Iwan Rudiarto, Rizqa Hidayani, Micah Fisher
Abstract
The trends of bi-locality – in which an individual will spend part of the year in a rural area, and the other in an urban area – presents a unique and increasingly common manifestation of the circular migrant. In this paper, we explore the dynamics of bi-local migrants in Indonesia from a Central Java city and examine migrant points of origin in terms of their characteristics, mobility patterns, and remittance uses. Data were collected from 105 sample cases among those classified as migrants distributed across the study area. We apply the Flocktracker software for our study, which is a mobile-based application that combines online questionnaires and provides associated locational attributes. Most of the bi-local migrants continue to migrate as a strategy to address the lack of income in rural areas. Migrants not only circulate between two destinations from their rural origins to one city, but also increasingly gravitate to other cities as a multiple destination strategy depending on networks and employment availability. A key finding of this study is that overall, although migration to urban areas supports rural household incomes, it contributes in limited ways to the commonly anticipated rural development outcomes. This suggests that policy interventions are mistaking job creation and remittances as a proxy for rural development, whereas policy priorities should be looking beyond job creation to identify other ways to support development in rural areas.
Keywords: bi-local migrants, mobility pattern, remittance, rural development, Indonesia
the version that was submitted the English needs careful editing to pick up minor errors that appear throughout.
Once a manuscript is sent to production the editing process is light touch, errors won’t be corrected by the production team. For example, line 310 "In average" should be "On average", line 567 "important" should be "importance", line 748 "dynamics in" should be "dynamics between urban and rural" It is not my place to go through checking for all the errors, these are just examples. There are also many long paragraphs that need to be spilt.
has been proofed read. Some long paragraphs have been spilted and repetitive statement has been eliminated and edited.
2 The title - I notice you have changed "the bilocal migrant"
to "rural - urban" and I've been trying to see if this was recommended by a reviewer. It is my view that this better captured the pitch of your paper and why it is novel. I would recommend either returning to "the bilocal migrant" or something like "bilocal migration to and from Central Java City [rather than "in"]. I also would suggest changing the terms after the colon "connecting the impacts to Rural Development" doesn't represent the paper well. you have a theme about migration being shaped by both economic decisions and broader decisions, maybe it is this key point you need to capture in the title rather than the detail on livelihoods and remittances.
We have changed the title into “The Bilocal Migrant: Economic Drivers of Mobility Across the Rural-Urban Interface in Central Java, Indonesia”
to emphasize more on the economic and broader decisions on migration.
3 I would recommend you revise the abstract to make it succinctly convey your main argument/contribution, at present it is long and appears "lost in the detail".
Abstract has been revised and reorganised as desribed in line 10 to 24.
4 Your highlights are too long, they need to be 85 characters each. As a tip focus on what your main findings are/the contribution of the paper.
Highlights are modeified and suited to main findings with maximum 85 characters each.
5 Keywords - circular migration or bilocal migration? rural- urban migration not migrants. Cut Sukarta city.
Keywords have been adjusted to bilocal migration and Surakarta city was deleted.
6 Acknowledgements - I would recommend naming the team members who collected data, also acknowledging the anonymous reviewers.
Team members for data collection have been added as mentioned in line 994-996.
7 Define bilocal, circular, seasonal and rural - urban migration - the differences are not obvious to a reader such as myself who is not a migration specialist. I also guess there maybe regional differences in what these terms connote so please be clear. I hope I haven't missed the definitions; I've been scanning to check they are not there.
Also, throughout your text be very clear how you are using specific terms, I find there is a looseness regarding when 'bilocal' and when 'circular' migration are used, you need to be precise in the use of terminology.
We made particular section for the definitions as described in line 164- 251.
8 Very important: you bury the aim of the paper at the end of a long paragraph lines 167 - 196, please make your aims and research questions clear within a separate paragraph. I have been trying to find your questions, they must be clear
Objective has been stated clearly in a separated paragraph as mentioned in line 150-162. The paragraph does not only mention the objective but also
not improved the manuscript won’t be accepted). well as future research chalenge.
9 I have one substantive comment and I regret not identifying this at the first revision request stage: throughout your use of the term migrant is a homogeneous category (sexless, ageless, no ethnicity, etc.). In my view this is a short- coming of the paper, not least because it begs the question whether certain social categories are bilocal migrants over and above others e.g. young male. Ideally one would want to see attention to social differentiation mainstreamed across the paper, however at this stage can I ask whether you have information on at least gender and age to include in section three? For example, after 3.1.4 on education. If you do could you please address this issue, if you don't you need to be explicit that it is a short coming of the empirical data.
We have added the information about gender and marital status of bilocal migrants as stated in point 3.1.5 line 395-414.
Some points I picked up when reading the text:
66-68: you first state that reclassification from rural to urban is most likely to be happening in sites transformed into mega cities... then you say this is not confined to the growth poles as medium-sized cities, etc. This is confusing, you appear to be contradicting yourselves.
194-198: I would suggest move to line 180.
251-252: for a non-Indonesian audience either explain what these traditional foods are or you could cut the examples altogether.
paragraph 260: the grammar needs checking (is and are, for and to are confused).
312: you refer to the currency rate but, in the revisions, you have converted all the currency to US$ so don’t need to give this.
425: Figures 6 & 7 - line 476 you seem to imply that there was movement between Surakarta and other cities,
The statement has been revised into
“While natural growth is more dominant in shaping growth in a smaller region, rural to urban migration and reclassification from
‘rural’ to ‘urban’ are more indicative of locations transforming into
megacities. In Indonesia, these megacities include regions such as Jakarta, Surabaya, and Bandung metropolitan areas, and more recently are indicative of regions in emerging medium-sized cities like Semarang, Surakarta and Yogyakarta” as stated in line 81-87.
Line 194-198 has been moved and now become line 256-260.
The statement has been cutted.
Grammar has been checked and proofed.
Currency rate has been removed.
The movement is not directly done from Surakarta to another city but
arrows and b. [important] need to think what implications this has for your argument on 'bilocality' if it is in fact 'trilocality' or similar. Please clarify in text.
570 - 572: move sentence to earlier in paper.
There are paragraphs that are too long.
681: Do you present evidence that the flow of remittances is absolutely critical for wellbeing in many village households? I would suggest this is outside the scope of your paper. It is a complex issue that could be a paper in its own right. I suggest revision to a statement not supported by robust empirical data.
There is a section here around lines 681 to 742 that should be in your findings not in your discussion, particularly related to Table 9.
782: the end of your conclusion, I wanted to have a clearer statement of your aims and questions to see the main overarching message and original contribution of your paper in the conclusion. I can see you have included the final paragraph in response to reviewers’ comments. I would suggest coming back and checking the conclusion and this paragraph once you have made the revisions I have suggested, in order to see whether you capture the "so what" of your overarching argument. I notice this last paragraph refers to circular migration, earlier in the text there is more emphasis on bilocal migration.
another city is done after they went back to the village.
Sentence has been moved to earlier in paper as found in line 109-110.
Some paragraphs are edited and revised by reducing some unnecessary sentences.
We have deleted the sentence as We understand that the statement is not supported by robust empirical data.
We have moved this part into new sub number 3.4 (lines 619 – 640).
We have edited and revised this part to make a clear statement in answering the objective. This is to clarify the characteristics, livelihood typology, mobility pattern, remittance use and overaching message at the end paragraph of conclusion (line 967- 990).
The amount of remittance is following the income-earning by the migrants in the city.
Migrants invest more on-farm supporting activities instead other types of investment.
Income gain contributes in limited ways to rural development outcomes.
Bilocal migration is a distinct trend to live to some degree in both worlds.
Iwan Rudiarto a, *, Rizqa Hidayani b, Micah Fisher c
a Department of Urban and Regional Planning, Diponegoro University, Indonesia
b Kota Kita Foundation, Surakarta, Indonesia
c University of Hawaii, United States
* Corresponding author. Department of Urban and Regional Planning, Diponegoro University, Jl. Prof. Sudarto SH, Kampus UNDIP Tembalang, Semarang, Indonesia. E-mail address: [email protected]