Gerben NOOTEBOOM is director of the Graduate School of Social Science (GSSS) at the University of Amsterdam and Associate Professor at the Department of Anthropology at the University of Amsterdam, research group Moving Matters: People, Goods, Power and Ideas. The Moving Matters research group focuses on the social consequences of the mobility of people, goods, power, and ideas. It examines migrating people, moving commodities, and the shifting networks of solidarity, remittances, knowledge, and power. He is also a member of the UvA Centre for Sustainable Development Studies (CSDS).

In his academic work, Nooteboom prefers to work as an anthropologist in an interdisciplinary way and focuses on issues of social welfare, poverty, and inequality in ecological and agrarian change process as outcomes of planned development, social policy and sustainable future making. He focusses specifically on the conceptual understanding and the empirical intersection of human adaptation, rural transformation, climate change and development. His longstanding interest in sustainability is defined by 20 years of work experience on interpretation and adaptation to environmental change in rural societies. Most of his research concerns South East Asia, notably rural Philippines and especially rural Indonesia. Recently, he started to work on issues in rural Europe as well. As an anthropologist he is particularly interested in people’s ideas of sustainability, adaptation and practices of (sustainable) future making. Specifically, he focuses on the interrelationships between people and the environment from a political economy and multispecies perspective. 

He teaches courses on the anthropology of development, ecological anthropology, historical comparative sociology, applied anthropology, research design, and methodology. In supervisions, he focusses on anthropology and development, adaptation(s) to climate change, ecology, inequality, understanding rural change processes, social conflict, and social policy.

He has carried out a large number of interdisciplinary research projects on social welfare, poverty and environmental and agrarian change. Among others: Changing Water: Aquatic-ecological change and adaptation to a changing environment in the Middle Mahakam Wetlands, East Kalimantan, Indonesia (Royal Academy of Sciences (KNAW)); Transnational Landdeals in Indonesia and The Philippines (with Rosanne Rutten) (Dutch Research Council (NWO)); Pathways out of Poverty: Food Poverty Social Policy and Agrarian Change in Indonesia (with John McCarthy, Andrew McWilliams, Carol Warren (Australian Research Council (ARC)) and Innovative Knowledge About Networks – Fish For Food (IKAN F3) (NWO). Nooteboom has also been regularly asked to be involved in other research networks, which have provided a fruitful environment for research on social, economic and ecological transformations in both the Global North and the Global South. Examples are research projects on social policy, poverty and rural change in Central Java (in cooperation with Kyoto University, Gajah Mada University Yogyakarta, Makassar University, and the Australian National University).

His current research agenda focusses on:

‘Green Futures’: 1) The comparative study of social-economic consequences of climate change by focusing on (perceived) impacts and the formation of old and new inequalities; 2) Paradoxes of Agrarian and Climate Change: Social-cultural entanglements and adaptation processes of agrarian and climate change; 3) The social-cultural analysis of Green Future Making. Ideas, values and implicit ideologies of the politics of 'improvement' in the field of climate change and adaptation through (development) policies, interventions and technologies.

Research projects

• Innovative Knowledge About Networks – Fish For Food (IKAN F3) (NWO/Wotro).
• NWO/Wotro Integrated Programme: GULF-STATE CONCESSIONS IN INDONESIA AND THE PHILIPPINES : CONTESTED CONTROL OF AGRICULTURAL LAND AND FOODCROPS (with Rosanne Rutten).
• 'CHANGING WATER: AQUATIC-ECOLOGICAL CHANGE AND ADAPTION [...] IN THE MIDDLE MAHAKAM WETLANDS, EAST KALIMANTAN, INDONESIA, financed by the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO). (With Edwin de Jong).

• McCarthy, J., Nooteboom, G., Hadi, S., Kutanegara, P. M., & Muliati, N. (2023). The Politics of Knowledge and Social Cash Transfers: The Constitutive Effects of An Anti-Poverty Regime In Indonesia. Journal of Contemporary Asia, 1-24.

• McCarthy, J.F., A. McWilliam & G. Nooteboom (Eds.) (2023). The Paradox of Agrarian Change: Food Security and the Politics of Social Protection in Indonesia. Singapore, NUS Press. https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/distributed/P/bo185856608.html

• Mizuno, K., Semedi, P. and G. Nooteboom (Eds.). (2023) Two Centuries of Agrarian, Economic, and Ecological Shifts in the North Coast of Java (1812-2012). Gajah Mada University Press.

• Hulsbergen, F. and G. Nooteboom (2023). Child Sex Tourism: Ambiguous Spaces in Bali. TESG. Journal for Economic and Social Geography. 114 (1): 28-42.

• Nooteboom, G. (2019). Understanding the Nature of Rural Change: The Benefits of Migration and the (Re)creation of Precarity for Men and Women in Rural Central Java, Indonesia. TRaNS: Trans -Regional and -National Studies of Southeast Asia, 1-21.

• Nooteboom, G. (2015). Forgotten People: Poverty, Risk and Social Security in Indonesia: The case of the Madurese (Monograph). Leiden, Boston: Brill.

• Nooteboom, G. and L. Bakker (2014). Beyond the Gulf State Investment Hype: The Case of Indonesia and the Philippines. In Mayke Kaag & Annelies Zoomers (Eds.), The Global Land Grab: Beyond the Hype (pp. 170-184). London: Zed Books.

• G. Nooteboom & M. Rutten (2012). Magic bullets in development: assumptions, teleology and the popularity of three solutions to end poverty. In L. Botes, R. Jongeneel & S. Strijbos (Eds.), Re-integrating technology and economy in human life and society: proceedings of the 17th annual working conference of the IIDE, Maarssen, May 2011. Vol. I (pp. 103-120). Maarssen: IIDE.

• Nooteboom, G. (2011). 'Out of Wedlock: Migrant - police partnerships in East Kalimantan'. In: State and Illegality in Indonesia . Aspinal, E & Gerry van Klinken (Eds.). Kitlv Press/Iseas Press. Leiden , Singapore .

• Bakker, L., G. Nooteboom, and Rosanne Rutten (eds. special issue) (2010). Localities of Value: Ambiguous Access to Land and Water Resources in Southeast Asia . Asian Journal of Social Science, 38 (2).

• Nooteboom, G. and E. de Jong (2010). Green Development Fantasies: Resource Degradation and the Lack of Community Resistance in the Middle Mahakam Wetlands, East Kalimantan, Indonesia . Asian Journal of Social Science, 38 (2).

• De Jonge, H. & G. Nooteboom (2006). Why the Madurese? Ethnic Conflicts in West and East Kalimantan compared. Asian Journal of Social Science, 34(2), 354-376.

• Nooteboom, G. (2005). Demystifying State Provocation and Violence in Indonesia . Journal of the Humanities and Social Sciences of Southeast Asia and Oceania , 163(1) (Review essay).

• Nooteboom, G. (2006). 'Styles of Social Security in Upland East Java '. In J. Koning & F. Husken (Eds.), Ropewalking and Safety Nets: Local Ways of Managing Insecurities in Indonesia . Leiden , Singapore : Brill.

• Nooteboom, G. (2003). A Matter of Style: Social security and livelihood in Upland East Java. PhD Dissertation online (see link below).