Smallholders beyond the snapshot: Tracing transient lives in Southeast Asia’s oil palm landscapes

Oil palm smallholders have attracted growing attention in Southeast Asian agrarian studies, especially as research has disaggregated the category to reveal diverse constraints, opportunities, and forms of differentiation. Yet such approaches have an analytical limitation: they often capture smallholders as “snapshots” observed at the time of research, treating oil palm cultivation as a relatively stable component of livelihoods. To address this limitation, this paper develops the framework of “transient lives” to shift attention from smallholders as a stable analytical category to smallholding as a provisional position within changing livelihood trajectories. The framework examines how shifting access to land, labor, and capital is assembled across places through mobility at entry, and how the role of smallholding is subsequently recalibrated as oil palm’s long productive cycle intersects with changing household circumstances. Drawing on long-term field research in Sarawak, Malaysia, and Riau, Indonesia, the paper compares these processes under contrasting boom conditions. In Sarawak, a secure-boom setting, entry depends largely on labor and capital mobilized through multi-local livelihoods, whereas in Riau, an insecure-boom setting, it depends more on land access shaped by the timing of migration. Across both cases, the role of smallholding is repeatedly recalibrated as household circumstances and access to resources change over time. The framework thus foregrounds the spatial and temporal dynamics of livelihoods that are difficult to capture through snapshot analysis. It further suggests that policy interventions, particularly replanting programs, should account for gradual livelihood reassessment rather than treating replanting solely as a technical matter of renewing aging trees.