This article analyzes the gendered “invisible work” in Latin American and Caribbean climate collaborations. Using case studies from Jamaica, Panama, Colombia and Brazil, we examine the unacknowledged sociocultural and sociospatial labor of women, including mediation, network navigation and emotional management that underpins community projects and territorial defense. This work, often masked by tokenistic inclusion, is racialized and spatially embedded. We argue that effective, equitable transdisciplinary practice requires centering these contributions, moving beyond visual representation to genuinely value the relational and logistical labor that sustains socioecological collaboration in the context of climate challenges.
This is a qualitative study involving interviews, storytelling, documents, project reports, secondary data and field visits to sites in Colombia and Panama in 2022 and 2024. For these cases, reflective conversations were held both formally and informally with community members involved in local environmental initiatives. These discussions enabled self-reflection, identifying barriers and enablers of conservation. A key element was citizen action deliberative spaces (conversatorios de acción ciudadana), which integrated diverse knowledge into decision-making, with contributions through Canva presentations, stories, photos, testimonies, poems and autobiographies that highlighted social and environmental dynamics. In-depth interviews with women involved in transdisciplinary projects lasted about an hour, following an open-ended protocol to explore their experiences, roles, challenges, recognition, and perceptions of value. Each interview ended with a prompt to identify the “elephant in the room,” encouraging reflection on unnoticed tasks, invisible labor, and emotional or logistical contributions.
The findings highlight that women play a crucial role in climate and sustainability efforts, with activists, researchers and funding directors doing unseen work beyond official activities. Community leaders fighting violence organize resistance under fragile conditions, using media to protect and raise awareness. Researchers and funders build trust, provide emotional support and help marginalized groups access resources. These practices, advocacy, care, tactical engagement and networking are unpaid and unrecognized, but essential for maintaining collaborations and ensuring long-term project success.
Our feminist methodological framework insists on the critical importance of “on-the-ground” work and everyday practice. This is not merely an intellectual interest at the micro-level, but a political commitment to understanding sociality and collaboration not as abstract infrastructure, but as a concrete series of interactions in which power, difference and labor are negotiated. By making these routine exchanges the primary unit of analysis, we provide a helpful lens for making visible and, therefore, transforming the mechanisms of inequality that are reproduced or challenged in daily practice.
Given the growth of such projects in climate and socioecological research, our study offers a critical, actionable framework. The mechanisms we identify can be used to audit and improve ongoing collaborations. Those involved in collaborative research work can apply our analytical lens to document, expose and name this invisible work, conceptualized for decades yet persistently ignored. This moves beyond academic critique to a practice of social justice and care, translating longstanding theory into a concrete commitment to recognize, validate and reward the essential work that holds collaboration together.
Our study’s contribution lies in its robust case scope and regional breadth. We present a transferable approach for revealing invisible work within transdisciplinary collaborations. By engaging data from four countries with diverse participants, including academic, funders and Indigenous women, we identify consistent mechanisms of work erasure that cut across different epistemological affiliations and project types. This broad, comparative scope enables us to argue that the invisibility of work is not an isolated issue but a systemic feature of transdisciplinary collaborations.
This study contributes to the broader understanding of invisible work by connecting empirical evidence to actionable suggestions for funding agencies, academic institutions and policy actors. It exposes the “gendered elephant in the room,” the essential, often unacknowledged work performed predominantly by women that sustains transdisciplinary collaborations and underscores the need to move beyond symbolic recognition toward structural and procedural changes that value all forms of work, visible and invisible, in climate change research. Our intersectional framework of connecting the embodied, everyday work of women to the structural institutional logic is highly applicable. It offers a helpful tool for other fields where similar dynamics of invisible labor and epistemic exclusion hinder collaboration and reinforce inequality.
