her to look differently. It is a paradigm shift. “When we look at alternatives, we perceive people as a political force,” she emphasizes. “Even when deprived of liberty and a quality life, they still emerge. While fighting for their lives, they create outstanding alternative practices and innovations in the process.”

This led her to begin documenting the alternatives of women, peasants, and indigenous communities across Southeast Asia. Their stories are often undervalued and underreported, she notes, yet they offer critical insights into resilience, solidarity, and collective strength.

At the core of Angging’s work is a critique of neoliberal development in Southeast Asia - a model that hinges on economic growth, extraction, and capitalist interests that glaringly sidelines the needs and agenda of ordinary people. Alternative development, in her view, must emerge from those who are excluded by this system: peasants, indigenous peoples, informal workers, and marginalized communities.

Communities reclaiming territories through land occupation, building agroecological farming systems, establishing fair trading relationships between rural producers and urban workers, and redistributing food during crises - these are powerful examples that wither the notion of top-down approach as a development solution. They bolster community welfare, redistribute resources, recognize the value of women’s participation, and sustain life.

Angging is critical of how conventional social science approaches communities. Too often, she argues, academic research focuses on problems, deficits, and vulnerability - especially in the context of development interventions. While these realities are real, they obscure something equally important: the power, creativity, and political agency of communities themselves.

The alternatives that thrive among local communities are not marginal experiments, but effective development initiatives in their own right. Angging highlights how moments of crisis reveal the depth of community knowledge and organization. At the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic and in cases of ongoing political repression such as that in Burma/Myanmar, communities did not wait for external aid. What they executed was to immediately coordinate humanitarian responses, provide health care, secure food distribution among the affected population, and even ensure the continuing education of children and young learners under these extreme conditions. Such responses demonstrate that communities are not passive recipients of aid, but are active problem-solvers capable of responding swiftly and collectively to emergencies.

For Angging, the learnings from these local practices is the impetus of the documentation. “Communities inform us of pragmatic and long-term solutions. This requires scholarly attention. That community wisdom must feed movement-building, collective political projects, and also inspire scholars.” She further explained that these alternative development projects on the ground provide hope by reminding society that an alternative future is viable.

Further reading and learning

• More on MASSA
• Exploring alternative schools in Southeast Asia by Ananeza P. Aban
• Reimagining Development in Southeast Asia: Alternative Practices from the Grassroots and Social Movements, Edited by Jose Monfred C. Sy and Ananeza P. Aban

Credits

Banner photo credit: Øyvind Holmstad, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.