Surfing on Waves of Opportunities: Resource Use Dynamics in a Dayak Benuaq Community in East Kalimantan, Indonesia

Abstract

This long-term study analyzes the dynamic patterns of resource use and income generation among Dayak Benuaq forest users in Indonesian Borneo. While swidden agriculture provides food for Benuaq families at a subsistence level and safeguards their survival—especially during times of uncertainty—financial income is generated from various forest products and off-farm activities. The Benuaq “surf” on “waves of opportunities” by frequently switching from one income source to another; their decisions are influenced by resource availability, market prices, seasonality, and individual cash demand. This flexible approach, combined with swidden agriculture as a safety net, has proven to be a resilient and efficient strategy to cope with external shocks and to sustain local livelihoods.

Keywords:

• Borneo
• coping strategies
• Dayak
• Indonesia
• resource dynamics
• resource use
• swidden agriculture

I thank the people of Lempunah for their assistance, hospitality, and friendship. Funding for this research (1996–1999) was provided by a scholarship from the Tropical Forest Research Program of GTZ. The SFMP project in Samarinda of the Indonesian Ministry of Forestry and GTZ provided valuable administrative and logistic help. Additional field work in 2003–2007 was conducted under the CIFOR-BMZ Poverty and Decentralization Project funded by the Federal Ministry of Economic Cooperation and Development of Germany (BMZ). I also thank three anonymous referees for their helpful comments on an earlier version of this article and Kristen Evans for her help with editing.

Notes

For a comprehensive overview on the conceptual use of resilience, see Brand and Jax (2007).

This livelihood mode has been called “extended subsistence” by Gönner and Seeland (2002).

According to Walker (1998), Lélé (1998), and Kasperson et al. (2005), resilience carries the temporal notion of a short-lived event, while adaptation refers to more long-term impacts.