The causes of the Asian economic crisis have been the subject of fierce debates among economists, yet little is known about the impact on employment and wellbeing. In Indonesia, the worst affected country, the malaise turned into a political and societal upheaval which brought an end to the New Order regime. Based on anthropological fieldwork in two villages along the coast of West Java, the monograph discusses the repercussions for work and welfare in the rural hinterland. The authors criticize the policies of the government of Indonesia as well as those of other transnational agencies on what has happened and what should be done. Their micro-study on socio-economic dynamics in two localities, researched in a longitudinal perspective, argues that since the start of the crisis the poverty level, then already much higher than officially conceded, rose to include more than half of all households. In contrast to the received wisdom that the village still functions as a community, the crisis has widened the gap between the rural rich and poor. The fieldwork findings are held to justify conclusions for areas with similar structural characteristics: densely populated, with a highly skewed pattern of land distribution, long-distance labour circulation between city and countryside and involving a substantial part of the total workforce, especially the landpoor and the landless.

This book provides a comprehensive analysis of the constraints facing the development of rural non-farm enterprises in Indonesia. Recent years have seen a substantial effort by the Indonesian government to improve the investment climate. To date, much of this effort has focused on the constraints faced by businesses at the national level. However, if Indonesia is to be successful in creating jobs and reducing poverty across the archipelago, this will require improving the investment climate for the 15.7 million micro and small enterprises that employ more than half of all the non-farm workers in the country. This book brings together leading Indonesian and international academics to consider seven key constraints that RNFEs face: labour regulations and practices; infrastructure; competition and marketing; knowledge transfer and technology; access to credit and financial services; local taxation and user charges; and insecurity. In each case the authors draw on the Indonesian Rural Investment Climate Survey, a unique dataset of more than 2,500 RNFEs, to identify the size and nature of the constraints, the way in which they impact upon enterprise growth and the implications for policy. In addition, a key chapter estimates the strength of the linkage between agriculture and non-agricultural activities in rural areas, showing that agricultural revitalization is an essential complement to the development of the non-farm economy. "Understanding the rural investment climate in both slow- and fast-growing economies has taken on new urgency in the wake of the world food crisis. The rural non-farm economy often provides half or more of the income of farm families and is especially important for food-deficit rural households hard-hit by rising food prices. The Indonesian Rural Investment Climate Assessment is the "gold standard" for how to achieve this understanding. It is a delight to see it published and available to a wide audience." - C. Peter Timmer, Visiting Professor, Program on Food Security and Environment, Stanford University; Non-Resident Fellow, Center for Global Development

This book is the most up-to-date and authoritative work on Indonesias rural non-farm development characteristics and potential. The essays, by experts and well-known specialists in the field, emphasize the changing importance of off-farm income, employment contributions of small enterprises, the role of gender and mobility in entrepreneurial behaviour and the policy implications for rural non-farm enterprises. A unique feature is the use of case studies to provide insights and context for activities. The book is both a summary of current knowledge and a call for new inquiries on this critical theme.

Most literature on the economic crisis in indonesia has focused on the negative macro-economic impacts during the "crisis- years" of 1997-99. The case studies presented in this book take a different perspective. With a longitudinal research perspective, this comparative study analyses a wide variety of responses to the crisis among communities and households. The case studies in this book cover the coping and adapting mechanisms of rural households under a variety of resource use practices and resource use regulations in different areas of Indonesia.

Rural life in Southeast Asia is being transformed by new and intensifying processes of migration and mobility. Migration out of rural areas creates new forms of class mobility, familial relations, production processes and income. Migration into rural areas creates a new and sometimes marginalized workforce, contestation over resource access, and the juxtaposition of culturally different groups. At the same time, everyday mobility stretches the spatial boundaries of village and family life. The bounded space of the village is no longer adequate to understand the dynamics that are driving (and resulting from) rural social change. This collection of original studies explores the cultural, economic and environmental dimensions of intensifying migration and mobility in rural Southeast Asia at multiple scales. Diverse processes are explored including rural-urban flows, rural-rural movement, everyday mobilities, and international migrations into regional and global labour markets. Drawing on fieldwork in six countries across the region, these essays also explore what migration means for our understanding of class, citizenship, gender and the state in a rapidly changing part of the world. This book was based on two parts of a special issue of Critical Asian Studies.

This book examines contemporary forms of rural resistance to agrarian reforms in Southeast Asia, adopting a multi-scalar approach. focusing on Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, Vietnam and Thailand.

Small-scale agricultural producers in the peripheral world are often condescendingly assumed to be a single social class (‘the peasantry’) to be pitted against the state or corporation. This book challenges this rather idealistic view by demonstrating that under current capitalist social relations (competition, efficiency and productivity, and profit maximisation), these agricultural producers have been differentiated into different agrarian classes by exploitation. By comparing two different contexts of local agrarian change in Indonesia—rice cultivation in Java and oil palm in Sumatra—this book exposes the different class locations of the agrarian classes among petty agricultural producers and the class relations between them. These are often inextricably linked to gender, clanship and generational issues. The power of class dynamics crucially shapes how agricultural production in both rice and oil palm is organised. The share received by different agrarian classes from the production site then prominently shapes the different nature of class reproduction for each agrarian class. This analysis demonstrates that the different agrarian classes possess different capacities and responses in their relation to the state or corporations. Any real emancipation attempt in the Indonesian countryside (and beyond) must start from a proper understanding of these class dynamics. This book marks a significant contribution to the literature on agrarian change, the political economy of development, rural development and Marxist political economy.