Oil palm governance at the grassroots: how assemblage links oil palm, livelihoods, and local administration in an Indonesian village

Oil palm governance has attracted significant research attention. However, the impact of this work on palm oil governance remains patchy. In part, this is linked to trends in palm oil research, which focus on the conservation-development binary that limits exploration of the practices whereby actors in different sites work out oil palm governance. In this paper, we propose an approach that conceptualizes the oil palm industry as an assemblage of heterogeneous human and non-human elements and explores how these are contingently brought together in the oil palm industry. These are employed to examine how oil palm is integrated into a village in West Kalimantan. The study shows that while current partnership arrangements leave village governments in a weak position vis-à-vis large plantation companies, local administrative arrangements provide local actors with the capacity to respond to opportunities in a variety of ways resulting in diversified small-scale production addressing multiple livelihood objectives.