MANIFESTO
The world is changing⏤so what? Come closer, look. Then ask questions. Go beyond the headlines. Get curious. Get uncomfortable. Think people. Visit places. Embrace culture: because the future isn't far, since we're already in it.
THE PITCH
Climate change is everywhere. We hear about it in the news, in reports, in classrooms and increasingly in our everyday lives. But somehow, the conversation can still feel like it belongs to someone else⏤either too technical, too distant or too big to know where we fit in.
LENSES
The Spaces In-Between for a New Standard of Self-Narrative
Diantara is Malay for "in-between." It's also where this started; with a simple observation: the story of climate change has a huge gap in it. Too often it's told as one story, in one voice, from one place. But no two people experience a changing world the same way⏤a fisherman, a farmer, a policymaker, a child all stand somewhere different, looking at the same sky. We exists in that gap and we're here to close it, not by simplifying the science, but by making room for the many stories climate change actually tells, through the lenses of People, Culture, Place and Systems. We bring the conversation closer.
People
How climate affects the people living through it.
Places
How our cities, villages, forests & seas are changing.
Culture
How climate shapes what we eat, create & remember.
Systems
How climate strains the systems we depend on.
VALUES
Stand Our Ground
Our Stories
We ask ourselves⏤who gets to tell the story? Because climate conversations are often told through institutions, experts, governments or global organisations. So, we say people in Southeast Asia should also be able to tell their own, in their voices, from their own experiences. Instead of here's what climate change is doing to Malaysia, we say here's what it feels like from here.
Self-Narrative
Many Worlds
There isn't one climate experience⏤a fisherman in Terengganu, a farmer in Kedah, a family in a Kuala Lumpur apartment, Orang Asal community in Sabah-Sarawak and someone living in a rapidly developing city can all experience the same changing climate differently. We are not about finding the one climate story but about making room for many.
Plurality
Get Together
Climate issues can be too complicated for one person, discipline or organisation to solve because every Researchers, Artists, Communities, Scientists, Designers, Policymakers have different things to offer. We're about bringing all these people into the same room & finding a solution together. Each bring different pieces, but we figure it out together.
Collaboration
For Everyone
The reality climate change doesn't affect everyone equally. Some have more resources; some communities are much more exposed to environmental changes. So, it isn't as simple as everyone should care. But, everyone deserves a place in the conversation, so nobody will be left behind. A better future that work for everyone, not just the people with the most power.
Justice
OUR PEOPLE
Fatin Nadhirah
Founder+CEO & Research Director
Fatin has spent her career asking who development is actually for. A Research Associate at Khazanah Research Institute — and formerly at the Employees Provident Fund and the ASEAN Research Centre — her work looks at social protection, labour and informality, and how development frameworks might be reimagined through decolonial perspectives. She's studied at the University of Chicago and the University of Warwick, but the questions she keeps returning to are much closer to home: who gets counted, who gets left out, and whose experience of change actually shapes the policy meant to help them.
Diantara started as her observation—that climate research rarely reaches the people it's about. She's the one who built the thinking; the rest of diantara exists to carry it further.
Fatin Nadhirah
Head of Research & Policy / COO
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Hidayat Jamalolail
Creative Coolie
