At a recent regional conference, researcher Wengki Ariando presented a sobering look into the "Political Ecology of Marginalization" facing Southeast Asia's Sea Nomads. This project is part of TRACE: Tracing evolutionary pathways in grassroots climate governance. 

Drawing on extensive fieldwork conducted between 2020 and 2025, Ariando’s multi-sited ethnography tracked the lives of groups like the Moken, Orang Laut, and Sama-Bajau across nine distinct field sites in Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, and Thailand. The research highlights a profound socio-spatial shift: the mass transition of these communities from houseboats to permanent coastal settlements. Far from a simple upgrade in living standards, the study argues that this "sedentarization" is often a state-sponsored tool for territorial control, forcing maritime-based peoples into an ethnocentric, land-based governance model that renders their traditional, fluid lifestyles invisible or even "illegal."

The conference discussions centered on how development (typically a buzzword for progress) often functions as a mechanism of exclusion through extractivism and coastal grabbing. From the nickel mines of Kabaena to the high-intensity tourism zones of Phuket, Sea Nomads find themselves caught in a paradoxical double bind. On one side, Marine Protected Areas often criminalize their traditional fishing practices under the guise of conservation; on the other, urban expansion and port infrastructure push them to the literal peripheries of society. However, Ariando noted that these communities are not merely passive victims. Their continued strategic mobility serves as a form of quiet resistance. By leveraging their deep knowledge of tides and porous maritime borders to bypass state surveillance, the Sama-Bajau and Moken are redefining resilience, not just as an adaptation to poverty, but as a bold political act of refusing to be fixed by a global capital system that has no place for the lived sea.