Gender, class, and agrarian-environmental contestation in Lapangan Tembak, North Sumatra

This research paper seeks to investigate the intersections of gender and class in agrarian-environmental political contestation. In exploring a slice of this socio-ecological complexity, it particularly addresses how class and gender mediate and shape (and are shaped by) political reactions “from below” in the contestation dynamics, how and why they are undertaken. It uses a framework of feminist political ecology, a loosely configured qualitative research tra-jectory of gender/feminist studies, agrarian political economy, and political ecology. The study is carried out by examining the case of Lapangan Tembak, Besitang, North Sumatra. Based on a border delineation during the Dutch colonial era, Gunung Leuser National Park (GLNP) claims that Lapangan Tembak is under its unit of management. However, the claim is contested as different groups of local community use the land for oil palm plantations, farms, and settlements. In response to the eviction attempts and conservation partnership program done by the GLNP to discipline its borders, local community members engage in various political reactions “from below”. Much of the pre-existing literature often analyses separately the relationships between (1) agrarian and environmental dimensions and (2) gender and class. Hence, this study contributes to a more nuanced understanding by addressing those two sets of interconnections. In doing so, it uses primary empirical materials based on ethnographic-oriented fieldwork done by two research assistants and combines them with secondary data and literature.