Reimagining Grassroots of Women’s Leadership Epistemic Agency and Collective Power in Rural Indonesia

Abstract

This paper reimagines grassroots women’s leadership as an epistemic and collective process rooted in everyday struggles for justice, care, and survival. Drawing from field experiences and reflections compiled in Her Place, Her Power: Growing Together for Women’s Rights and Agency in Rural Communities, this paper explores how women in rural Indonesia–living in forest-edge, agrarian, and coastal contexts–develop leadership not merely as positional authority but as epistemic agency: the power to create, interpret, and share knowledge emerging from lived realities.
Through participatory research and feminist-decolonial analysis, this study highlights how these women challenge exclusionary governance structures, negotiate recognition, and co-create local strategies for gender equality and environmental well-being. Their leadership is relational and transformative, combining care-based ethics, intergenerational solidarity, and community-based learning. By situating their experiences within Indonesia’s broader policy environment and the 2030 SDGs agenda, this paper argues that epistemic leadership offers a pathway toward gender-just and inclusive innovation. It calls for a rethinking of leadership development and knowledge systems that genuinely value local women as co-producers of transformative change.