Upcoming Publications...

As I mentioned a couple of months ago, I've been posting less frequently because I have been focusing on finishing up my dissertation and on writing articles for scholarly journals.  The past few months have been quite productive for me, and I've been fortunate enough to have had several articles accepted through peer-review.  These articles will appear soon in several journals.  Below I've included publication information along with abstracts.  If you are interested in reading any of these articles, please contact me though this blog's email.

Thanks for reading, and I'll be making at least one or two posts later this month on customary law in Indonesia.

1.  Bettinger, Keith Andrew.  IN PRESS.  "Death by 1,000 Cuts: Road Politics at Sumatra's Kerinci Seblat National Park.  Conservation and Society.

Abstract: This paper examines how decentralization reforms have led to an increase in road proposals in the districts around Sumatra's Kerinci Seblat National Park (KSNP). Roads through the park, which is still under the authority of the central government, are illegal, but the newly empowered districts argue that the park's existence is an unfair obstacle to regional economic development, and that the roads would aid in the improvement of the local economies. The article examines Sumatra's extractive economy in a historical context, arguing that past economic patterns have helped to shape the conflicts over access to resources at KSNP. District elites are attempting to maximize their access to and benefits from natural resources using a variety of strategies to push for the construction of roads through the park. Three case studies illustrate discursive and strategic practices utilized by district elites to gain support for roads. These strategies include the discursive construction of a new district geographic identity, the use of formal powers to encourage informal and illegal activities, and the formation of ad-hoc coalitions across scales.

2.  Bettinger, Keith Andrew.  IN PRESS.  "The Secret Valley Divided: Administrative Proliferation in Kerinci Valley, Jambi Province, Sumatra, Indonesia".  Journal of Rural Indonesia.

After the fall of president Suharto Indonesia implemented sweeping decentralization reforms with the goal of rebalancing powers and responsibilities between the central government and the regions.  Among the raft of new laws was legislation that allowed for increased proliferation (pemekaran) at the district/municipality and provincial level.  In theory administrative proliferation would increase citizen participation and efficiency in governance.  After 12 years the number of districts in Indonesia has nearly doubled, but there are indications that the performance of new regions is not living up to expectations.  This paper examines one case: the creation of the administrative municipality of Sungai Penuh, which was split off from Kerinci District, Jambi Province, Sumatra, in 2009.  I find that the process of new region creation in Kerinci has been dominated by local elites and has actually decreased unity within the district and has given rise to a movement to further sub-divide the district.  The implementation of pemekaran created new tensions, and very likely will undermine the medium and long-term prospects for development in the region.

3.  Bettinger, Keith Andrew.  ACCEPTED.  "Puncak Andalas: Functional Regions, Territorial Coalitions, and the Unlikely Story of One Would-Be Province".  Indonesia.

This paper examines an under-the-radar campaign to establish a new province on Sumatra from pieces of three existing provinces (Bengkulu, West Sumatra, Jambi).  Previous scholarship has shown that proposals for new provinces in Indonesia generally revolve around identity politics or territorial coalitions.  I describe in this essay the territorial coalition supporting Puncak Andalas province while arguing that there is another important factor: the existence of a coherent formal or functional regional identity.   The proposed Puncak Andalas province differs from other cases in that there is no ethnic or religious marginalization, nor has the area ever been united as a discrete political, cultural, or economic region.  Therefore the territorial coalition must create a regional identity.  Moreover, every other province created since the fall of Suharto, as well as all of the potential provinces currently being deliberated by the Ministry of Home Affairs have been or would be formed from a single "mother province".  Thus the case of Puncak Andalas reveals a novel strategy for provincial formation.  Although this new strategy faces unique challenges, if successful Puncak Andalas province could serve as a template for a flood of new proposals to carve provinces out of hitherto unconnected corners of existing provinces.  This paper describes an incremental long term strategy utilized by local elites to mobilize support for intervening goals, each of which is easier to achieve than the formation of a new province, but each of which makes the goal of provincial formation more realistic.  This chain of events has unwittingly been set in motion by Indonesia's decentralization and democratization reforms.  However, while local elites pursue this strategy to increase their prestige and rent-seeking opportunities, they reify and thus render intractable the marginalization of already peripheral groups through the formation of relatively poor administrative regions.  Now that the moratorium on new districts and provinces has apparently lapsed, initiatives to establish new regions will undoubtedly gain renewed momentum.  This analysis adds to our overall understanding of the processes and politics of new region formation. 

4.  Bettinger, Keith Andrew.  ACCEPTED.  "Political Contestation, Resource Control and Conservation in an Era of Decentralization in and around Indonesia's Kerinci Seblat National Park".  Asia-Pacific Viewpoint.

This paper examines the direct and indirect impacts of Indonesia's decentralization reforms on national park-based conservation using Sumatra's Kerinci Seblat National Park (KSNP) as a case study.  Though in the years immediately following the fall of president Suharto there were significant spikes in illegal logging in parks throughout Indonesia, this uptick was the result of opportunism stemming from the confused nature of decentralization.  Illegal logging has since decreased but now new stresses to parks have emerged.  This paper examines three intersections of decentralized politics at the district level and national park-based conservation.  These three intersections are tied to key laws passed after the fall of Suharto and are manifested in conflicts stemming from administrative proliferation, road construction, and center-periphery struggles over the control of state resources.  This paper ties these legacies of unfinished decentralization to increased levels of encroachment at KSNP.  Fifteen years after the end of Suharto's authoritarian Orde Baru, these intersections represent unanswered questions about the extent of decentralization which threaten to undermine Indonesia's protected areas.  

The Mystery of Merangin's Missing Women

Picture from here.

In 1990 economist and future nobel laureate Amartya Sen wrote a landmark article in the New York Times Review of Books entitled "More than 100 Million Women are Missing".  The essence of the article, based on demographic statistics and reason, was that in several parts of the world the normal proportion of men to women has been skewed by certain "cultural traits".  Sen points out that at birth, pretty much universally, boys outnumber girls by a ratio of around 105 boys to 100 girls.  However, since girls tend to be heartier than boys, boys experience greater childhood mortality.  In addition, women tend to be more resistant to disease.  This combined with a number of other factors means that women tend to have a longer life expectancy.  All of these conditions taken together means that in normal populations there are more women than men.

Sen's Logic

Amartya Sen photo from here.

Sen argues that in most of Asia (EXCLUDING SOUTHEAST ASIA and JAPAN) and North Africa this natural population bias has been disrupted.  He provides several examples; at the time the article was published the ratios in India and Pakistan were 94 and 90 girls born per 100 boys, respectively.  According to Sen there are a number of reasons for these unnatural disparities, ranging from female infanticide to sex-selective abortion to the neglect of female children, leading to a greater susceptibility to disease and a higher incidence of malnutrition, resulting in a far higher under-age-5 mortality for girls than for boys.  Moreover, a general disempowerment of women creates the social conditions necessary for the aforementioned dynamics to emerge.  In short, Sen argued that male children are preferred.  In all Sen estimates that there are more than 100 million "missing women".  Although Sen has his critics and some have attempted to refute his numbers and logic, there certainly is some truth to his thesis.

This brings us to Merangin district, where I've been doing some work over the past week.  As I was pouring over the socioeconomic statistics for the district, I noticed something strange about the population numbers.  I'll explain further in a moment, but first I want to introduce the population pyramid

Population Pyramids

Year 2000 pyramid for Mozambique from here.

A population pyramid is a graphical tool used by demographic geographers to display the breakdown of a population by age cohort and gender.  Normal population pyramids divide the population into 5 year age cohorts or blocks arranged chronologically with the youngest cohort on the bottom.  The cohorts are further divided by gender, so you can see how many males and females there are in each group.  Horizontal bars indicate the size of the cohort.  The graph is called a population pyramid because that's the shape of a normal growing population, as you can see with the example I've provided to the right.

I can't remember where I got this graphic.  Sue me.

Population pyramids are useful because they indicate whether a population is growing, holding steady, or shrinking.  These trends are important for planning; if you have an aging population then, as a policymaker you probably want to think about putting more public resources into improving healthcare.  If the population is growing, the leadership needs to think more about providing educational opportunities for the increasing numbers of youths.  It is important to remember that not all populations are growing.  Under normal circumstances, regardless of the overall structure of the population, there should be more women than men in every cohort.  Population pyramids can also show us the effects of certain historical events, as you can see from the graphic of the populations of East and West Germany.  Sometimes we see weird anomalies in population pyramids, and it's fun to try and come up with an explanation as to why there might be a weird gender distribution in certain cohorts.  Have a look at the population pyramids below and see if you can come with an explanation for the weird bulges in certain cohorts.  Once you make your guesses you might look at the wikipedia page for each place to see if you can confirm your answer.  I took the graphic from Rubenstein's Human Geography textbook which I use when I teach introductory geography.

The occurrence of war and epidemics can have a pretty significant impact on a population at certain times, which is reflected in the overall structure of the pyramid.  Similarly, the presence of colleges, military bases, prisons, and other facilities can account for demographic weirdness.

Merangin's Missing Women

Returning to my story, as I was going over demographic information I noticed something odd.  Unlike other districts in Indonesia, there are more men than women in Merangin.  At first I thought this might be accounted for by the presence of encroaching farmers that come from other districts to open up new land in the national park (presumably these would be mostly men working seasonally away from their families; I think that this probably accounts for some of the imbalance in the older cohorts), but a quick check of the age breakdown disproved this hypothesis as the disparity shows up among younger cohorts as well as old.  I made the population pyramid below using Excel; to make your own population see this great tutorial.

As I mentioned previously, Southeast Asia is an exception to Sen's observation of the missing women trend in Asia.  As far as I know, there's no evidence of any sort of sex-selective abortion or infanticide in Indonesia, and since the Merangin anomaly doesn't show up in other districts, there had to be some other explanation.  I asked my new friends at the planning office about this, and they were as vexed as I was.  One suggested that it could be explained by a lack of health facilities in the more far-flung parts of the district, but if this were the case boys would be affected as well.  We weren't able to come up with a good answer.  I had a colorful and imaginative conversation with my good friend Agung as we tried to come up with a possible solution, but because the various adolescent myths of the gender-determining merits of various copulative positions we'd heard were at odds (1), we didn't come up with a resolution.  As an open minded scholar, I can't rule out the influence of some hitherto-undocumented environmental factor or even the effects of thaumatology (2).

The only thing I've been able to come up with that makes any sense is that maybe encroaching farmers tend to bring male children with them to help work their newly-opened land, but I'm still looking for a definite answer to the mystery of Merangin's missing women.  If you have any ideas, drop me a line.

(1)  Most likely due to the fact that Agung is a product of the southern hemisphere, whereas I come from the northern hemisphere, and so the coriolis effect probably has some sort of influence.

(2)  The dark arts.