The politics of ontological pluralism are concrete and serious, and they are worth spending time on because the abstract philosophy connects to real situations.
In 2008, Ecuador became the first country in the world to write the rights of nature into its constitution. Pachamama, roughly, "Earth Mother", was granted legal standing: the right to exist, be maintained, and regenerate. This was not merely a clever legal strategy (though it was that too). It encoded, into a national constitution, an ontological claim: that nature is a living subject with rights, not merely a resource or property. The Andean indigenous communities who pushed for this were not translating their worldview into Western legal categories, they were demanding that Western legal categories accommodate an ontology in which the land is a person.
Similar struggles are happening globally. New Zealand's Whanganui River was granted legal personhood in 2017, following decades of Maori advocacy that the river was an ancestor, not a resource. The legal recognition did not just protect the river, it recognized, in law, a different ontological status for rivers than Western property law had ever contemplated.
The philosopher Isabelle Stengers developed the concept of cosmopolitics to navigate this terrain: rather than appealing to a universal science or universal human rights (which risk being just one ontology imperializing over others), cosmopolitics proposes a slow, difficult diplomacy between different ways of constituting the world. It is deliberately uncomfortable: you cannot appeal to a neutral framework that everyone already shares, because the existence of such a neutral framework is precisely what's contested.
The critical objections to ontological pluralism are serious and worth taking seriously. The philosopher Ian Hacking and others have argued that there is a difference between social construction (the categories we use to organize experience are historically contingent and revisable) and ontological pluralism (there are genuinely different realities). Conflating them leads to a kind of relativism where any claim can be deflected by appeal to alternative ontologies, which makes critical engagement, including the criticism of oppressive practices within other ontologies, much harder.
The pluriverse doesn't mean all ontologies are equally valid or that internal critique is impossible. It means that the default assumption that Western modernity's ontology is the universal background reality against which all others are measured and found wanting is a philosophical claim, not a self-evident fact, and it should be argued for, not simply assumed. That is a much weaker, but much more defensible, position. And it is the position that does the most useful work.