Informal, essential and embedded: Transport strategies in remote Sarawak

Abstract

Transport is a main concern for people living in rural and remote communities around the world, where the absence of affordable and reliable transport often prevents access to education, health services and employment opportunities. In Sarawak, a state of Malaysia on the island of Borneo, many rural villages experience acute transport poverty. For their basic transport needs, people here rely on informal transport systems based on local social and cultural networks, which provide essential mobility.We apply Polanyi's concept of social embeddedness to explore mobility in this region, people's efforts to develop regional models of entrepreneurship but also the relative marginalisation of remote communities in terms of development and infrastructure provision and the resulting friction between local people, the companies involved in regional resource extraction activities and local government. Based on data collected between 2015 and 2017, we frame informal transport in this region as a form of Indigenous entrepreneurship that can help local communities achieve wider social and economic inclusion. Our research points to a more social type of entrepreneurship and economic practice, in which social relationships and community responsibilities play an important role. Our qualitative approach, including ethnographic methods such as semi-structured interviews and participant observation, underpins the groundedness of our data in the every-day experiences of the people who took part in the research.