Deepening youth precarity: How the COVID‐19 pandemic impacted the livelihoods and mobility pathways of rural youth in South Sulawesi, Indonesia

Abstract

Indonesia's young people renegotiate the constraints on rural‐based livelihood opportunities by participating in a diverse array of off‐farm activities, circular migration, and rural to urban mobility flows. While these strategies work to overcome the insecurity of farm‐based work, they can also introduce new forms of precarity, which are compounded when other major life events or crises occur. Drawing on a period of in‐depth qualitative research with two villages in South Sulawesi, we describe how young people were impacted by, and responded to, the mobility and trade restrictions on their daily livelihood activities during the fallout of the COVID‐19 pandemic. Travel restrictions and company layoffs forced some young people to return to their villages, where they faced limited employment prospects, while other young people remained isolated or idle in urban settings and unable to return home. Furthermore, fluctuating commodity prices and an absence of buyers for agricultural and seafood commodities led to even fewer opportunities in rural areas. The impacts of the pandemic were also gendered, as young women faced increased demands for unpaid care work, while also stepping into new markets (e.g., ginger powder) or retail work, to counter the loss of household incomes and return of male migrants. In the context of broad‐scale landscape change, declining rural opportunities, and precarious work contracts in urban areas and resource frontiers, our findings exemplify how the economic fallout of the COVID‐19 pandemic represents just one of the many crises that rural youth contend with on a daily basis.