My relationship with plantation landscapes began more than a decade ago. In 2014, as an undergraduate student conducting my first fieldwork in Indonesia’s oil palm frontier, I spent months visiting…
My relationship with plantation landscapes began more than a decade ago. In 2014, as an undergraduate student conducting my first fieldwork in Indonesia’s oil palm frontier, I spent months visiting smallholder farmers and plantation villages in West Kalimantan. At the time, I was trying to understand how the rapid expansion of oil palm plantations was transforming property relations and rural livelihoods. Yet what stayed with me most were the conversations with smallholders about the hopeless weight of debt, fluctuating commodity prices, and the uncertain futures tied to a single crop. I did not know then that I would keep returning to these communities over the years.
Since then, my work has grown into a broader effort to understand how financial systems shape plantation economies and the lives of those who structure and are structured by them. As an anthropologist working at the intersection of political ecology, agrarian studies, and the anthropology of finance, I study how financial institutions, mechanisms, and instruments increasingly structure environmental governance and agrarian change. My doctoral research at Northwestern University examined Indonesia’s oil palm replanting program, following how the state, plantation corporations, and financial intermediaries render aging and unproductive plantations investible through debt-based financing. In this process of securing future biofuel supplies, smallholders are folded into the state’s speculation of continued profitability as indebted subjects in need of management.
These experiences trained me to think with and from the plantation as an analytical vantage point. I am particularly inspired by the work of Black geographers and Caribbean plantation economy thinkers who have long shown how plantations are shaped as colonial sites where nature, labor, and capital are continually reorganized in the face of recurring socioecological crises. Today, plantations persist and mutate into key terrains where “green” financial logics—from debt financing and sustainability-linked loans to green bonds and ESG investment—intersect with long-standing development finance and environmental governance. Along with this, new forms of risks and possibilities emerge. What appears at the level of global policy as “green transition,” “alternative energy,” or “sustainable investment” often arrives in the rural Global South as a new financial burden that stretches across time, space, and scales–with interest.
At the same time, my engagement with plantation landscapes and their transformations has also connected me to broader networks of researchers, activists, and labor organizers working across Southeast Asia. I am increasingly involved in conversations around transnational palm oil labor movement and regional farmer collectives, where scholars and grassroots actors are collectively grappling with the social and ecological consequences of plantation expansion at a time of climate breakdown and authoritarian revival. I believe working directly with workers and smallholders directly is essential to achieving any vision of a just transition.
Political ecology has long been an intellectual home for me. Since first introduced during my studies, I have approached it as a critical and generous space where different traditions, disciplines, and struggles can think together. POLLEN’s commitment to dialogue across communities reflects the collaborative spirit that continues to shape my research journey.