Rural livelihoods, Resources and coping with crisis in Indonesia; A comparative study

Abstract

This book is the first of a series dealing with recent and past experiences of crises in Indonesia, and aims at disseminating the results of a research program on the same subject. The Experiences with Crisis program was a subset of the broader Indonesia in Transition program, sponsored by the Royal Dutch Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW) in the period 2001-2005. This latter program was set up as a multidisciplinary research in social, cultural, and historical sciences, bringing together Indonesian and Dutch scholars from several renowned academic institutions with specialist knowledge on the region. The purpose of this wider program was to study the recent social, cultural, and political- economic changes in Indonesia since the fall of the New Order regime and the impacts of the recent economic crisis, from historical and contemporary perspectives. The Indonesia in Transition program consisted of four subprograms, of which Experiences with Crisis was one of the largest and most comprehensive. It is the purpose of this book to present the results of the Experiences with Crisis sub-program which examined and analyzed livelihood strategies, coping mechanisms, and resource management practices in rural communities in Indonesia during and just after the recent crisis (1997- 2003). With a longitudinal research perspective, this comparative study analyses a wide variety of responses to the crisis among communities and households. The case studies in this book cover the coping and adapting mechanisms of rural households under a variety of resource use practices and resource use regulations in different areas of Indonesia.