Migrants, smallholders and oil palm: brokering migration modalities and life-making in Indonesia’s plantation-transmigration landscapes

In contemporary Indonesia, narratives linking oil palm and migration generally envisage enclaves of contract labourers from labour-exporting provinces seeking wage work on corporate plantations or in movements of people displaced by changes in land control or infrastructure development. The paper offers ‘stories from below’ from fieldwork in Lampung and in East Kalimantan, working through a plantation-transmigration-social reproduction framework informed by feminist political ecology that attends to layerings of history, social-ecological affordances, and gendered subjectivities. Emerging within these stories are responses entwined with different migration modalities, which exceed the simple ‘push and pull’ of labour through corporate labour recruitment or government-led transmigration settlement. Both cases are, in different respects, illustrative of life made possible through context-specific, relational, and spatially stretched strategies of social reproduction that bring about ‘diversity-in-the-making’ amidst plantation-transmigration lives and landscapes in sometimes unexpected ways.