Creative farmers and climate service politics in Indonesian rice production

Providing climate information services to farmers is expected to optimise agricultural outputs amidst increasing climate uncertainty. Consequently, Indonesian governmental and extra-governmental actors provide climate services with the goal of improving productivity and increasing national food security. Existing research about climate-smart agriculture generally, and climate services in particular, presents these projects as largely technical or anti-political endeavours. Here, we analyse how rice farmers, collectively and individually, engage with climate services. We find that farmers ‘play’ with and between the climate service projects, manipulating them in order to subsidise their livelihoods and assert their individual and collective political power across scales.