Why does the promise of sustainable development in resource-rich nations like Indonesia continue to generate debt and deepen inequality? This research takes up that question through an ethnographic and historical study of Indonesia’s oil palm replanting program. Drawing on more than two years of multi-sited fieldwork with smallholders, corporate managers, bankers, and state planners—alongside extensive archival and financial document analysis—the project examines how replanting schemes, promoted as solutions to aging plantations and as cornerstones of Indonesia’s biofuel transition, transform land, labor, and debt into speculative assets. By placing debt at the center of analysis, the research offers a fresh account of plantation persistence: one driven not only by land and labor regimes, but by the expanding architectures of finance that organize everyday life and reorder possibilities for the future.

During 2025 - 2026, this research develops along three complementary directions:

1. Book project "Recursive Debts" -- A monograph that extends my dissertation into a broader analysis of how financial infrastructures sustain plantation economies through cycles of replanting, sustainability certification, and debt-based governance.

2. Collaborative Project with Universitas Gadjah Mada and the University of Zurich -- As Principal Investigator, I led a three-member research team from project design to publication, examining the intersections of agrarian transformation, financial governance, and state–market relations

3. Expansion on Climate and Green Finance in Southeast Asia -- This project explores how climate and green finance reshape agrarian worlds by following the recursive movement of debt across plantations and regional financial hubs. 

Keywords: Debt, Sustainability, Financialization, Plantation Futures

Drawing on ethnography, political economy, and postcolonial studies, this body of work examines how people imagine, negotiate, and sometimes refuse the futures planned for them. 

In this body of work, I trace emerging practices of carbon credit, more-than-human solidarity, the social life of financial derivatives, and labor struggle to show how hope is made and sustained under extractive conditions. 

Across Indonesia’s plantation and mining frontiers, as well as financial centers and high-level investment negotiations, I center the everyday ways people live, endure, and remake possibilities amid layers of socioecological crisis.

Keywords: Speculation, Socioecological crisis, Affective Labor, Alternatives

This collaborative research examines how Indonesia’s electric-vehicle transition redistributes risk downward while consolidating capital upward. In Southeast Asia’s ride-hailing sector, EV adoption is driven not by environmental benefits alone, but by credit schemes and leasing arrangements that shift the financial burden onto drivers. 

Meanwhile, state holding companies and investment authorities are restructuring the industry through de-risking mechanisms aimed at attracting private and foreign capital. The turn to “green” also reshapes political settlements and strengthens an emerging mode of state asset management, where sustainability functions simultaneously as a development narrative and a financial strategy. 

My role focuses on analyzing corporate-level transformations—tracing how the imperative to “green” reorders investment portfolios, sets institutional agendas, and drives state-led restructuring across the sector.

In 2026, this research will expand in two ways: first, by centering the perspectives of online driver unions in their everyday negotiations with the EV landscape, and second, by exploring corporate elites' negotiations with the state and the global decarbonization agenda. 

Keywords: Green industrial policy, EV transition, Ride-hailing, Risk transfer