Place attachment and agricultural land conversion for sustainable agriculture in Indonesia

The relationship between place attachments and agricultural land conversion for developing countries had not been studied in many studies. This study aimed to provide empirical evidence of the psychological relationship between place attachment and agricultural land conversion, in contributing to sustainable agriculture in rural areas. The method used was the calculation of the place attachment index, while examining the relationship between latent and dependent variables implemented in Structural Equation Model (SEM), applied in AMOS Software. The result of the Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) calculation demonstrated the relationship between place attachment and agricultural land conversion. The attitude towards land development also had a weight of 0.657, which is substantially optimistic. Also, the weight value indicated that the place attachment relationship positively impacted the desire to maintain land, as maintenance decision was higher when the place attachment was high. That was accompanied by a 31.6% value of R2, meaning that the place attachment influenced 31.6% of the variance in the decision to preserve land.