Agrarian Resources and Pluralizing Social Reproduction
Convener: Suraya Afiff
Co-convener: Nancy Lee Peluso
Agrarian resources, such as land, forest, and other resources are important sources for rural household or family social reproduction. Rural communities depend on agricultural wages and non-wage labor to provide family income and ensure food security. Access to and control over agrarian resources are crucial for overcoming poverty at the village level. However, more studies are needed to enhance our understanding of the complex dynamics between agrarian resources and family social reproduction in different geographical location of the rural landscape of Indonesia (or in other Asian countries). One of the important issues that affected rural communities’ access to their agrarian resources in Indonesia was the national state’s claim of about 63% of the total land area as a “political forest.” Rural household or family social reproduction has been affected by the state allocation of political forests for various purposes, such as conservation, industrial logging, large-scale timber estates, industrial mining, large dams, food estates, and other development projects, including those for ecosystem restoration or other carbon projects involved in restoring degraded ecosystems—such as peatlands, forests, and mangroves. In addition to these problems, human-induced climate change and other natural disasters have affected many rural communities’ livelihoods. Although the Indonesian government implemented policies on social forestry and adat forest recognition, it does not mean that agrarian resources are always sufficient to meet the family’s living needs. Therefore, this panel aims to invite scholars and practitioners to discuss how the social reproduction of rural families today depends on complex labor strategies that combine on-farm and off-farm activities. For this reason, we cannot ignore the fact that many rural families today are also engaged in labor migration as an important aspect of their social reproduction. At its core, the panel interrogates social reproduction as a pluriversal process, embedded in heterogeneous forms of resource access (e.g., communal forests, state concessions, plantation estates, mining activities, including informal markets); shifting contextual pressures (such as climate variability, policy reforms, and land grabbing); and varied migration modalities (circular labor migration, transnational remittances, or indigenous mobilities). This approach highlights rural actors—men and women—agencies in navigating livelihood uncertainties through familial, communal, and translocal strategies, rather than portraying them as passive victims—vulnerable or invisible. This panel explores how land-related issues intersect with family social reproduction—grounded in different forms of resource access, changes in contexts, and migration modalities. Contributors ask how agrarian environmental changes have fostered new forms of social reproduction that affect household livelihoods, labor, and transformations in agrarian environments.