Palm Oil, Migration, and Livelihood Insecurity: Community Development and Household Resilience Strategies in Indonesia's Transmigration Areas
The expansion of oil palm plantations in the transmigration areas of West Kalimantan has created an ambivalent community development ecosystem, providing both income opportunities and livelihoods. This qualitative ethnographic analysis, conducted in Sanggau and Sintang Regencies, examines the experiences of transmigrant households in fending off the price pressures of fresh fruit bunches, limited land, rising production costs, intimidation from daily labor, and weak social protection. Data was obtained through participant observation, in-depth interviews, semi-structured interviews, field notes, and triangulation with village documents and institutional information. Findings indicate that household resilience stems not from the stability of the oil palm economy but from the ability to combine smallholder oil palm plantations, wage labor, migration, remittances, informal loans, family networks, and relationships with collectors and foremen. Migration serves as a cross-spatial social reproduction strategy that enables households to finance education, maintain consumption, mitigate risk, maintain productive assets, and foster hope of returning to the village. However, social network-based resilience remains fragile because intermediary relationships are ambivalent: they provide access to markets, jobs, price information, transportation, and short-term assistance, but simultaneously reinforce dependency, local hierarchies, and unequal bargaining power. Theoretically, the main contribution lies in a critical reading of community resilience as an uneven, daily negotiated adaptation practice, constrained by the political-economic structures of plantations. This framework broadens the study of community development by sitting household bodies within unequal structural relationships. Policy implications emphasize that oil palm community development requires worker protection, price transparency, strengthening farmer institutions, local economic diversification, youth skills development, and inclusive productive remittance utilization schemes.
Copyright (c) 2026 Sociodev: Jurnal Ilmu Sosiatri https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0
When Tourism Becomes Uncertainty: Uncovering the Paradox of Community Development in the Mount Semeru Hiking Trail Area
This study examines how hiking tourism in the Mount Semeru area produces a paradox of community development in an active volcanic landscape. Moving beyond celebratory accounts of community-based tourism, this article positions uncertainty as an analytical lens for understanding how ecological instability, access policies, tourism disruption, and livelihood dependence shape local development trajectories. Using a critical qualitative design with an instrumental case study approach, the research draws on in-depth interviews, field observations, and secondary documentation involving guides, porters, traders, homestay owners, transportation providers, village officials, tourism communities, and area managers in Ranupani. The findings reveal four interrelated dynamics. First, volcanic activity and changing safety status are translated into livelihood uncertainty through route closures and fluctuating tourist access. Second, tourism benefits and vulnerabilities are unevenly distributed, with informal and daily-income actors more exposed to disruption than those with stronger assets and networks. Third, community resilience is differentiated, shaped by savings, alternative work, social support, and position within the tourism economy. Fourth, access governance functions as an arena of risk distribution because decisions on opening and closing trails determine who can work, benefit, or absorb losses. The study contributes the concept of the tourism uncertainty paradox, showing that tourism can simultaneously enable empowerment and generate structural vulnerability when livelihood dependence is not balanced by equitable governance, transparent risk communication, and livelihood diversification. This article enriches debates on community-based tourism, risk society, resilience, and sustainable tourism governance in ecologically fragile destinations.
Copyright (c) 2026 Sociodev: Jurnal Ilmu Sosiatri
Misdiagnosis of Empowerment Programs and Socio-Ecological Uncertainty: Reconstruction of Coastal Community Development in Riau
Coastal poverty in Riau, Indonesia, reflects a multidimensional condition shaped by socio-ecological uncertainty, unequal market access, weak infrastructure, peatland ecological risks, and limited bargaining power within local economic chains. Empowerment programs in coastal areas often emphasize capital assistance, technical training, equipment provision, and group formation, yet these interventions frequently fail to address the structural roots of vulnerability. Using a qualitative case study approach, fieldwork was conducted from May to September 2025 in four coastal areas of Riau Province: Meranti Islands, Bengkalis, Pelalawan, and Indragiri Hilir. Data were collected through participant observation, in-depth interviews with 32 informants, informal discussions, field notes, and analysis of policy and development documents. Findings indicate that empowerment programs tend to misread poverty as a lack of inputs rather than as a complex socio-ecological and institutional problem. Vulnerability varies across livelihood groups: fishermen face uncertainty in weather, catches, fuel costs, and distribution; sago and rubber farmers face price fluctuations and market constraints; women bear household adaptation burdens; and youth experience limited access to sustainable economic networks. The main contribution lies in positioning misdiagnosis as an epistemic problem in social policy and reconstructing coastal community development through participatory socio-ecological risk mapping, value-chain integration, substantive participation, cross-sectoral governance, and transformative resilience rooted in local knowledge and social justice.
Village Mediated Corporate Territorialization: Acquisition of Customary Land, Agrarian Fragmentation, and Resistance of the Dayak Indigenous Community to Oil Palm Plantation Expansion
This article analyzes the acquisition of customary land by the Dayak indigenous community in the expansion of oil palm plantations in Sintang Regency, West Kalimantan, highlighting the role of village government as a mediator in corporate territorialization. Unlike studies of agrarian conflict, which often position the conflict as a binary one between companies and indigenous communities, this article argues that control of customary land occurs through a configuration of power involving state legality, corporate strategy, village legitimacy, local elites, and community fragmentation. Using a critical qualitative approach based on agrarian case studies, data were collected through in-depth interviews, field observations, and document analysis, including land release letters, village deliberation minutes, village planning documents, regional maps, and archives of community complaints. The findings show that village government does not always act as a neutral administrative institution, but can work as an administrative legitimizer, broker of consent, institutional translator, and fragmentation amplifier in the release of customary land. Through deliberations, administrative documents, cooperatives, partnership schemes, and development narratives, customary land is redefined as productive land that can be integrated into corporate production regimes. This process results in spatial, social, political, and symbolic agrarian fragmentation, while simultaneously weakening the collective capacity of indigenous communities to defend their living space. However, Dayak communities build resistance through strengthening customary claims, documenting territorial boundaries, filing complaints, advocacy, and alliances with supporting actors. This article proposes the concept of village-mediated corporate territorialization to explain how the expansion of agrarian capital gains local legitimacy and why the protection of customary rights must be the basis for just, inclusive, and sustainable social development that supports indigenous communities as political subjects in the governance of rural agrarian resources in contemporary Indonesia.
From Vulnerability to Resilience: Grassroots Adaptation of the K'Ho Community for Sustainable Coffee Production in Vietnam
This study examines how the K’Ho community in Lâm Đồng Province, Vietnam, is building grassroots resilience to climate change in sustainable coffee production. Using a critical qualitative approach through case studies, the research analyzes data from in-depth interviews, field observations, focus group discussions, and document analysis involving K’Ho coffee farmers, women in farming households, community elders, young farmers, agricultural extension workers, local government officials, and cooperative actors. Findings indicate that rising temperatures, seasonal uncertainty, changing rainfall patterns, increased wind intensity, drought, frost, hail, floods, and landslides not only disrupt coffee productivity but also increase production costs, weaken income security, and deepen household socioeconomic vulnerability. However, the K’Ho community is not simply a passive victim of climate change. They are developing adaptation strategies through branch pruning, the use of disease-resistant varieties, shade tree planting, the use of mulch and manure, water conservation, coffee drying management, the use of weather information, participation in training, income diversification, and seeking financial support. This study proposes the concept of layered grassroots resilience to explain how resilience is formed through interconnected adaptation practices at the crop, garden, landscape, and household levels. By positioning climate adaptation as a socio-ecological process and a social justice issue, this article contributes to debates on social development, sustainable livelihoods, and the resilience of agrarian minority communities in Southeast Asia.