Jambi province, Sumatra is one of the largest regions of tropical lowland rainforests. The province has experienced massive changes in the ecological as well as social landscapes (CRC 990 2012). Mainly rubber, introduced by the Dutch and oil palm as a recent boom crop has brought tremendous changes. An ideal setting for studying ecological trade-offs as well as drivers of land use change. In order to decelerate this transformation, nature conservation areas have been implemented by state organizations. Laws have been passed pointing out restrictions in these areas, zoning huge amounts of land as off limits to agricultural use. This makes it on the one hand even more interesting to investigate ecological trade-offs, at the same time it provides a setting in which changing land use regulations and their translation can be studied. The project as a whole aims at providing science-based knowledge on how to protect and enhance the ecological functions of tropical forests and the agricultural systems transforming forests, while improving human welfare. Further, the program aims at providing baseline information on how to integrate agricultural land use and conservation issues. For the overall research design of the project, two landscapes and 32 core sites - including transformation systems and forest reference sites - were selected for detailed analyses (Collaborative Research Centre 990 2012). The two conservation sites are the national park Bukit Duabelas and the ecosystem conservation concessions Harapan Rainforest. The research villages are located in proximity of these two conservation areas (see map 1, villages listed as case study villages, see also map 5). Within these two research areas (Bukit Duabelas and Harapan) the villages were selected to best serve the research questions. It was of importance to work in rather old villages and to ensure heterogeneity in terms of main cultivation patterns and to visit autochthonous as well transmigration villages.
This is due to the possible different access legitimization rationales of autochthonous and transmigration villages.
The supervising counterpart from the University of Jambi has long standing research experience in the region and pre-identified a certain number of villages matching the criteria listed. The following step was then to visit all villages pre-selected, to introduce the research
C h a p t e r 3 : M e t h o d o l o g y 22 team and the planned undertaking. It was also an important precondition that the village heads agreed on cooperating with a researcher from abroad. This is not only the case to ensure a high degree of quality of data gathered, but also because it was planned that the research team (this is the author of this dissertation plus one field assistant) would stay in the villages for longer periods. Only after the village head agreed on cooperating could the village be finally selected.
Map 1: Overview research area and research village of the human dimensions group
By the time field work was completed, ending with the second field trip in October 2013, a total number of 11 villages had been visited as research villages. The initial number of villages planned for was smaller than this figure. During the first visit with Dr. Ibu Rosyani, the Jambi counterpart, work was conducted in 9 villages. During the stay in the villages other settlements proofed to be of relevance for the research question at hand. For several reasons, expanding the sample was not always possible. For some villages, however, it worked out to select them as additional research villages. So more villages were visited and the list amended accordingly. One of the villages not in the initial list is Singkawang.
Singkawang became the village were the biggest dataset was gathered and where the author spent most of the time at (see Table 1).
C h a p t e r 3 : M e t h o d o l o g y 23
Table 1: List of research villages Research
are
Name of village Kabupaten/District Kecamatan/Subdistrict Village origin
Harapan Markanding Muaro Jambi Bahar Utara Old village
Harapan Bakti Mulya/Unit V Muaro Jambi Sungai Bahar Transmigration village
Harapan Mekar Jaya Batang Hari Bajubang Transmigration village
Harapan Singkawang Batang Hari Muara Bulian Old village (first written evident from 1927)
Harapan Senami/Jebak Batang Hari Muara Tembesi Informal settlement
within a protection forest
Bukit Duabelas
Gurun Mudo Sarolangun Mandiangin Old village
Bukit Duabelas
Desa Jernih Sarolangun Air Hitam Old village
Bukit Duabelas
Bukit Suban Sarolangun Air Hitam Transmigration village
Bukit Duabelas
Mentawak Ulu Sarolangun Air Hitam Transmigration village
Bukit Duabelas
Mentawak Baru Sarolangun Air Hitam Transmigration village
Bukit Duabelas
Desa Baru Sarolangun Air Hitam Old village
In total, a time of 11 months was spent in Indonesia in the frame of research trips. These 11 months stretched over two years: from June 2012 to December 2012 and from June 2013 to November 2013. Beside the time spent in villages, time was also used for language courses in Jogjakarta, for expert interviews in Bogor, Jakarta, Jambi city and for being at the Agricultural Institute in Bogor where many fruitful discussions with Indonesian counterparts took place. The time actually spent in the villages was 15 weeks. It turned out, that for some villages it was indispensable to spend a lot of time with participant observation, while in other villages less time was ‘needed’. This is due to several reasons: interview partners needed more or less time to get used to a foreigner conducting interviews, interview partners were not available or the importance of sharing time with interview partners in their fields, assisting them in their harvest or any other every day activity. It also proofed
C h a p t e r 3 : M e t h o d o l o g y 24 very beneficial to visit the same villages several times. It helped the actors in the villages to gain confidence in their opponents, they felt more respected and more taken serious and less like mere research objects. The result of this is that in some villages only a couple of consecutive days were spent. In other villages, the research team stayed for almost two weeks in a row and still went back several times. In many villages a strong bond was established with the people inhabiting the respective villages or sub-villages.
A usual visit in a village would start at the Kepala Desa’s house, the head of the village. This visit allowed the research team to explain the intention of the research project and what the agenda in the village would look like. The Kepala Desa serves as gate-opener to interview partners and most of the time is also the host household for the research team. This again, proofed very beneficial for the research. Through his position the village head knows the inhabitants well and can provide advice who to talk to when trying to learn more about a certain topic. At the same time, village heads also have many visitors who start to be interested in the case of the research team and often even offered to become interview partners. He (in actually all cases the village head was a man so were the Secretaris Desa, only in one village was she a woman) would also tag the team along to weddings, village meetings, common activities like village upgrading activities, in short, he would temporarily make the research team part of the village community. Also, being affiliated to the village head, equips the research team with trust. In most of the cases, the village head is a respected person in the village and having him introducing the researcher team to potential interview partners allow the interviewee to be less shy or in other words, more open.
As a first step at the beginning of each stay in all villages a village profile was compiled. This was most of the time done with the Sekretaris Desa, the village Secretary, as their position makes them in charge of village statistics, etc. The village profile, a quantitative demographic appraisal, served as a first orientation: how many people do live in the village, what is their ethnic background, how many schools, how many mosques does the village have, what is the water source, how many people are connected to the electricity grid, how many households cultivate rubber/palm oil, what are other income generating activities, when was the village founded, has the village been part of another settlement in the past and so on.
When, from this starting point, the interview partners and neighbors were told that the research focus is on the history of land use change, the villagers usually had a very clear
C h a p t e r 3 : M e t h o d o l o g y 25 picture of who should become an interview partner. This means that the interview partners were mainly identified by using the snowball effect. Additionally, in order to allow for interdisciplinary research, part of the interview partners are a sub-ample of a household survey carried out by another sub-project of the Collaborative Research Centre 990. The data gathered serve as supplement to the data gathered in the standardized household survey (for more information on the overall research design of the human dimension group 990 see Faust et al. 2013).
Even though the author of this dissertation studied the Indonesian language prior to commencing field work in the research villages, it would have been impossible to conduct the interviews without the help of an assistant, at least at an early stage of the research.
With great patience the field assistants (only one assistant at a time, but in the first year the team consisted of a different assistant than in the second year) translated, explained, took notes, pictures, and drove the motor bike and so on. The fact that information gets lost mis- or reinterpreted when using a translator is well noted. Working in a team meant that assistants were involved in every decision taken and were familiar with goals and interests.
Through this team work the error hopefully remains as minimal as possible. At the end of the second field stay language skills proofed proficient enough to more or less manage an interview without the help of a translator. The work of the assistants never became indispensable though. Coming from an alien cultural background it was important to be taught everything from conducts of behavior when it came to greetings, addressing or thanking people to eating, showering in rivers and how to wash clothes in water that seemed dirtier than the clothes themselves.