Economic Diversity in Contemporary Timor-Leste analyses various economic dynamics in past and present Timor-Leste. Comprising 14 research chapters, the volume brings to the fore: 1) local, community-based economic values and arrangements; 2) community-based entanglements with a market-driven economy; 3) the colonial and postcolonial governance praxis through which a market-driven economy has permeated the country, and 4) the creative and place-based ways through which local people have respon...

This book examines the dynamics of a 'return to custom’ in post-independence Timor-Leste; a set of practices connecting ancestral house communities with the complex spirit ecologies upon which people's livelihoods and well-being depend. Drawing on detailed comparative studies, it considers the contribution of custom and its inter-generational legacies to the development of sustainable social and environmental policies of governance in Southeast Asia’s newest nation-state. The book is both...