ILPC 2026

Smallholder agriculture has been seen as a threat to protected areas, as it often extends into conservation spaces. Conservation agendas have therefore attempted to transform smallholders’ labour practices to become more sustainable, either through direct enrolment in conservation work, or through improving agricultural practices. This approach assumes that the reason for smallholder agricultural expansion is the lack of economic income, hence conservation intervention attempts to provide decent earning for smallholders to reduce pressure on protected areas. However, in Gunung Leuser National Park (GLNP), Indonesia, despite getting income from labouring for conservation, most smallholders persist in maintaining their identity as farmers and their practice of expanding agricultural plots, sometimes into protected areas. Furthermore, smallholders mobilized themselves politically to oppose conservations’ attempt to transform smallholders’ labour practices. The smallholder movement created history as for the first time it succeeded in winning the current direct local election without any help from major political parties, thus further solidify the opposition against conservation. This research used labour in Marxist term as an analytical concept to better understanding the tension underlying smallholders’ resistance, which could be elaborated as follows. First, incorporating smallholder to work for conservation would change the way smallholders’ labour interacts with the environment, as farming directly utilizes nature’s capacity–such as the soil and plants natural photosynthesis–for agricultural production, while the requisite of conservation labour is to minimize human impact on transforming nature. The tension regarding the extent to which smallholders’ labour is allowed to interact with the environment, and the nature of this interaction, underlies the challenge of garnering smallholders’ support for conservation projects. Second, the process of turning farmers into conservation workers is changing smallholders relation with their means of production. In agricultural production, a smallholder may own land as the means of production and not necessarily be compelled to sell his/her labour as a commodity. Meanwhile, to be enrolled in conservation work necessitates smallholders to sell her/his labour as a commodity to conservation agencies such as donors and NGOs. Third, the emergence of conservation labour in rural setting expands the integration of rural economy into international commodity relations and social divisions of labour, in which smallholders are facing direct competition from international and national workers to enter the conservation service industry. This research employs ethnography to investigate the motivation and constraints of smallholders’ decision-making process regarding their labour practices in a conservation-agrarian setting. The aim is to address the relation between entwined conservation-agricultural labour regimes and the process of rural social differentiation that could potentially lead to agricultural expansion and increasing pressure to GLNP. It analyses the types and requirements of conservation labour and what factors determine smallholders’ eligibility to enrol into it. Then, it explores how conservation and agricultural labour intersect at GLNP and how both deepens smallholders’ commodity relations. Finally, it studies smallholders’ strategies to reproduce their subsistence and/or accumulate, and secure their material and cultural needs, including through political mobilization, and how these strategies impact environmental protection in GLNP.