The research, led by Ririn Purba of Indonesia’s National Research and Innovation Agency (BRIN) together with colleagues in Jakarta and Yogyakarta, adopted a deliberately intimate methodology. Rather than surveying salaries from a distance, the team embedded itself in the daily rhythms of campus life at one state university, using participant observation, in-depth interviews and informal conversations with lecturers over an extended period. Ethnography of this kind captures what payroll statistics cannot: the anxiety of waiting for a remuneration payment that arrives late, the quiet calculations about whether a second job is feasible, and the social embarrassment of holding a doctorate while earning less than a neighbor in the private sector. The study was conducted as part of the first author’s master’s research at Universitas Gadjah Mada, with informed consent and anonymity protections approved under formal research permission.

The analytical backbone of the paper is the sustainable livelihoods framework, an approach developed originally for studying rural poverty and adapted here to academic work. In that framework, a livelihood consists not merely of income but of the full bundle of assets a person can mobilize: human capital such as qualifications, social capital such as networks, physical and financial assets, and the institutional structures that determine whether those assets can be converted into security. Applying this lens to lecturers reveals a striking paradox. Indonesian academics possess exceptional human capital, often including doctoral degrees and international publications, yet the institutional rules of their universities systematically block the conversion of that capital into economic stability. The result is what the researchers call an intellectual precariat: highly educated workers whose employment conditions resemble those of informal laborers.

Technically, the study distinguishes between macro-level policy and what it terms micro-institutional dynamics. At the macro level, Indonesia’s higher education system has been reshaped by neoliberal governance reforms, including the introduction of PTN-BH status, a legal category for state universities with autonomous, business-oriented governance. Under this model, universities are expected to generate a growing share of their own revenue, tuition fees rise, and internal remuneration systems become tied to performance metrics and institutional cash flow. Government Regulation Number 4 of 2014 governs how higher education institutions manage their finances and personnel, and it is at the level of institutional implementation that the researchers found the sharpest inequalities. Two lecturers with identical qualifications and workloads can receive dramatically different pay depending on their contract type, faculty unit, or standing within internal patronage networks.

This finding about ostensibly homogeneous institutions is among the study’s most significant conceptual contributions. A state university appears, from the outside, to be a single employer with uniform rules. The ethnographic data show instead that micro-level dynamics, the informal hierarchies, the discretionary allocation of teaching hours and project opportunities, and the uneven distribution of institutional allowances, generate systemic inequality within the same campus. Junior and non-permanent lecturers absorb the heaviest teaching loads while receiving the smallest and least reliable shares of remuneration. Seniority and connection, rather than transparent criteria, often determine who gains access to the institutional benefits that make an academic career viable. The walls, as one framing of the study puts it, are closing in on those at the bottom of the internal hierarchy.

The economic picture emerging from Indonesian sources corroborates the ethnography. A first national survey mapping the welfare of academics, reported by The Conversation Indonesia, documented wide disparities in lecturer income across public and private institutions, with many respondents reporting earnings that fall short of regional living-wage benchmarks. In Yogyakarta, where the study took place, regional minimum wage analyses have highlighted the gap between academic salaries and the actual cost of living. The tension spilled into public view in early 2025, when lecturers who are civil servants demonstrated in Jakarta demanding that their professional allowances, known as tukin, be paid reliably into their accounts, a protest that national media covered extensively. For a profession whose members train the nation’s doctors, engineers and teachers, the visibility of these grievances marked a turning point in public perception.

The study situates these local observations within a global literature on academic precarity. Scholars such as Guy Standing have described the precariat as a new class defined by insecure labor and the erosion of occupational identity, and researchers including Burton and Bowman have applied the concept to the neoliberal academy, where tenure-track positions shrink while contingent appointments expand. Comparable studies from Malaysia, Spain and New Zealand document freelance academics, unsustainable public universities and the anxieties produced by performance-based funding. The Indonesian case adds a distinctive dimension: precarity here is not primarily the product of a shrinking tenure system, as in North America, but of institutional remuneration structures that delay, divide and condition payments even for staff who hold formal positions. Academic inbreeding, the tendency of universities to hire their own graduates into junior posts, further concentrates vulnerability among young scholars with few outside options.

The theoretical stakes extend beyond higher education policy. Drawing on Anthony Giddens’s theory of structuration, the authors show how individual lecturers’ daily coping strategies, taking extra teaching, postponing family plans, chasing administrative approvals, simultaneously reproduce the very institutional structures that constrain them. The framework of rentier capitalism, developed by Brett Christophers and others, also informs the analysis: universities increasingly behave as asset-holding entities that extract income streams from tuition and status rather than investing in the productive capacity of their academic workforce. Under this reading, the lecturer’s livelihood becomes a residual claim on institutional revenue, paid after buildings, rankings and administrative priorities are satisfied. The emotional toll documented in the ethnography, including chronic job insecurity and the erosion of professional identity, mirrors findings from studies of anxiety production in neoliberal universities.

What makes the Indonesian case resonate internationally is its timing. Higher education systems across East and Southeast Asia have pursued global competitiveness through ranking regimes, performance funding and institutional autonomy, policies championed from China to Vietnam to Singapore. The Yogyakarta study suggests a hidden cost of that model: when universities are restructured as competitive enterprises, the people who deliver teaching and research become flexible costs to be managed rather than careers to be secured. The authors argue that current institutional policies, far from ensuring security and promoting advancement, frequently exploit lecturers and manufacture the very precarity that the #janganjadidosen hashtag made visible. Their findings contribute a conceptual vocabulary, intellectual precariat, micro-institutional inequality, livelihood vulnerability, that can be applied wherever academic labor is being restructured under market logics.

The practical implications are equally direct. If Indonesia wants to retain its best scholars, the study implies, remuneration systems inside autonomous state universities require transparency and enforceable floors, not just national allowance schedules that arrive late or partially. Ethnographic evidence of this kind is difficult to gather, because lecturers fear retaliation for speaking candidly, and the researchers note that confidentiality agreements restrict the availability of their data. Yet the willingness of informants to share their stories, and the resonance of a hashtag that warned a generation away from the profession, indicate that the issue has moved from faculty corridors into national debate. The walls, the study’s title suggests, are closing in; whether they are pushed back will depend on whether policymakers treat lecturers’ livelihoods as infrastructure for the nation’s future rather than as a line item to be minimized.

Subject of Research: Economic and structural vulnerability of lecturers' livelihoods in Indonesian higher education

Article Title: “The walls are closing in”: the vulnerability of lecturers’ livelihoods in Indonesia

Article References: Purba, R., Erwinsyah, R. G., Yumantoko, Belvage, R. H., Wahyono, E., Solekhah, N., & Aldyan, R. A. (2026). “The walls are closing in”: the vulnerability of lecturers’ livelihoods in Indonesia. Higher Education. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10734-026-01781-4

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s10734-026-01781-4

Keywords: academic labor, intellectual precariat, Indonesia, higher education, neoliberal governance, lecturer salaries, ethnography, livelihoods, Yogyakarta, university autonomy, job insecurity, sustainable livelihoods framework

The study rests on an unusually rich empirical base. Singh and Mistri surveyed 600 households, split evenly between 300 migrant and 300 non-migrant households, across 12 villages in and around the Loktak Wetland, and supplemented the survey with 16 key informant interviews. They then subjected the data to a three-pronged analytical strategy: descriptive statistics to map who moves and how, Principal Component Analysis to construct composite indices of household assets and amenities, and Binary Logistic Regression to isolate the factors that significantly raise or lower the probability that a household sends a migrant out. This combination allowed the researchers to test, rather than merely assert, the predictions of three established migration theories applied together for the first time in this setting.

Those theories are the Push-Pull framework, the New Economics of Labour Migration, and the Sustainable Livelihoods Framework. The Push-Pull model, dating back to Everett Lee’s classic formulation, holds that people move when negative conditions at the origin outweigh attractions of the destination, moderated by intervening obstacles. The New Economics of Labour Migration, developed by Oded Stark and David Bloom in the 1980s, shifts the analytical unit from the individual to the household, treating migration as a collective strategy for diversifying income and managing risk rather than a purely individual wage calculation. The Sustainable Livelihoods Framework, institutionalised by the UK Department for International Development, examines how households combine five categories of assets, natural, physical, human, financial and social capital, to construct a living under given vulnerability contexts and institutional conditions.

The empirical findings map remarkably cleanly onto this integrated framework. Ecological degradation of the wetland, climatic variability and institutional constraints emerged as significant push factors, undermining the livelihood security of fishing and farming households. At the same time, urban employment opportunities acted as the principal pull factors drawing people toward towns and cities. In the regression analysis, the likelihood of migration was significantly associated with household size, landholding, household assets, perceived ecological and climatic risks, and what the researchers call policy uptake, the degree to which households had engaged with government schemes and support programmes. Larger households, with more labour to spare, were better positioned to send a member away; asset holdings shaped both the capacity to migrate and the need to do so.

Perhaps the most theoretically significant result concerns the function of migration itself. Consistent with the New Economics of Labour Migration, movement from the wetland operates primarily as a household-level strategy for income diversification. Rather than abandoning the wetland entirely, families diversify their labour portfolios: one member earns wages in town while others continue fishing or cultivating at home, and remittances or savings flow back to buffer the household against livelihood crises. This circular pattern, in which migrants retain strong ties to the origin and return repeatedly, echoes findings from other rural Indian settings, including the multilocational livelihood strategies documented in earlier work on circular migration, and it underscores why treating migration as a one-way, permanent relocation misses much of what is actually happening in ecologically fragile regions.

Yet the study resists a comfortable interpretation of migration as straightforward adaptation. The qualitative evidence from key informant interviews suggests that migration from Loktak is frequently undertaken under conditions of constrained choice, with households moving not because they have optimised a livelihood portfolio but because ecological and institutional pressures have left them few alternatives. Singh and Mistri conclude that migration in this setting exists along a continuum between adaptation and distress, shaped by differential access to livelihood assets and institutional support. Households with more assets may use migration strategically and benefit from it; households with fewer resources may be pushed into it as a last resort, absorbing the costs of separation and precarity without gaining much resilience in return.

The specific ecology of Loktak helps explain why distress runs so deep. The wetland, famous for its phumdis, the floating masses of vegetation and organic matter on which communities live and fish, has been profoundly altered by human intervention, most notably the Ithai Barrage, which has disrupted the natural hydrological regime and the drift of the floating islands. Declining fish catches, changing water levels and periodic clean-up campaigns that threaten access to fishing commons have combined to erode the natural capital on which Loktak’s fisherfolk depend. Earlier work by the same research team had already documented how ecological deterioration drives livelihood diversification among the lake’s fisherfolk; the new study extends that picture by quantifying the migration response and embedding it in formal theory.

The methodological choices deserve attention in their own right. By surveying migrant and non-migrant households separately and comparing them, the researchers could distinguish the characteristics that differentiate migrating households from otherwise similar stayers, a design that strengthens causal inference in the absence of experimental data. The use of Principal Component Analysis to build a Durable Household Asset Index and a Basic Amenities Index, alongside a Policy Uptake Index, converted messy multidimensional information about wealth, infrastructure and institutional engagement into measurable predictors. The Binary Logistic Regression then estimated the independent effect of each factor on migration probability, controlling for the others, so that the apparent influence of perceived ecological risk, for instance, is not merely a proxy for poverty or household size.

The policy implications are pointed. Because migration from Loktak is driven substantially by ecological degradation and institutional failure rather than by opportunity-seeking alone, the authors argue that wetland conservation must be integrated with livelihood enhancement if distress-driven movement is to be reduced. Restoring the ecological health of the wetland, securing fishing communities’ access to common resources, and strengthening the delivery of livelihood support and social protection would, on this evidence, do more to stabilise populations than any migration-focused intervention by itself. Conversely, conservation measures that ignore livelihoods, such as clean-up drives that displace fishers from their commons, risk intensifying exactly the pressure they aim to relieve.

More broadly, the study makes a case for mainstreaming the environment into migration theory, a call that has been growing in the demographic literature. Most environmental migration research has concentrated on dramatic, large-scale hazards, leaving a gap in understanding of how slow, cumulative degradation of a single ecosystem, a lake, a delta, a forest, reshapes mobility in the communities that depend on it. Loktak shows that such small-scale livelihood systems can generate substantial, theory-consistent migration flows that are simultaneously adaptive and distressing. As wetlands worldwide continue to shrink and degrade, the continuum between adaptation and distress traced in this Northeast Indian wetland may prove to be one of the defining mobility patterns of the coming decades, and a reminder that the people most affected by ecological decline are often those least equipped to choose whether to stay or go.

Subject of Research: Ecologically induced circular migration among fishing and farming households in the Ramsar-designated Loktak Wetland, Northeast India

Article Title: Circular migration under ecological stress in the Loktak Wetland, India: insights from migration theories

Article References: Singh, O. K., & Mistri, A. (2026). Circular migration under ecological stress in the Loktak Wetland, India: insights from migration theories. Journal of Population Research, 43(4), Article 30. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12546-026-09438-w

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s12546-026-09438-w

Keywords: circular migration, environmental migration, Loktak Wetland, Ramsar site, Push-Pull Theory, New Economics of Labour Migration, Sustainable Livelihoods Framework, ecological degradation, livelihood diversification, Manipur, wetland conservation, household resilience

The study rests on the sustainable livelihoods framework, a conceptual apparatus developed in the late 1990s that decomposes household well-being into five interlocking capital assets. Human capital encompasses skills, health, and labor; social capital captures networks, trust, and reciprocal obligations; natural capital refers to fisheries, land, and coastal ecosystems; physical capital includes boats, nets, housing, and infrastructure; and financial capital covers savings, credit, and income streams. In livelihoods analysis, poverty is understood not simply as a lack of income but as a depletion or imbalance across this asset portfolio, and climate shocks are understood as exogenous forces that can drain one or more capitals simultaneously. By asking fisherfolk to appraise their own assets retrospectively—before flooding became a defining feature of daily life and after—the researchers were able to reconstruct a longitudinal narrative of loss from within the communities themselves.

Methodologically, the investigation employed twenty-five qualitative in-depth interviews with fisherfolk in the two case study communities, both situated on Ghana’s vulnerable southeastern coast, a stretch of shoreline repeatedly battered by tidal waves and sea encroachment. The interview protocol probed how participants perceived and experienced changes in each of the five livelihood capitals, with thematic analysis used to identify patterns across accounts. Snowball sampling was used to reach participants embedded in close-knit fishing networks, and the researchers attended carefully to positionality, reflexivity, and the ethical sensitivities of working in communities where livelihood insecurity is a lived and often painful reality. This approach trades the statistical breadth of household surveys for interpretive depth, capturing nuances—such as the shifting meaning of kinship obligations during a disaster—that quantitative indices of livelihood vulnerability often miss.

The findings paint a consistent picture of asset deterioration. Before recurrent coastal flooding became a major hazard, participants in both communities appraised their livelihood assets positively, describing functional fishing gear, secure homes, reliable access to fishing grounds, and social arrangements that buffered households against ordinary shocks. With the intensification of flooding in recent years, however, participants reported marked decline across nearly every asset category. Boats and nets are damaged or destroyed by storm surges; homes built decades ago crumble as the sea undermines their foundations; savings are consumed by rebuilding rather than reinvestment; and the physical erosion of landing beaches and coastal land shrinks the natural resource base on which fishing depends. Health and educational investments—core components of human capital—are deferred as households divert resources to immediate survival.

Strikingly, one asset defied this pattern: social capital. While fisherfolk reported erosion of natural, physical, financial, and human capitals, their social networks did not merely persist but, in the researchers’ interpretation, emerged as the residual cushion absorbing repeated shocks. Communal labor, kin-based sharing of catch, and mutual assistance during displacement events continued to bind communities together even as material assets vanished. This resilience of social capital carries a double meaning. It testifies to the strength of communal institutions in Ghanaian fishing societies, but it also signals danger: when social capital becomes the last line of defense, repeated withdrawals from that reserve—neighboring households endlessly absorbing one another’s losses—risk exhausting the very networks that hold communities together. Previous research on coastal Bangladesh and elsewhere has warned that the collapse of livelihoods under environmental stress can push people toward desperate coping strategies, including illegal activities, underscoring how fragile this final buffer can be.

Ghana’s coastline provides an ideal—and alarming—laboratory for this inquiry. The country’s roughly 550-kilometer shore is among the most rapidly eroding in West Africa, with some stretches retreating several meters per year. Low-lying communities in the Ketu South Municipality and the Keta area of the Volta Region have suffered repeated tidal wave disasters in recent years, with seawater surging hundreds of meters inland, destroying homes, salt-mining operations, and fishing infrastructure. Earlier scholarship has mapped the geophysical vulnerability of Ghana’s coast to sea-level rise, documented the sociodemographic determinants of household exposure in the Volta Delta, and catalogued the multiple environmental and socioeconomic stressors bearing down on small-scale fisheries. What this new study adds is the temporal dimension: an explicit before-and-after accounting of asset trajectories as perceived by the people whose livelihoods are at stake.

The mechanism linking flooding to asset depletion operates through several reinforcing channels. Directly, floodwaters and wave action destroy physical capital and degrade natural capital through saltwater intrusion and shoreline retreat. Indirectly, each flood event triggers a cascade: households liquidate savings or take on debt to repair damage, which drains financial capital; children may be withdrawn from school and adults from productive work to assist with recovery, eroding human capital; and declining catches—compounded by climate-driven changes in fish stocks—reduce the income stream needed to replenish any of these reserves. Because livelihood assets are fungible and interdependent, a shock to one capital propagates through the portfolio, producing a spiral in which each successive flood inflicts disproportionate damage on an already weakened household economy. This dynamic helps explain why communities that once recovered from occasional marine incursions now experience each event as a step down an irreversible gradient of impoverishment.

The authors argue that the policy response must match the multidimensional character of the problem. Seawalls, the conventional engineering answer that Ghana has pursued in vulnerable towns such as Keta, have drawn criticism for their cost, their tendency to displace erosion down-drift, and their failure to address the livelihood dimensions of coastal risk. Instead, the researchers recommend nature-based solutions, most prominently mangrove restoration. Mangroves attenuate wave energy, trap sediment, stabilize shorelines, and sequester carbon at rates that rival tropical forests, while simultaneously providing nursery habitat for fish and material resources for coastal households—an intervention that rebuilds natural capital even as it shields physical and financial assets. International evidence from the Caribbean and the Pacific supports the role of sustainably managed mangrove systems in reducing community vulnerability to coastal hazards.

Complementing ecosystem restoration, the study calls for welfare insurance schemes tailored to fishing communities. Index-based or subsidized micro-insurance could prevent households from having to liquidate productive assets after each flood, breaking the depletion spiral at its financial link. The authors frame this as a form of social protection analogous to the safety-net programs pioneered in Indian fisheries decades ago, updated for an era of accelerating climate hazards. Other policy options they gesture toward include investments in early-warning systems, climate-resilient housing, and livelihood diversification that reduces dependence on a single, increasingly hazardous resource. The underlying principle is that adaptation policy should target the asset portfolio as a whole rather than any single capital in isolation.

The study also identifies critical gaps in what is known. Qualitative work of this kind, while rich in interpretive detail, is limited to two communities and twenty-five voices; the authors frame their contribution as mapping what we know, what we do not know, and what we need to know about flooding and livelihood asset dynamics. Outstanding questions include the quantitative magnitudes of asset loss across hazard events, the thresholds at which social capital begins to fray under repeated strain, the differential experiences of women and other subgroups within fishing communities, and the long-term effectiveness of mangrove restoration under projected rates of sea-level rise along the Ghanaian coast. Answering these questions will require combining the kind of participatory, longitudinal qualitative research exemplified here with remote sensing of shoreline change and panel surveys of household asset holdings.

For now, the message from Ghana’s eroding coast is unambiguous. Climate hazards are not merely damaging infrastructure; they are systematically dismantling the asset base of coastal livelihoods, leaving social bonds as the final, straining safety net. Whether the communities of the Volta coastline retain a viable future may depend on how quickly policy can rebuild natural buffers and financial protections before that last reserve is spent.