Competing climate imaginaries: the cultural political economy of climate change in Indonesia

This article employs the framework of ‘climate imaginaries’ to analyze the competing visions shaping Indonesia’s response to the climate crisis. Building on and extending the established typology of climate imaginaries, we introduce a sixth imaginary: the indigenous imaginary grounded in the customary knowledge (adat) and relational cosmologies of masyarakat adat. Through Cultural Political Economy, we map how the dominant techno-market and anthropocentric imaginaries align with historical structures of extractive power to marginalize alternative futures. In contrast, the emerging scientific, sustainable lifestyle, climate apocalypse, and indigenous imaginaries offer divergent pathways, with the indigenous vision presenting a foundational challenge to the coloniality embedded in mainstream climate policy. The findings demonstrate that the contest over which imaginary becomes hegemonic is not merely discursive but is mediated through the structural, agential, and technological selectivities that govern energy systems and land use. A just climate transition in Indonesia requires an epistemic decolonization that centers the indigenous imaginary, thereby recognizing climate change as a struggle over whose knowledge and whose future is allowed to shape socio-ecological relations.