From Java to Hawai‘i – and back again… Thank you so much for the opportunity to spend the next six months here, and for allowing me to introduce my work – which primarily is divided in two periods. In the early part of my career, I mostly worked on agricultural change and rural development in Indonesia. I put Java on the title to bring attention to the similarity of the two place names, and the similarity of some agricultural practices such as sawah – which in traditional Hawai‘i is used to grow taro. Linguists have also argued that Austronesian migration path included journeys from Java to islands in the Pacific, including Hawai‘i. Indeed, place names such as Hawai‘i, Savaii in Samoa are said to mean the home land where sawah provided bountiful food. It is literally my journey as well. But unlike the people of Hawai‘i or Savaii that never made it back, I am privileged to have come home.

The political ecology of agriculture and rural change Krisna Suryanata US Fulbright Scholar Department of Geography University of Hawai‘i at Manoa My real title is more boring. A little bit about myself. I was born and raised in Bogor, graduated from IPB, majoring in soil sciences. I did my Masters at the University of Hawai‘i, and my PhD at the University of California at Berkeley – both in geography. I went back to the University of Hawai‘i in 1997 as a faculty member. This year I am on a sabbatical leave and received the Fulbright grant to spend a semester at UGM. The title of this presentation has changed a little.

What is political ecology? Combines the concerns of ecology with broadly defined political economy (Blaikie and Brookfield 1987) An explicit alternative to apolitical ecology (Robbins, 2011) I am a human geographer, and I also call myself a political ecologist. What kind of research do political ecologists do? Here are three definitions of political ecology that broadly summarize the field. The most succinct one by Paul Robbins shows the conventional narrative when examining environmental change. For example, when explaining why soil erosion happens, we immediately think of rainfall, slope gradients, and ground cover. Political ecologists consider them to be the proximate causes. In addition, they consider the root causes, such as the capacity of land managers to carry out management practices as they are subjected to power hierarchy, economic rationality, or cultural norms.

Methodological approaches Multi-scale analysis Access to and control over resources Socially defined set of rights to a resource. Property rights determine who may be where doing what and when The importance of local histories, meanings, and culture The interface between policies/formal regulatory framework and micro-politics of resource use How the state mediate the flow of capital into the (built) environment In addition to measuring ecological variables, several methods mark the work of political ecologists. In my own work, I broadly summarize them in these five areas. I’ll elaborate them as we go through some of the cases that I will review in this presentation

Geography of food chains ”Follow the thing” (Cook, 2004) Materials Knowledge Infrastructure Labor processes Institution Case studies