Envisioning Agribusiness: Land, Labour and Value in a time of Oil Palm Expansion in Indonesia
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The thesis examines the social and economic implications of large-scale agribusiness expansion in Indonesia by analyzing how this economic system, as it is envisioned and materialised, reshapes livelihood possibilities. Based on original interviews with oil palm plantation workers, plantation company officials, smallholders, and on secondary research, this thesis scrutinises the forms of knowledge and practices that constitute large-scale oil palm agribusiness. While oil palm agribusiness produces economic opportunities for groups of individuals from certain social categories, it constrains the prospects of others in systematic ways. Oil palm agribusiness, as a project and as a set of practices, is deployed by a broad range of economic actors at different scales in an attempt to govern access to resources. However, the power of oil palm companies and investors over land, labour, and value is contested and negotiated by workers and smallholders who engage creatively with this economy. The thesis shows that oil palm agribusiness forms a field of power that produces specific subjectivities which transform the meanings and constraints related to this mode of production. The first part of the thesis (chapters 2 and 3) identifies the objectives pursued by those who plan and envision oil palm agribusiness. I emphasise that oil palm agribusiness serves a number of often competing and shifting aims that range from capital accumulation to welfare provision. The second part of the thesis (chapters 4 and 5) demonstrates how the modes of visioning examined in the first part of the thesis produce a broad set of material conditions for populations. I analyse the ways in which these conditions are constantly reshaped by everyday power relations and articulated around the value of labour and land. Based on ethnographic fieldwork that I conducted in West Kalimantan, Lombok, and Nias, these chapters shed light on the lived geographies of labour and the livelihood strategies used by individuals and social groups in the space of oil palm agribusiness.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.008 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".