Presentation short abstract

This paper examines how rural communities in Indonesia, Thailand, and Vietnam navigate climate precarity and agrarian transformations by developing adaptive agroecological pathways that sustain livelihoods and social well-being amid shifting environmental and political conditions.

Presentation long abstract

Agroecology in Southeast Asia finds its practical expression in agroforestry systems that integrate trees with crops and livestock, remaining crucial to livelihoods on up to 70% of farms in upland and island areas. Yet agroforestry viability is increasingly threatened by climate variability and accelerating agrarian-forest transformations driven by expanding state and corporate control, infrastructure development, and market integration. Drawing on case studies in Indonesia, Thailand, and Vietnam, this paper investigates how rural communities navigate the intersecting challenges of climate precarity and political-economic transformation as they strive to create sustainable agroecological futures. We focus on climate precarity and social reproduction in our analysis of Southeast Asia's small-scale, resource-poor, and vulnerable farming communities. Critically, we examine how gender, generation, and geography shape differential access to, and engagement with, agroecological pathways and knowledge politics. What do rural youth envision for their futures within agroforestry systems? How do gendered relations, encompassing land access, labor responsibilities, and market participation, constrain or enable participation in agroecological innovation? How do territorial factors influence whether agroecology remains fragmented 'islands' of innovation or evolves into a robust 'archipelago' of sustainable practices? In examining these questions, we interrogate the current agroecological turn in development policy by exploring the adaptive agroecological pathways that can enable rural communities to navigate climate precarity while sustaining livelihoods. This analysis keeps in sight how these practices may (or may not) contribute to social well-being and help mitigate the challenges posed by an increasingly unstable climate.

Presentation short abstract

This paper examines how riparian villages of the San Roque Dam in Northern Philippines negotiate the loss, persistence, and reconstruction of livelihoods in dam-affected ecologies

Presentation long abstract

The San Roque Multi-Purpose Dam in the Agno River—the largest dam in the Philippines—has operated since 2003, reordering hydrological regimes, forest ecologies, and livelihood practices across upland Benguet and lowland Pangasinan. For the Philippine government, the completion of the country’s largest dam marked a defining moment in its pursuit of hydraulic modernity. Yet for riverine and agrarian-dependent communities, its persistent and lingering impacts continue to shape possibilities for making a living.

This paper examines how altered river flows have transformed three long-standing livelihood practices—farming, fishing, and gold panning—once bound together by the Agno’s hydrological pulses. Drawing on ethnographic research in the riparian villages of the Agno River, I trace how households negotiate the loss, persistence, and reconstruction of livelihoods in dam-affected ecologies.

I advance the concept of rhythmic livelihoods to describe how households adapt to disrupted agrarian livelihoods introduced by the dam. I suggest that rather than passive victims of livelihood change, villagers act as rhythmic actors who improvise, diversify, and endure in their livelihood activities amidst disruptions. While the dam’s water repatterned agrarian lives, livelihood and subjectivities, local resource users learn to engage in a politics of rhythm and find ways to attune and rework their livelihood activities. I argue that the livelihoods of the rural poor in the shadow of dam-induced transformations are not necessarily extinguished but are reworked and reconstructed—unevenly, precariously, and creatively—through everyday negotiations with water and power.

Presentation short abstract

Differentiations in the landscape are easy to overlook. This paper examines the storied landscapes of Indigenous recognition through the perspectives and dilemmas among local youth. It spotlights the idea of intersectional inheritance as a way to understand how crops and people reproduce landscapes.

Presentation long abstract

In communities undergoing agrarian transition in Southeast Asia, the very practice of crop production embodies continuity, possibility, loss, and transformation. Beyond the institutions of tenure, acts of cultivation shape land and resource use in dynamic ways, defining how tradition is sustained, forgotten, or replaced. Whether a crop is deeply embedded in a community’s identity and subsistence (like rice) or considered a relative newcomer through commodity booms (e.g. rubber), each initial experiment or repetition represents legacy, risk, and possibility. Relations of cultivation are often dismissed or easily overlooked, but form a tapestry connecting memory with desire in the landscape. I analytically propose a closer examination of these relations under the conceptual framing of landscape of potential/precarity, rooted in opportunity for some, invoking risk for others. Theorizing a relational binary in this way connect claims to the past with articulations of the future, situating uneven political ecologies of inheritance. Evidence emerged from multi-year ethnographic engagement in Kajang, Sulawesi, following local youth life stories in the aftermath of Indigenous recognition. I center constitutive experiences represented by two young men considered gendered examples of success among their peers. Their uneven, inchoate trajectories, provide novel insights on variegated agrarian change in Southeast Asia.

Presentation short abstract

I examine how yield-focused rice policies in Southeast Asia—rooted in productivism and epistemic violence—erase Indigenous knowledges, agroecologies, and land rights. Ethnographic work among the Pala’wan reconsiders 'yield' as nourishing spirit worlds & broader cosmologies amid dispossession.

Presentation long abstract

In Southeast Asia, cereal crop production for food security has long prioritized input-intensive farming, yield maximization, and surplus accumulation. Since the Green Revolution, however, efforts to close the so-called yield gap—the difference between actual and potential yield—have stalled, undermined by biodiversity loss, soil degradation, and climate vulnerability. Broader agrarian changes—driven by infrastructure, extractivism, and peri-urban expansion—have reinforced productivist logics and declining yields through dispossession and restricted access to land and resources. Drawing on Spivak’s notion of epistemic violence, this paper examines how the political economy of commercial rice production, shaped by racialized technological optimism, narrowly defines yield as volume and marketable output. Over time, such violence erases Indigenous smallholders' situated knowledge and agroecologically diverse practices. Examining the roles of the International Rice Research Institute and the Philippine state, I trace how decades of rice research and policy have criminalized swidden yields and marginalized the cosmologies that sustain them. Ethnographic insights from southern Palawan show how Pala’wan farmers struggle to sustain rice yields due to criminalisation, enclosures, and pressures to intensify, while, when conditions allow, strive to cultivate socio-ecologically complex yields entangled with spirit worlds. For the Pala’wan, upland rice yields involve ongoing negotiations with forest deities through which social relations, moral order, and ecological functions are maintained. The conclusion calls on public and private sector actors to move beyond narrow productivist models and recognize the enduring significance of swidden yields and cosmologies for Indigenous rights to land and livelihood.

Presentation short abstract

This study examines how the growing demand for edible bird’s nests in West Kalimantan, Indonesia, reshapes gender roles, labour relations, and household livelihoods, highlighting the changing contributions of men and women in the trade as it intensifies and expands in response to market forces.

Presentation long abstract

Among high-value non-timber forest products, the harvest of edible bird’s nests (EBNs) from cave and purpose-built swiftlet dwellings has opened new income opportunities for rural smallholders in Indonesia. While studies have explored the impact of EBN value chains on livelihoods and environments, few have investigated the changing roles and responsibilities of men and women in meeting the rising demand for EBNs and the effects on local gender relations and rural livelihoods. Drawing on 10 months of ethnographic research in West Kalimantan, Indonesia, I investigate how EBN production became central to household livelihoods and how differently positioned women and men respond to the intensification of the trade across rural and urban spaces. The labour relations, roles, and responsibilities of both men and women have changed as households strive to maintain livelihood security through the trade and other diversification strategies as opportunities and challenges arise from global EBN market expansion. Drawing on feminist political ecology, results reveal the shifting gender roles and labour relations within the EBN trade and agrarian transformations of the region. I explore the visible 'men’s work' involved in accessing and managing EBN in wild caves and purpose-built 'farmhouses,' while highlighting the crucial yet often overlooked role of women managing household economies, sustaining land-based livelihoods, and cleaning nests. The contributions of both men and women to the EBN trade play a vital role in securing a stable income, offering hope for families who can no longer rely on forest and land-based economies in a fast-changing frontier region.