Plant response-ability and vegetal care offer a rich analytic for reimagining agency and subjecthood beyond the realm of the human and against the fiction of anthropocentrism. This contribution considers how other-than-human response-ability and care shape Indigenous Papuan communities’ conceptual, material, and political relationship to oil palm, a species recently introduced in the guise of large-scale industrial plantations. Specifically, it reflects on the degree to which plantations’ notoriously adverse socio-environmental impacts can be attributed primarily or indeed at all, to cash crops themselves, and on the ethical, epistemic, and representational stakes of such a claim.

The notion of plants as agents of violence acts in my first book (Chao 2022) as the ethnographic premise for a broader interrogation of assumptions surrounding the notion of violence as a primarily human action and of vulnerability as a primarily non-human experience. It finds root in the emic discourses of my Indigenous interlocutors in West Papua, who affirm that introduced oil palm is an agentive being, endowed with its own particular desires and dispositions. However, whereas native beings know how to “share space” with humans, oil palm is often described as an invasive, destructive, and selfish being, who takes but gives nothing in return. In this, oil palm contrasts radically to endemic plants, notably the sago palm, that flourishes in ways that in turn enable the flourishing of all manner of other vegetal and animal kin in the forests and grove, as well as that of the humans who find nourishment in its starch. Responsibility for eco-social breakdown, as such, is imputed to the attributes and affects of the oil palm itself. But this is not the whole story.

Equally important in Papuan discourses are prevalent expressions of pity, compassion, and sadness directed towards oil palm. These sentiments stem from villagers’ knowledge of oil palm’s own subjection to human, technological, biological, and institutional manipulation and exploitation as a lucrative cash crop. Papuans with whom I work, in other words, are acutely aware that the way in which oil palm is grown fundamentally conditions the plant’s ability to interact with them and forest ecologies in reciprocal and response-able ways. This “way” is the plantation system: predicated on homogeneity, simplification, discipline, and the coercion of life into capital, to the detriment of sympoietic relations with other beings, or what my companions gloss as “freedom” (kebebasan). Responsibility for harms and injustices wrought by the plantation, together with plants’ subjectivity and ability to respond, are thus shaped as much by the attributes of the plant of oil palm as by the technological, infrastructure, and institutional structures that shape its life- and death-world. This context includes human entities and structures—corporations, governments, and financial institutions, but also global consumer communities, whose demand for palm oil partakes in driving plantation proliferation (Chao 2025).

Papuan inhabitants of the oil palm frontier understand response-ability in multispecies terms—as an affordance and action that is unevenly distributed across human and non-human subjects and objects. This operates alongside an awareness on their part of the importance of being responsible when it comes to storying vegetal response-ability to different audiences (Chao 2020). An anthropologist might, over fieldwork and time, learn of the diverse facets of plant violence and vulnerability from her interlocutors—but these may not be how oil palm is described by her interlocutors in other contexts.

In land rights advocacy, for instance, the agency and response-ability of oil palm is radically played down by Papuan activists, lest it be attributed by state and corporate audiences to Indigenous superstition, ignorance, or stupidity. Instead, failures of care and response-ability are attributed to the human actors involved and invested in plantation expansion, because being heard and heeded by these actors is necessary to achieve advocacy outcomes—the safeguarding of rights, the protection of territories, the sharing of benefits. In negotiation settings, it makes strategic sense for the response-ability of plants for human and environmental harms to be backgrounded. Response-ability, in other words, does not exist in the absolute but rather lends itself to discursive flexibility.

A central question that arises here is how vegetal agency is attributed, rhetorically, practically, and to what effects in terms of moral discourse and the distribution of responsibility and blame. Attributing agency to plants alone risks downplaying the role of humans and abnegates them from their responsibilities to pursue and protect social, ecological, and multispecies justices across local and planetary scales (Chao et al. 2022). My Papuan friends, however, maintain that distribution of responsibility in more-than-human terms need not equate to dilution of responsibility in human terms. For them, acknowledging care and responsibility as multispecies attributes does not automatically diminish humans’ role within the “ecology of obligations” (Despret and Meuret 2016) that sustain more-than-human worlds. Rather, it brings us to consider critically how the distribution of non-human agency is politicized and the kinds of moral and epistemic stakes involved or pushed when non-human agency and subjectivity are either granted, diminished, expanded, or ignored.

This opens fertile space for asking other questions of response-abilities in the plural—how, for instance, is it defined and enacted across species lines? Who holds monopoly over its scales, sites, and subjects? How do chains or hierarchies of (ir)responsibility alternately enhance or diminish different actors’ capacity to care and to act? Where do we locate response-ability across individuals and collectives, economies and ecosystems, species and structures, and ideologies and institutions? And how central do questions of intentionality, consciousness, and self-awareness become when it comes to holding non-humans accountable for their actions and effects?

In an epoch when anthropocentric logics are driving non-human, planetary deaths at an unimaginable scale, these questions bear contentious empirical, ethical, and epistemic weight. And yet they must be asked—across different ethnographic and historical contexts and across situated yet interconnected communities of life. My Papuan interlocutors offer us vital food for thought in this endeavor, alongside a range of productive indigestions that knowing, storying, and taking response-ability otherwise might raise. In this endeavor, plants, too, will have their rightful place and plot.