The remittance forest: Turning mobile labor into agrarian capital

Abstract

How does labor migration affect Indonesian forests? In the mountains of Java, where political forests and plantations date back to colonial state land acquisitions in the nineteenth century, forests are being reconstituted and reconfigured by unusual subjects: the wives and daughters of contracted forest workers and other forest farmers. Working as maids and other domestic laborers in Hong Kong and other prosperous Asian cities, these landless women are sending home remittances to invest in rural resources and changing the understory of the political forest where their husbands and fathers are required to remain available for formal forest labor. Slowly, without really intending to, these women have regendered the forest, not completely ousting the men or the masculine associations with logging and resin collection, but making inroads into the control of the forest lands via the under-used understory. This article tells how poor, landless women, marginalized as forest residents and as free household labor, reforestation farmers, and poor agricultural laborers, signed up to work as maids in Hong Kong and ended up remaking the forest.

Editorial: Prize‐winning papers for 2017, SJTG lectures and special issue/section proposals

“…A manifesto for incomparable geographies’ was delivered by Tariq Jazeel at the RGS‐IBG Conference in London in September 2017. SJTG lectures are also published in the journal and the current issue includes an article on ‘The remittance forest’ (Peluso & Purwanto, ) that was originally presented by Nancy Peluso at the annual conference of the Association of American Geographers in San Francisco in 2016, along with two commentaries.…”

Transforming the Classic Political Forest: Contentious Territories in Java

“…Lower value trees, such as pine, are less prone to theft, and also provide some income to villagers through ongoing resin collection during some 30 years before the trees are logged. This replacement strategy has been used by the SFC to control its territory and main species for decades (Peluso ; Peluso and Purwanto )…”

“…Second, in some areas, remittances from labour migrants have provided small amounts of capital to their families in forest villages to invest in livestock. Livestock and their farmers in turn are dependent on the fodder crops they plant on forest land (Peluso and Purwanto ). Third, what is new from these two sets of changes in resource use and labour practice on the political forest lands is that villagers’ extensive cultivation of forest land has forced foresters to recognise and formalise new forest uses, access, and responsibilities.…”

SDG 10: Reduced Inequalities – An Environmental Justice Perspective on Implications for Forests and People

“…From an environmental justice perspective, however, even the more careful and nuanced studies do not provide much insights on implications of migration and remittances for distributive, representative and recognition justice. One recent exception is Peluso and Purwanto's (2018) research in Java, Indonesia, which explored the effects of remittances sent by poor and landless women (who were previously presiding illegally in government monopolised forestlands in Java) on state-society power dynamics in forest governance. The study finds that an increasing number of these women are migrating to Hong Kong and other prosperous Asian cities to work as maids and domestic labourers; they send remittances back to their husbands, who remain as formal forest labourers.…”