In this ISG, John McCarthy analyses how smallholder communities develop adaptive strategies in response to intersecting pressures.
Event details
Time: 9:30-11:00am WIB // 12:30-2:00pm AEST
Join in-person: McDonald Room, Menzies Library, ANU
Join online: bit.ly/ISG_indonesiaproject
Abstract
Climate precarity, food and nutritional insecurity, including persistently high rates of childhood stunting, remain serious and intensifying challenges in Eastern Indonesia. Meanwhile, scholars, policymakers and social movements imagine transformative pathways out of interlinked climate, food and ecological crises in the Global South. The paper considers this conundrum, drawing on research using a mixed-methods, participatory research design conducted since 2024 in Flores, Nusa Tenggara Timur. This paper examines how a multi-layered crisis emerges, how smallholder-migrant communities develop adaptive strategies in response to these intersecting pressures, and how territorial governance might respond to address community vulnerability. The paper demonstrates how climate precarity and nutritional insecurity emerge from the interplay of ecological stress, climate variability, and natural disasters; low-yield, unsupported food production and agroforestry systems; practices of labour migration and everyday care work that simultaneously sustain resilience and lead to depletion; and governance arrangements that are not yet able to sustain the adaptive responses of rural households and communities. Finally, the paper discusses the possibility of reconfiguring governance to support household adaptive strategies, moving beyond fragmented, top-down interventions towards a community-centered nexus approach that treats villages as the primary locus of resilience. This approach could integrate agroforestry revitalization, the mainstreaming of care work into agricultural and village development policy, and the recognition of migration as a legitimate development strategy, supported by participatory policy learning ecosystems.
This research was supported by the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade through the KONEKSI program; the views expressed are those of the authors alone.
This seminar is co-badged with RE&D Seminars.
Closed captioning will be available for all online Zoom presentations. If you are attending in person and require accessibility accommodations or a visitor Personal Emergency Evacuation Plan (PEEP), please contact the ANU Indonesia Project at Indonesia.Project@anu.edu.au
Event Speakers
John McCarthy
John McCarthy is a Professor of rural development and the anthropology of policy. He has an abiding interest in the rapid socio-environmental change taking place in the Global South. His work focuses on environmental change, rural development, food and livelihood security and the impacts of climate change on the global south.