This article investigates a counterintuitive occurrence whereby indigenous Toba women in Pandumaan and Sipituhuta, NorthSumatra, Indonesia, retained significant grievances despite successfully challenging a landgrab in their community. Juxtaposingethnography, labour time records and interviews with soil sampling, the article explains how continued soil depletion and rivererosion following the failed land grab correlate with women's increased and undercompensated labour time.
Women's labour is a part of the ecosystem of their social world, just as the ecosystem itself is part of their labour. The reciprocal relationship between the two is due to thecloseness of their material and cultural connection. Yet, thisrelation is often overlooked, particularly under a linear expec-tation and the evolution of (rural) women's labour, given howclimate change will greatly affect their future—ranging fromlabour diversification, the absence of younger farmers, to theindustrialisation of rural lives (Elmhirst et al. 2015; Mohantyand Lenka 2023; White 2012). As I show, women's labour in-volves rapid dynamics, given the changing landscape of theenvironment.This study has shown how women are disproportionately af-fected by land grabs and how that disproportion is connectedto the environmental changes to which a land grab could con-tribute or directly cause. Environment, thus, is a vantage pointfor understanding the changing social relations after a landgrab that is often undermined due to the communities' focus onrestoring their land rights and the difficulty in responding tosuch changes after a conflict that enormously consumed their collective capacity.
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