capital scored weakly because Minangkabau culture is closely intertwined through familial relationships. This was in evidence by the story of one bagan owner. He
was a former bagan crew member and bought his first second-hand bagan in 1997 from savings. Now he owns 3 large bagans and the business is managed and
staffed by his family. The agent who buys the fish is his younger brother, the captain of one of his vessels is one of his more distant relatives and the one who
manages the business day-to-day is his son. On certain attributes of social capital such as ‘trust’ and ‘help when a crisis’ he scored highly but on other aspects, for
example ‘leadership’ and ‘sanctions rule of law’ he scored those attributes poorly.
In his example, bonds of trust built on family relationships created a strong web of social capital yet when he assessed the more distant aspects of social capital that
overlapped with institutions he scored them poorly. In an unrelated interview, a bagan crew member attributed identical scores to all the social attributes as the
owner of the example above but with one difference. Whereas the owner had said in a crisis his family would help him, the crew member said that in an emergency
his family would not help him, he would be on his own. When those two respondents were analysed there was only a minor difference in position on the
bad-scale yet their respective social capital security nets were very different. One possibility in future analyses may be to move the attributes ‘right to speak out’
and ‘leadership’ to the institutional field and to develop more social capital
attributes that better capture the nuances of those immediate social relationships.
6.3.7 Comparison Between Villages.
Both bagan crew and sampan owners were present in sufficient numbers in both Sungai Pinang and Ampang Pulai to conduct a comparison between the
different locations for those sectors Figure 6.12.
In the natural field, bagan crew members from Sungai Pinang generally
scored lower than Ampang Pulai because Sungai Pinang is geographically isolated and lacks sheltered mooring facilities Figure 6.12, top left panel. In addition,
average scores for the attribu tes ‘state of natural resources’ and ‘fishing income’
were lower in Sungai Pinang. This is most likely because the bagan boats used from Sungai Pinang are smaller bagans that return each day to land the catch and
lack the capacity to travel to the Mentawai Islands in search of fish. There were minor differences between sampan owners from Ampang Pulai and Sungai Pinang
but these were almost entirely caused by scores for the attributes ‘geographical isolation’ and ‘sheltered mooring’.
Figure 6.12: Comparison of Sungai Pinang SP and Ampang Pulai AP scores
from MDS projected on a bad 0 to good 100 x-axis for all six fields of the analysis for the bagan and sampan sectors. The y-axis shows the
similaritydissimilarity scores. Diamond = bagan crew AP, square = bagan crew
SP, stars = sampan owner AP, circle = sampan owner SP.
In the social field, sampan owners in Sungai Pinang tended to score lower
than their counterparts in Ampang Pulai Figure 6.12, middle left panel. This difference was predo
minantly caused by low scores for the attribute ‘leadership’.
-40 -20
20 40
20 40
60 80
100
Natural
-40 -20
20 40
20 40
60 80
100
Financial
-40 -20
20 40
20 40
60 80
100
Social
-40 -20
20 40
20 40
60 80
100
Human
-40 -20
20 40
20 40
60 80
100
Institutional
-40 -20
20 40
20 40
60 80
100
Physical
The majority of sampan owners criticized the incumbent village head who they alleged lived in Padang and was too focused on his own business to give them
much attention. They contrasted him with the previous leader who was active in local politics and effective at lobbying the government for aid. Indeed, half of
sampan owners from Sungai Pinang had received grants for long tail machines in the past but these had dried up over the last 5 years. In contrast, none of the bagan
crew members had ever received any government assistance and so were les inclined to argue that the current leadership was much worse than they had
experienced before.
In the human field there is a large group of bagan crew members from
Ampang Pulai that are concentrated around the midpoint on the bad-good scale Figure 6.12, middle right panel. They are joined by 7 bagan crew members from
Sungai Pinang but there is a second group of 5 bagan crew members who score above 60 on this scale. Each of this higher scoring sub-group from Sungai Pinang
had some form of supplementary livelihood. In addition to this, four of them had wives who contributed to the household income, three of them had the desire to
save and two of them had plans for their future when they were too old to go to sea. This higher scoring sub-group had considerably lower average household
expenditure than other bagan crew members from both Sungai Pinang and Ampang Pulai. There was already evidence of higher financial capital from this
sub-group. Eighty percent of these respondents stated that they saved regularly, compared with 25 of other bagan crew members from Sungai Pinang and just
4 of bagan crew from Ampang Pulai. Although the higher human capital of this sub-group had not yet translated into higher physical capital, they are an example
of how even with the low wages that crew members receive it is possible to live prudently, save and invest in supplementary livelihoods and improve livelihood
resilience against shocks.
In the institutional field there was no observable difference in livelihood
resilience scores between the two locations in either the bagan crew or sampan sectors Figure 6.12, bottom left panel. This was surprising because residents of
Sungai Pinang criticized the lack of attention they had received from the government and specifically the lack of aid over the last 5 years when the current
village head was in power. The reason that this difference was not picked up by the attributes is because the majority of fishers in Ampang Pulai also scored
institutional support very low. Furthermore, there was no time limit specified for the attributes ‘personal interventions’ and ‘village interventions’. Consequently
respondents who had been given a boat machine by the government 15 years ago would score the same as one who had received their machine last month. Future
versions of the attributes could include a time limit to distinguish these differences.
In the physical field there was no difference in the scores for the bagan
sector but sampan owners tended to score higher in Sungai Pinang than in Ampang Pulai Figure 6.12, bottom right panel. There were two underlying
causes of this. Four of the six sampan owners from Ampang Pulai owned a motorbike compared to just two from twenty five of the sampan owners in Sungai
Pinang. Part of the reason for this difference is that everything rice fields, schools, shops, fishing boats in Sungai Pinang is within walking distance and
residents only use motorbikes or trucks if they want to travel to Padang. Secondly, Ampang Pulai is a larger port and has a fish auction so all sampan owners can sell
their catch locally for a fair price. In Sungai Pinang the catch needs to be transported to the fish market at Padang, a journey of more than an hour by truck
or motorbike. Some sampan owners were able to use their relatives motorbikes or paid a commission to one of the fish agents to have their fish sold. Others took the
inferior price on the beach either because they could not wait until the following day for the money or because their fishing gear had been purchased for them by
an agent and they were tied into a patron-client relationship. Compared to other villages in the district of Tarusan, including Ampang
Pulai, Sungai Pinang has not received the same level of government support in recent years. There are geographical, institutional and human reasons why this is
the case. Firstly, Sungai Pinang is part of the regency of Pesisir Selatan and the district of Tarusan but it is a two hour drive from the regency capital, partially on
rough roads. For any government official it is much more difficult to reach than Ampang Pulai for example. Secondly, the current village head of Sungai Pinang
lives in Padang rather than Sungai Pinang and villagers alleged that he spent very
little time serving the people he was responsible for. They argued that government attention had dried up during the time that he had been the leader and this was
ev ident in the low scores attributed to ‘leadership’ in the social field. Thirdly, one
of the respondents from the beach seine sector was honest enough to state “over the years we have had so much government assistance in one form or another, but
it gets sold by the receivers and there is no sanctions, no enforcement here. The problem is with the attitude of the people receiving the aid.” In contrast to the
above comment, the example of the sub-group of bagan crew members from Sungai Pinang who scored higher in the human and financial capital fields is an
example of the kind of characteristics of forward planning, prudent living and developing supplementary livelihoods that could strengthen and improve
livelihoods.
6.4 Conclusion
