Envisioning climate politics from below: Rural Indonesia in the shadow of climate change

Climate Change is political ‘all the way down’. Yet, the nature of the ‘everyday politics’ emerging from below as climate change impacts rural societies remains underexamined. How do increasing climate variability and climate policies shape agrarian politics and rural futures? How, in turn, do agrarian politics, practices and aspirations for specific rural futures influence the perception of climate change and the implementation of climate policies on the ground? This article examined how rural actors, facing increasingly unstable meteorological conditions under climate change, advance their livelihood aspirations across several rural contexts in Indonesia. We found that largely unacknowledged ontological pluralism and future-making processes mediate rural people's experiences and responses to climate change and become decisive factors in shaping everyday politics and agrarianecological change over the long run across rural Indonesia. Building on ethnographic research, this study argued that notions of everyday politics must be expanded to account for the ontological complexities and anticipatory strategies employed by rural communities in the context of climate change, thereby revealing a more nuanced understanding of how local practices and institutions navigate and shape their futures.