Keywords

1 The Pluriverse of the Anthropocene

The thesis that the appearance of humankind marks the beginning of a distinct geological time unit has been entertained since the early twentieth century, under terms such as “Psychozoic,” “Anthropozoic,” “Noosphere,” “Gaia,” and the “Anthropocene”—a word that is known to have been used by Soviet scientists in the mid-twentieth century. The Anthropocene drew renewed attention in the early 2000s, after Paul J. Crutzen proposed it as the name of a new geological epoch, which can be distinguished from the Holocene by the emergence of Anthropos, or humans, as a geological force whose activities on the planet generate apparent and measurable effects (Crutzen, 2016).

Exactly when the Anthropocene begins, if it can be given a more formal stratigraphic definition at all, has been a matter of debate (Malhi, 2017). Some proponents of the Anthropocene thesis have suggested its pre-historic beginnings in the human discovery of fire, adoption of enhanced hunting-gathering techniques, and the domestication of plants and animals. Others have regarded the onset of modernity and the Industrial Revolution, with the increase in the use of fossil fuel and mass manufacture, as the beginning of the Anthropocene. Amidst the increasing interest in the thesis that human presence has impacted the planet to a sufficient degree to merit its recognition within Earth’s geological timescale, the Anthropocene Working Group (AWG) was established in 2009 as a part of the Subcommission on Quaternary Stratigraphy—a constituent body of the International Commission on Stratigraphy—with the aim of engaging in a more in-depth investigation that should lead toward the identification of the formal basis of a rupture between the Holocene and the Anthropocene. What the group sought to determine was a global marker in the environment that indicates the start of a distinctive geological epoch, a novel “golden spike.”

Today, it is widely accepted that the dramatic increase in anthropogenic activities affecting the planet beginning in the 1950s, often referred to as the “Great Acceleration,” marks a significant turning point in planetary history (Steffen et al., 2015). The extent to which anthropogenic activities can be considered geological forces is such that a term such as “teleconnections”—far-distant perturbations that prove to be coupled by hidden bonds—that had been used to refer to fluctuations in atmospheric pressure and earthquakes in geographically distant areas can plausibly be expanded to encompass anthropogenic phenomena that might include the flow of capital or energy consumption (Davies, 2016). More recently, the Covid-19 pandemic that began in 2020, too, has been described by some as the “disease of the Anthropocene” (O’Callaghan-Gordo & Antó, 2020)—an expression designed to highlight the fact that many of the conditions of possibility of the Covid-19 pandemic, from cross-species transmission of viruses to the rapid appearance and spread of variant strands, were in large part human-made. It is no exaggeration to say that “human societies are now among the most powerful of the ecological forces that operate on, above, and below the surface of the earth” (Davies, 2016, p. 10).

In light of its primary aim of producing an understanding of the Anthropocene toward its formal inclusion in geological research, the AWG had, during the first several years of its existence, tended to exclude research and findings outside the discipline of geology, not least to minimize ambiguity and confusion in defining the Anthropocene in formal geological terms (Zalasiewicz et al., 2019). However, the Anthropocene thesis has quickly crossed disciplinary boundaries and is now a major basis for research in disciplines such as sociology, political theory, cultural studies, history, and philosophy (Clark & Yusoff, 2017; Davis & Turpin, 2014; Haraway et al., 2016; Malhi, 2017), as well for the increasingly important multidisciplinary research program of Earth System Governance (Biermann et al., 2012). We are in full agreement with Christopher Hohnë’s view that “emerging economies need to become more central to the Anthropocene discussion, as they themselves have become strong drivers of global environmental change” (Höhne, 2018, pp. 124–125). The contemporary discourses around the idea of the Anthropocene are particularly relevant for Indonesia, as Hohnë points out, for the country now stands among the largest emitters of greenhouse gas in the world, with a historical per capita emission that is greater than that of the European Union.

Given the interest that the Anthropocene thesis has garnered across a variety of disciplines, it has, naturally, been taken up in different ways, and the ultimate import of various discussions around the Anthropocene does not necessarily cohere into a single vision or set of proposals. Nevertheless, in our view, the most interesting and novel perspectives opened by the Anthropocene thesis can only proceed from the recognition that, despite having its conceptual origins in recognition of the far-reaching impact of human intervention on the planet, the Anthropocene, as such, is not an anthropocentric concept (Mahaswa & Widhianto, 2020). While the Anthropocene thesis conceives humans as a geological force and the possible source of geological changes, it also dislocates, precisely by placing humans alongside nonhuman forces and entities, the exceptionality of the human that underpins anthropocentrism. As Jeremy Davies, defending the anti-anthropocentric implications of the Anthropocene thesis, writes: “Humanity is not at the center of the picture of the Anthropocene, opposing, by its powers of mind, the passive matter center that encircles it. Instead, human societies are themselves constructed from a web of relationships between human beings, nonhuman animals, plants, metals, and so on” (Davies, 2016, p. 7).

In this chapter, we introduce one of the ideas that has gained prominence over the past decade in discussions of the Anthropocene thesis: the idea of the pluriverse. In our view, the very condition of the Anthropocene itself can serve as an opportunity to give serious consideration to the notion of the pluriverse and to take it as the ontological ground of human—and indeed nonhuman or “more-than-human”—existence. In the first part of this chapter, we draw from some of the key literature on the pluriverse and studies on non-Western, indigenous worlds that have appeared within the past decade to elaborate the idea of, and the motivation for, the pluriverse. According to this growing body of literature, to understand the condition of the Anthropocene from a pluriversal perspective is to recognize that reality is composed of not one but many worlds, some of which have long been threatened to extinction by the domination of one particular world characterized by the pursuit of Western-centric modernization and capitalist exploitation. In this respect, the proposition of the pluriverse as the ontological ground of the Anthropocene is an ethically motivated one—a point that we illustrate by adapting the idea of the “differend” from the French philosopher Jean-François Lyotard (1989). The second half of this chapter considers how the discussions on the pluriverse may be relevant in the Indonesian context. In particular, we propose that the “ontological politics” elaborated by some of the key thinkers of the pluriverse offers a novel perspective for approaching the recent phenomenon of “adat revivalism” in Indonesia.

2 “Many Worlds Make Us”: A Pluriversal Politics

Accepting the pluriverse as the ontological ground of the Anthropocene implies a stance that goes a step beyond pluralism. Whereas the latter implies the acceptance of “many worlds” qua social spaces constituted by culturally different human groups, the pluriverse—as a subversion of the notion of universe—implies an explicit recognition of many kinds of worlds, some of which may allow for “social” relations that are constituted by “more-than-human” beings. A pluriversal outlook of this kind is called for by the declaration of the Zapatista movement, reproduced below:

Many words are walked in the world. Many worlds are made. Many worlds make us. There are words and worlds that are lies and injustices. There are words and worlds that are truthful and true. In the world of the powerful there is room only for the big and their helpers. In the world we want, everybody fits. The world we want is a world in which many worlds fit. […] Softly and gently we speak the words which find the unity which will embrace us in history and which will discard the abandonment which confronts and destroys us. Our word, our song and our cry, is so that the dead will no longer die. We fight so that they may live. We sing so that they may live. (“Fourth Declaration of the Lacandón Jungle,” Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional (1996), as translated in de la Cadena & Blaser, 2018, p. 1)

The Zapatista declaration has been a reference point in discussions on the pluriverse within and without academia (de la Cadena & Blaser, 2018), and the message ensconced therein merits further elaboration. An Australian court case in the 1990s discussed by Gelder and Jacobs (1998) can serve as a useful point of entry for understanding the motivation for and implications of the vision of “many words” and “many worlds” invoked by the Zapatista.

The case in question involves two plaintiffs: a construction company that is set on developing an island, and a group of aboriginal women claiming that the island is their sacred site. While the court is willing to hear the case put forth by the aboriginal women, the women’s lawyer explains that according to the aboriginal beliefs, the meaning of the site must remain a secret transmitted over the generations through the maternal lineage and that the disclosure of the secret to anyone else would desacralize the site. If the aboriginal women do not provide the evidence demanded by the court, they lose the case, but if they were to provide the evidence, they would also lose the case as the site would have lost its holiness in their eyes. The objects referred to by the utterances of the aboriginal women are simply nonexistent for others in the courtroom. This sort of impasse, which the French philosopher Jean-François Lyotard proposes to call “differend” (Lyotard, 1989), signifies a clash between the incommensurable ways in which particular things are disclosed to, or experienced and handled by different groups or individuals—processes that would be described by key thinkers of the pluriverse in terms of “world-building” practices, or worldings (Anderson & Harrison, 2012; Mercier, 2019).

Lyotard suggests that the task of philosophy is to bear witness to cases of differend and to help invent new idioms common to the parties implicated in those cases. As a differend attests to the inadequacy of the expressive potential of prevailing discourses, its resolution would only be possible under the invention of new discourses. “To give the differend its due,” write Lyotard, “is to institute new addressees, new addressors, new significations, and new referents in order for the wrong to find an expression” (Lyotard, 1989, p. 13). Justice, Lyotard suggests, consists in the invention of what he calls a new “phrase-universe” that would contain new referents, addressees, and modes of legitimation, that is, a new system of meaning, or discourse, that cannot but be different from any such system available to the two parties.

Lyotard’s writing—Le Différend was published in France in 1983—predates the advent of the contemporary discourse of the Anthropocene and the pluriverse by at least a couple of decades. Lyotard did not make the further step of characterizing the differend as a notion that points beyond the clash of different discourses, implicitly prioritizing thereby the linguistic construction of objectivity. Contemporary discussions on the pluriverse, however, draw from theories of “new materialism” that have gained a significant foothold in philosophy and social sciences in the past two decades, asserting, in effect, that the differend evinced in the preceding case of the aboriginal sacred site as a matter of being. According to this view—and the further step taken here is arguably the logical outcome of Lyotard’s thought—it is not that there are different, sometimes incompatible, manners of “looking at” or “talking about” one and the same external world. Rather, the difference goes, so to speak, all the way down: there is in fact a plurality of worlds and world-building practices involved in the impasse because one world may encompass entities that cannot be entities of another world, such as islands that bear ancestral secrets that resist transmission except to the select few.

The increasing significance in contemporary societies of clashes of the kind describable in terms of the “ontologized” version of the Lyotardian differend underpins the need to conceptualize what Marisol de la Cadena and Mario Blaser—drawing from ideas elaborated by philosopher Isabelle Stengers—have called “ontological politics,” which they define as an “imaginary for a politics of reality, and a field that stands where political economy and political ecology, formulated with ideas of nature and economic growth, are insufficient (at times even unable) to think antagonisms that, for example, involve things like mountains and forests that emerge as resources through some practices but also as persons through other practices” (de la Cadena & Blaser, 2018, p. 5). For too long, those who advocate the need for ontological politics would argue, it has been taken for granted that we already know which entities deserve our attention when so much of the struggles of indigenous peoples have involved getting governments and multinational corporations to recognize the existence of the entities that integral to their worlds. In other words, before we can even speak of conservation and sustainability, what has to be determined is what is there to be recognized, conserved, and sustained. That the determination of this matter must involve the expression of and interaction between a plurality of potentially irreconcilable worldings renders ontological politics an irreducible dimension of contemporary environmental governance.

The pluriverse, understandably, is a recurrent theme in today’s activist and progressive academic circles. In some cases, the idea has been taken up outside activist movements and scholarly publications, even receiving state recognition. Catherine Walsh (2018), for example, has shown how the Ecuadorian Constitution has implemented the indigenous concept of Buen Vivir—roughly translatable as “living well” or “collective well-being”—to curtail rampant developmentalism, a concept and word that, according to Walsh, “does not exist in the cosmovisions, conceptual categories, and languages of indigenous communities” (Walsh, 2018, p. 184). Concepts associated with indigenous worldings or cosmovisions unassimilable to the developmentalism enabled by the Western conception of modernity are found elsewhere in Latin America and beyond (Peredo, 2019). To list a few: according to anthropologist Francis B. Nyamnjoh, the universe of West Africa’s Yoruba people is one in which consciousness “can inhabit any container—human and non-human, animate and inanimate, visible and invisible” (Nyamnjoh, 2017, p. 28), hence one that allows for a variety of relations between humans and nonhumans alien to the modern, anthropocentric, world; the Southern African value of human mutuality has been elaborated around the notion of ubuntu (Binsbergen, 2001); the Indian concept of swaraj implies a unique view of self-reliance and self-governance (Kothari, 2018); an understanding of the relation between nature and human beings called Pachamama—sometimes rendered (though not unproblematically) in English as “Mother Earth”—is an integral part of the Andean imaginary (Mamani-Bernabé, 2015). Notions drawn from indigenous cosmovisions have inspired socially transformative initiatives across the world that seek to subvert prevailing modes of environmental governance (Chandler, 2019; Chandler & Reid, 2019; de la Cadena, 2010; Escobar, 2020; Kallis et al., 2020), which verge on—to borrow a concept popularized by the Cameroonian philosopher Achille Mbembe—a necropolitical alliance between state and capital.

In the Anthropocene, the magnitude of human intervention is such that it has become capable of inducing planetary-scale changes, with repercussions that cannot always be foreseen (Davies, 2016). As the climate crisis of our time demonstrates, some of the repercussions of anthropogenic activities are threatening for humans themselves, indeed, for the existence of the dominant world—one that the Zapatista declaration describes as “the world of the powerful”—governed by logics of capital and resource development. Under such a condition of a new terra incognita, calls to recognize many kinds of worlds highlight the nature and extent of the threats of the Anthropocene that remain unrecognizable to the dominant world. If the Anthropocene thesis enjoins us to see that humans have become capable of destroying a world, the pluriversal paradigm on the Anthropocene enjoins us to see that there are worlds that are under threat or have already been destroyed by the very same process that threatens the dominant world. Emerging from the peripheries of a world founded on Western-centric modernity and developmentalism, pluriversal ontological politics are nothing less than struggles to preserve worlds and the human and nonhuman beings within them. From the pluriversal perspective, negligence of the destruction of these “other” worlds while the dominant world values its self-preservation constitutes a wrong, an unjustifiable outcome of a solipsistic anthropocentrism built into Western rationalism that had closed the dominant world responsible for the destruction of a plurality of worlds off from worlds other than itself.

Activists and thinkers drawn to the idea of the pluriverse have sought to articulate the possibility of a convivial co-existence of worlds, an arrangement that would allow everyone to coexist with dignity and peace, without being subjected to diminishment, exploitation, and misery (Kothari et al., 2019). In seeking such a possibility (unknown, so far, to the dominant world of “lies and injustices”), some theorists have noted fundamental proximity in the relational ontologies that underpin Daoist and Buddhist worldviews as well as the Andean cosmovision (Querejazu, 2016). These relational ontologies emphasize, according to Querejazu (2016), the balanced unity, complementarity, and reciprocity between entities—no one entity can exist without others, and it is only in co-existence that an entity can be said to exist in full. This relationality promotes, in turn, fundamental equality in every aspect of a variety of relations that can form between the human, the natural, the spiritual, and the cosmic. The pluriverse that emerges from the Andean cosmovision would be one that encompasses not only human worlds but also nonhuman worlds, in which souls of the dead, forces of nature, and supernatural beings exist as autonomous entities with which humans can communicate through “the language of symbols, rituals and special skills that some humans can develop” (Querejazu, 2016, p. 9).

Further elaborations of ontological precepts embedded in indigenous worldings have gone hand-in-hand with developments in contemporary philosophy. Aside from the aforementioned Stengers, the thoughts of Donna Haraway (2015), Rosi Braidotti (2019), Manuel DeLanda (2019), Bruno Latour (2014, 2017), and Graham Harman (2018) have been influential in fostering sophisticated inquiries into the ontological being of the pluriverse. Notwithstanding the differences between their theories, what these thinkers advocate is a “flat” ontology wherein the relation between the human and the nonhuman would be one in which one enjoys neither ontological nor ethical primacy over the other (Harman, 2018; Morton, 2013). What new perspectives on the relation between the human and the nonhuman these ontologies will open awaits to be seen, but the broad ethical implication of the pluriversal perspectives can be stated succinctly: the ethics of the pluriverse is an ethic for worlds in which humans would occupy a much more humble place.

3 Towards an Ontological Politics of Environmental Governance in Indonesia

Indonesia is one of the most culturally diverse countries in the world, comprising over a thousand ethics groups spread across more than 17,000 islands, though the majority of the country’s population resides in the five main islands of Sumatra, Java, Sulawesi, Kalimantan (Borneo), and Papua (New Guinea), and the archipelagos of Nusa Tenggara and Maluku. The cultural diversity of the archipelago posed a challenge for Indonesia’s founding figures, who wished to found a modern state wherein the people would come to share a common national civic identity regardless of the differences between their ethnic and regional backgrounds. Confronted with the task of establishing a political unity on the culturally and geographically diverse archipelago, Indonesia’s nationalist leaders relied on the strategy of establishing national unity through the promulgation of a single national ideology, the Pancasila, which was promoted as the embodiment of the shared values, emotions, and the singular Weltanschauung of the people of the archipelago (Bourchier, 2015). The essence of the vision of Indonesia that has been pursued and legitimated through appeals to the state ideology since the country’s independence is perhaps best expressed by its official motto, Bhinneka Tunggal Ika (Unity in Diversity): Indonesia would be a country in which ethnic minorities retain a large degree of cultural autonomy, but only in so far as they do not undermine the unnegotiable principle of national unity.

The role and consequences of the Pancasila ideology, which has often been used as an “inclusive myth” to which Indonesian leaders appeal in order to mend social disharmony, are well documented (O’Shannassy, 2010, p. 54). However, whereas most scholarships on the exclusionary or oppressive dimension of Pancasila and the discourse of national unity both within and without Indonesia tend to focus on its use by the state and ruling elites to suppress their ideological rivals and supposed threats to social unity such as political Islam, communism, and Western liberalism (Iskandar, 2016), Pancasila has not been subjected to as much critical scrutiny from the perspective opened by the Anthropocene and the pluriverse. Still, the beginnings of critical discussions of that sort can be found in some recent works by Indonesian scholars. For example, political theorist Shofwan Al Banna Choiruzzad (2020) has argued that one of the conditions of possibility of Anthropocene in the Indonesian context has been that of anthrocentrization, understood as the “gradual process of replacement/displacement or domination of nonanthropocentric political-economic governance, in which the relationship of humans with nature is based on respect and harmony, by anthropocentric political-economic governance, in which humans are at the centre and nature is exploited for the interest of humans” (Choiruzzad, 2020, p. 144). Choiruzzard traces the beginning of this process of anthropocentrization of political and economic governance to colonial state-building in the mid-nineteenth century that was designed with the singular aim of more efficient exploitation of resources through the creation of a unified market, which in turn displaced the systems of ecological governance found in indigenous communities.

Post-independence Indonesia witnessed further institutionalization of anthropocentric governance. In particular, the relentless pursuit of a developmentalist agenda during the three decades of the authoritarian New Order regime (1965–1998) had the effect of further marginalizing indigenous communities. Despite the state’s formal recognition of the adat—an expansive concept that refers to the beliefs, customs, and traditions of the country’s diverse indigenous peoples (van der Muur et al., 2019)—law that governs such communities, the New Order insisted, partly to consolidate its power, on the congruence of its dirigiste model of national development and the practical implementation of Pancasila (Robison, 1996). The elevation of the Pancasila in the early 1980s to the status of asas tunggal—the sole ideological foundation—of all social forces, including political parties and religious organizations, ensured that indigenous voices would find little representation in national politics. National unity, while imposed most aggressively during the New Order (Abdullah, 2003; Ulum & Hamida, 2018), is an ideal that continues to govern the Indonesian state’s stance toward diversity, according to which cultural, religious, and other forms of diversity are secondary to the ideological homogeneity represented by Pancasila and the official motto as interpreted by the central government in Jakarta.

Decentralization has been one of the prime characteristics of the post-Reformation era that followed the fall of the New Order. The devolution of authority from the center to the peripheries that followed the passing of the landmark Decentralization Laws in 1999 loosened the power and control of the central government and exacerbated the effects of globalization, such as fragmentation, decentralization, and internationalization of state apparatuses (Nordholt & Klinken, 2007; O’Shannassy, 2010; van der Muur et al., 2019). The devolution of power, with the concomitant deterioration of the ideological grip of Pancasila, raised new challenges for Indonesia’s central government, one of the most notable manifestations of which is the emergence of indigenous social movements around adat.

“Adat revivalism” is one of the most prominent forms of political undertaking in the current post-Reformation Indonesia. It is aimed at “transcending uneven socio-political conditions and economic relations” (Tyson, 2011, p. 653) by appealing for the recognition of the rights of the indigenous groups that have been victimized by the developmentalist ideology that had remained hegemonic in Indonesia for much of its modern history. The struggles of indigenous communities present very different worldviews and world-building practices than the dominant versions. According to Tyson, adat revivalism is “a social construction, a matter of becoming indigenous based on selective representations, articulations and deployment of the past” (Tyson, 2010, p. 5), which harbors the possibility of empowering indigenous populations to challenge clientelism—dependency relationship between the weak and the powerful where the former is led to sell their autonomy to the latter—that persists in rural Indonesia, deepen local people’s participation in community mapping, and increase their representation in regional and national governments. Moreover, the revival of traditional cultural practices outside Java, such as in western Flores (Erb, 2007) and Sumatra (Biezeveld, 2007), can be seen as reactions against the Javanese political and cultural hegemony in Indonesia. But the most politically consequential employment of adat in post-Reformation Indonesia has been in disputes involving indigenous communities’ rights over land and natural resources (Bedner & Arizona, 2019). Aliansi Masyarakat Adat Nusantara (The Indigenous Peoples’ Alliance of the Archipelago), an advocacy group representing Indonesia’s indigenous communities founded in 1999, claims to be one of the world’s largest movements dedicated to defending such rights (van der Muur et al., 2019).

While the general orientation of adat revivalism does appear to be congruent with the ideal of a pluriversal, “difference-friendly” world, in its current form, adat revivalism risks the possibility of failing to realize its socially transformative potential. As seen in the Minangkabau communities of West Sumatra studied by Biezeveld (2007), the revival of indigenous cultural practices has sometimes led to the return of problematic social and cultural practices based, for example, on gendered discrimination. At a broader level, one of the risks adat revivalism faces is the kind that Blaser (2013, 2014), himself a vocal proponent of the pluriversal paradigm from a decolonial perspective, has noted in the context of Latin American ontological politics, in the course of which some movements originally intended to defend indigenous worlds have been reduced to performances of ethnic uniqueness by the indigenous groups for strategic gains. Essentialism, even of a strategic kind employed by underrepresented groups, risks falling short of the aims of ontological politics of the pluriverse, in as much as it tends to expropriate the objects of the indigenous groups’ worlds into the dominant one to win recognition within the latter. Indeed, apropos the aforementioned Buen Vivir, there are concerns that it has simply become another hegemonic political paradigm in Ecuador or a buzzword that accompanies vague proposals that fail to translate into concrete action and real change. For example, Benalcázar and de la Rosa (2021) point out that when the concept was taken up by the Ecuadorian constitution, its implications, such as the initiative for renewable energy supported by activists, were left ambiguous, and subsequent legislations have not signaled a radical departure from Ecuador’s centralized, state-driven policy on energy.

Depending on how Indonesia’s indigenous movements unfold in the coming years, there is a risk that adat would be made into something be tolerated or appreciated as a proof of Indonesia’s cultural diversity, while government policies and industry practices in the country, by and large, continue to go on as usual. If such an outcome were actually to transpire, it would in fact not be entirely new in the history of adat. Although motivated by the commendable intention of understanding and preserving local traditions, the colonial-era scholarship on adat—the Leiden School legal scholar Cornelis van Vollenhoven (1874–1932) being the most influential figure in the earliest explorations of the notion—ended up isolating adat from its political and economic base, effectively relegating it “to the status of folklore” (Tyson, 2010, p. 164), an exotic “other” of the modern state.

Yet, that it does not guarantee desirable outcomes is not an argument against ontological politics per se. Rather, the contingency of its outcomes is suggestive of what makes ontological politics political. The interaction between different worlds—and the unavoidable operation of cultural translation between them—implies that the outcome of ontological politics cannot be entirely removed from broader economic, social, and political conditions. That a given indigenous worldview allows for a convivial relation with more-than-humans does not entail that such a relation will actually be realized without struggle. Critique of existing practices thus has a role to play in elucidating the stakes of the antagonism between indigenous and dominant worlds so that its consequences would finally constitute a step toward the realization of the ideals that have been articulated in relation to the pluriverse.

In this vein, recent discussions on corporate social responsibility (CSR) that call for a new awareness in environmental governance are worth noting. Indonesia has adopted the ISO 26000:2010 guidance for organization social responsibility, the Act of the Republic of Indonesia Number 40 of the year 2007 on Limited Liability Companies Article 74 Concerning Social and Environmental Responsibility, and evaluates corporate commitment to sustainability programs under the Performance Rating Program (PROPER) outlined in the regulation of the Minister of State for the Environment No. 1 Year 2021 (https://proper.menlhk.go.id/), which is designed to assess and produce a ranking of companies that reflects their adherence to CSR practices toward sustainable and ethical use of natural and human resources (Kafaa, 2019). Driven largely by the aim of satisfying international standards, the Indonesian government’s regulations concerning CSR have tended to replicate precisely the limitations of dominant understanding of CSR that have been pointed out by critics, particularly by those writing from postcolonial or decolonial perspectives (Banerjee, 2021; Dawkins, 2021). Broadly stated, prevailing CSR practices do not give enough consideration to the institutional voids created by the limitations of the Western theories of entrepreneurship, rendering CSR regulations unable to engage with alternative perspectives, indigenous distinctiveness, or the specificity of local contexts. While the conflict surrounding the mining operation headed by PT Freeport Indonesia in Papua has garnered perhaps the most attention because of the delicate relation between the indigenous people of Papua and the Indonesian central government (McKenna, 2015), tensions between local peoples and corporations can be seen in the various loci of Indonesia’s lucrative extractive industry (Anggoro et al., 2021). It would be in line with the aims of ontological politics to introduce decolonial perspectives in CSR, so as to broaden the notions of environmental governance, sustainability, and responsibility beyond the rules of one particular world. If the calls for the recognition of the pluriverse have an ethical underpinning in a sense we have suggested, then a pluriversal ontological politics with respect to CSR may very well consist in attempts to expand the latter’s purview to incorporate the preservation of indigenous worlds as one of its basic aims. Beginning to recognize, and giving expression to, the difficulties—the kind that we have highlighted earlier with reference to Lyotard’s idea of differend—posed by the clash of different worlds would already constitute a significant first step toward an ontological politics in Indonesia.

Each clash of worlds is likely to require a different approach. A one-size-fits-all solution, after all, is antithetical to the very idea of the pluriverse. Nonetheless, whatever proposals pertaining to Indonesia put forth from a pluriversal perspective are more likely to have traction and thus real consequences if the country’s government is able to shift its own perception of, and its relation to, environmental governance, so that the idea of pluriverse comes to be accepted as its own rather than as an imposition from outside. We would thus like to close this section with a brief consideration of the sense in which the pluriverse and calls to recognize many worlds can be seen as compatible with—or even as deepening—an ideal that Indonesia already embraces as its own.

Although Indonesia has increasingly become more involved in international initiatives—such as the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC)—in the last decade and the government has committed itself to further implementing international norms for climate mitigation, it is “still much more ‘talking the talk’ of climate change than ‘walking the walk’ of climate actions” (Höhne, 2018, p. 139). On matters of environmental policy, pressure from the international community appears to remain as one of the biggest motivators of action for Indonesia’s central government. Likewise, its willingness to listen to advocates of adat movements may in large part be a result of its heeding to pressure coming from NGOs, both local and international. Moreover, because Bhinneka Tunggal Ika—and other official ideological “pillars” of Indonesia such as Pancasila and NKRI (the Unity of the Indonesian Nation)—places weight on unity at the expense of diversity, and because that ideal of unity has become at the hands of the central government a tool for its exploitation and destruction of local indigenous worlds, adat has been taken up most often as a counterhegemonic cause against the Indonesian state’s emphasis on national unity (Avonius, 2003).

If these observations are accurate, it is not improbable for the idea of pluriversal ontological politics introduced in this chapter to be perceived by many in Indonesia (including corporate executives and policymakers) as yet another case of “foreign” paradigm, an idea imported from without Indonesia that places additional pressure on the government in matters of environmental governance. This sort of perception, in our view, is not only detrimental to realizing the ideals advocated by ontological politics but is also false. The Indonesian archipelago is already home to traditions of thought that are nonanthropocentric and pluriversal. To mention just a few: the Ciptagelar Kasepuhan speaks of the harmonious relation between micro- and macro-cosmos, human and nature, through notions such as Jagat Leutik, Jagat Gede—Jagat Leutik sanubar, and Jagat Gede Bumi Langit (Humaeni et al., 2018); the Javanese philosophy of life, Memayu Hayuning Bawana, values the maintenance of balance and peace in nature and ecological spaces, as well as the well-being of both the human and the more-than-human spiritual worlds (Ainia, 2021); within the natural philosophy of West Sumatra’s Minangkabau people, according to which the relation between nature and human is founded on learning and living together, nature is not only a place but a source of learning on how to grow and die well (Azwar et al., 2018). In as much as such diverse worlds have already been unfolding across the archipleago, the pluriverse and the ontological politics to which idea is tied deserve consideration as a means of theorizing, expressing, and preserving the richness—an ontological richness—of Indonesia.

The richness the Indonesian archipelago harbors means that the recognition of the pluriverse and the integration of ontological politics within environmental governance need not be regarded as “foreign” imperatives. On the contrary, they may be seen as constituting an attempt to reclaim the potential already ensconced in Indonesia’s founding principles. Throughout Indonesia’s modern history, the diversity of the archipelago was regarded by the central government as posing a challenge for national unity. Despite the apparent celebration of diversity by Indonesia’s central government, political unity, defined and imposed as it saw fit, rarely ceased to be the priority in state policy and ideological apparatuses such as education (Bourchier, 2015). Under this condition, various indigenous conceptions of the relation between humans and nonhumans were frequently set aside as irrelevant at the level of state policy and national identity. Against this historical tendency, ontological politics can be taken up as a radicalization of Bhinneka Tunggal Ika, as a struggle to realize further an ideal that the modern Indonesian state has long professed to be one of its foundational principles.

4 Conclusion

The pluriverse continues to inspire thinkers and activists alike, not least because it paves a way to reimagine the place of humans under the condition of the Anthropocene, in which the effects of anthropogenic activities are more extensive and consequential than ever before. It seems clear that if mass-anthropogenic activities constitute the most significant cause of the threats to the livelihoods of virtually all human as well as more-than-human beings on Earth, then a response that is adequate to such planetary-scale changes would require fostering a collective awareness and concerted action at an unprecedented scale. By highlighting the need for an understanding of the world as plural and diverse, as spread across corners of the world and as unlimited by the constraints of Western rationality, the idea of the pluriverse has facilitated some of the most extensive attempts to understand and respond to the conditions of the Anthropocene. Thus, although discussions around the idea of the Anthropocene, particularly with regard to pluriversal ontological politics, are, at the moment, still an emerging discourse within environmental governance, we are convinced that they will only gain further relevance in the coming years.

Although the scholarly literature on the topic may sometimes come across as esoteric to the general reader, discussions around the pluriverse are, at bottom, motivated by a clear ethical commitment to think and elucidate the profound ramifications of the vulnerabilities that are experienced or lived differently by different groups but are nonetheless shared by all those inhabiting this planet. It is our view that Indonesia has an important role to play in matters with which theorists, activists, and inhabitants of the pluriverse have concerned themselves. Not only is Indonesia one of the major contributors to the planetary changes characteristic of the Anthropocene, given its cultural and geographical diversity, but Indonesia also has the potential to become a key site of a pluriversal ontological politics. A realization of “many worlds” in Indonesia will no doubt involve interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary cross-sector research projects that radically reexamine the social, political, self-understanding, and ideological basis—which have often been left underexamined or taken as self-evident within domestic policy discourses—of the country. How such reexaminations should proceed is a question that shall be left open. But the first step toward the affirmation of local, indigenous worlds and reorientation of Indonesia toward issues of profound planetary significance may consist, we have suggested in this chapter, in a kind of radicalization of an ideal that Indonesia already embraces as its own, namely, the ideal of unity in diversity expressed by the country’s motto, Bhinneka Tunggal Ika.