Abstract
<p>In dryland Indonesia, water and agricultural scarcity is predominantly framed as a consequence of climate change, justifying state-led interventions in irrigation, hybrid seed promotion, and commodity agriculture. This study challenges that framing by examining how scarcity is co-produced through the interaction of climatic variability and development policy in Southwest Timor. Focusing on Atoin Meto communities in Kolbano, it combines multi-decadal spatial analysis of temperature, precipitation, and drought indices with qualitative evidence from interviews and focus group discussions across three ecologically distinct villages. The spatial record confirms genuine climatic intensification: sustained warming since 1949, a precipitation deficit below long-term averages over the past decade unprecedented in 120 years, and structural drying extending beyond El Niño cycles. Yet these stresses do not explain who experiences water shortage, who loses crops, or who abandons farming. Drawing on the political ecology of constructed scarcity, the analysis shows that climatic exposure becomes consequential scarcity through three interrelated domains: material redistribution, where road-led settlement reconfiguration displaced communities from their water sources and dismantled indigenous forest custodianship; institutional reconfiguration, where coercive agricultural mandates, hybrid seed promotion, and technocratic extension eroded local seed sovereignty and epistemically displaced indigenous ecological knowledge; and socio-economic restructuring, where market integration, rice dependency, and extractive mining narrowed livelihood diversity and pushed youth into precarious migration. The study contributes to political ecology by demonstrating that what appears as climate vulnerability is substantially the accumulated legacy of spatial dispossession and epistemic displacement and by treating indigenous knowledge systems as constitutive elements of adaptive capacity whose institutional erasure is itself a mechanism of scarcity production.</p>