This book provides a broad, interdisciplinary overview of the major facets of Indonesia's contemporary agricultural and rural development, while exploring the macro and micro factors that account for uneven development patterns. In assessing the rate and distribution of economic growth within the rural sector of the Indonesian archipelago, the auth

Indonesia was founded on the ideal of the “Sovereignty of the People”, which suggests the pre-eminence of people’s rights to access, use and control land to support their livelihoods. Yet, many questions remain unresolved. How can the state ensure access to land for agriculture and housing while also supporting land acquisition for investment in industry and infrastructure? What is to be done about indigenous rights? Do registration and titling provide solutions? Is the land reform agenda — legislated but never implemented — still relevant? How should the land questions affecting Indonesia’s disappearing forests be resolved? The contributors to this volume assess progress on these issues through case studies from across the archipelago: from large-scale land acquisitions in Papua, to asset ownership in the villages of Sulawesi and Java, to tenure conflicts associated with the oil palm and mining booms in Kalimantan, Sulawesi and Sumatra. What are the prospects for the “people’s sovereignty” in regard to land?

The book brings together a series of contributions with a common goal of reflecting the links between economic development and rural development. The scenario is dotted not only with old and new wounds but also with innovative strategies in an attempt to overcome existing delays. The chapters of the book are composed of scenarios full of case studies. The plans to be adopted to help the countries that have lagged behind fueled an intense debate since the obstacles to development, as evidenced by the extensive scientific literature available, now appeared to be the realities present in the socio-economic structures of a large number of villages. Although the data available are still few, it is assumed that the Covid-19 pandemic will make a landscape already full of criticalities even more fragile.

Presents a reinvigorated agenda on agricultural and rural development in Asia both for research and policy discussions in the coming decades.

Agricultural Involution: The Processes of Ecological Change in Indonesia is one of the most famous of the early works of Clifford Geertz. It principal thesis is that many centuries of intensifying wet-rice cultivation in Indonesia had produced greater social complexity without significant technological or political change, a process Geertz terms "involution". Written for a US-funded project on the local developments and following the modernization theory of Walt Whitman Rostow, Geertz examines in this book the agricultural system in Indonesia and its two dominant forms of agriculture, swidden and sawah. In addition to researching its agricultural systems, the book turns to an examination of their historical development. Of particular note is Geertz's discussion of what he famously describes as the process of "agricultural involution" in Java, where both the external economic demands of the Dutch rulers and the internal pressures due to population growth led to intensification rather than change.

Drawing upon current theoretical debates in social anthropology, development studies and political ecology, and presenting original research from across the Archipelago, this book addresses the changing histories and identities of upland people as they relate in new ways to the natural resource base, to markets and to the state. It is an engaged study, which fills important analytical gaps and addresses real-world concerns, exploring the uplands as components of national and global systems of meaning, power, and production. It offers a significant re-assessment of concepts, processes, histories, relationships and discourses, many of which are not unique to either the uplands or Indonesia, making the book essential and compelling reading for both scholars and practitioners.