Sustainable Livelihoods Sustainable Approach and Contemporary Research on Rural Social-Ecological Systems in Indonesia

Abstract

As the largest tropical archipelago country in Asia, Indonesia has 84,096 villages. From the human ecology perspective, a village or rural area is a social-ecological system. The sustainable livelihood approach was built by rural scholars and experts, development studies, and human ecology as a framework for looking at aspects of sustainable development in rural areas. This paper uses the literature review method on (1) the trajectory of the sustainable livelihoods approach and (2) its use in contemporary research on rural social-ecological systems in Indonesia. The analysis results show that the sustainable livelihoods approach continues to grow and evolve, including using scientific principles of political ecology. In Indonesia, its use is also used for various research on rural social-ecological systems. This paper specifically shows the important results of six studies of rural social-ecological systems in West Java, South Sulawesi, North Sumatra, West Sumatra, West Kalimantan, and East Kalimantan (New Capital City of Indonesia/IKN) area. The six studies show that aspects of social and ecological systems are closely intertwined, and the sustainable livelihoods approach managed to peel it off.