Presentation short abstract

This study shows how shifting extractive and conservation regimes in Central Kalimantan undermine Indigenous women’s environmental activism, revealing how swidden bans, criminalisation, and land pressures erode resistance while women sustain agency through care, alliances, and everyday practices.

Presentation long abstract

This research examines how shifting extractive and conservation regimes—implemented across different temporal periods by actors with competing worldviews—have simultaneously deepened and weakened environmental defenders’ activism in the upper Kapuas River, Central Kalimantan. In the early 2010s, the community had a history of collective resistance against oil palm encroachment on their swidden food lands, defending their territory despite threats of criminalisation. Following the 2015 haze crisis, the Indonesian government enacted a sweeping ban on swidden farming under the pretext of peat fire prevention. This ban has intensified livelihood precarity and eroded collective resistance, leading many women and youths to seek work elsewhere. By the 2020s, private plantations had occupied remaining community lands, and defenders were targeted under peatland fire regulations. Narrated by a woman environmental defender, this research draws on oral history interviews and live-in ethnography to show how shrinking civic space unfolds not only through legal and physical violence but also through the displacement of Indigenous women from practices that sustain life and care. The findings show that harms stem not only from extractive industries but also from conservation interventions, which can similarly criminalise and dispossess communities. The narrator refuses pressure to relocate or convert her land, defending swidden farmers’ rights, and challenging misconceptions about fire use. She sustains agency through emancipatory practices such as alliance-building with non-state actors and emergent strategies rooted in livelihood work. The study contributes to debates on the slow, incremental violence experienced by Indigenous women living at the intersection of extractive and conservation regimes.