Living together beyond liberal democracy: examples of local decision-making and managing resource extractivism in Indonesia

This article combines literature and insights from three different fields: comparative political thought, comparative politics, and area studies. It highlights critical gaps in empirical democracy studies and advocates for more encompassing notions of democracy and deeper integration with post-development, ecofeminist, and democratic economic planning perspectives. Indonesia's post-reform electoral democracy has facilitated elite-driven resource extraction, allowing a small circle of oligarchs to convert the country's rich natural resources into private wealth at the expense of rural communities. This elite capture has led to widespread dispossession and environmental degradation, particularly in regions heavily exploited for natural resources. This study uses interviews, observations, and discourse analysis to examine how the term “demokrasi” has been appropriated by elites as a tool for legitimizing resource extraction and to discuss collective decision-making in Central Sulawesi, Indonesia. The article offers empirical insights into local critiques of top-down political and economic structures and shows how communities are cultivating alternative, collective decision-making practices. Key actors in this shift are rural women who have established platforms for political education, challenging the androcentric norms that have been marginalizing them. Against mapping the blind spots of the post-Suharto Indonesian variant of electoral democracy, we argue that more nuanced and inclusive democratic models that foreground economic decisions and include hitherto marginalized citizens can better explain autocratization while highlighting alternative paths toward democratization.