This article explores how empowerment‐focused Civil Society Organisations (CSOs) traverse scales and perform brokerage functions in helping rural women from marginal groups to connect to and ...influence powerholders in Indonesia. It identifies three brokerage mechanisms activated by these CSOs: brokering marginal groups' power bases through strengthening organising structures and sources of knowledge/resources; brokering spaces for women's influence on powerholders; and brokering networks with other women and authoritative actors to build supporting coalitions. The article also illustrates that contexts shape how CSO interventions affect change: heavy, resource‐intensive ‘thick’ brokerage strategies were important in deeply patriarchal contexts, whereas ‘thin’ brokerage strategies had some effects in places already more conducive to improving gender equity.
This article contends that the type of high-level political consensus needed to reach a peace agreement is often insufficient for rebuilding and transforming wider social relations. Consensus-focused ...processes tend to suppress divergent views and experiences of conflict, particularly among grassroots conflict actors, and risk deepening social divides by homogenising diverse memories of past violence, with potentially dangerous consequences. In response to these concerns this article advances an understanding of agonistic dialogue and explores an example of such dialogue in communal conflict in Indonesia. Building on an understanding of effective dialogue as sustained, intensive and relational, this article also underscores the need for effective dialogue to have politico-institutional support and to be locally driven and owned by actors who are legitimate and trusted in the eyes of conflict protagonists.
Contesting Development Barron, Patrick; Woolcock, Michael; Diprose, Rachael
02/2011
eBook
This pathbreaking book analyzes a highly successful participatory development program in Indonesia, exploring its distinctive origins and design principles and its impacts on local conflict dynamics ...and social institutions.
This article explores the links between communal violence in Poso, Central Sulawesi, at the onset of democratisation in Indonesia and contemporary politico-security dynamics. Poso regained national ...attention in recent years when East Indonesia Mujahidin jihadis set up a base in the region and declared allegiance to ISIS and joint police-military operations ensued. The article argues that scale and "performance" of the security operations - to weed out a small group of poorly resourced armed men - connects local-national-global dynamics and keeps the threat of terrorism and insecurity at the forefront of public discussion in Indonesia. This has served the interests of those advocating for a greater role for the Indonesian military in domestic affairs through revisions to the Anti-Terrorism Law and for better resourcing for the military. Yet, the evidence suggests there has been little local support for the ideology of the East Indonesia Mujahidin and the risk of widespread engagement or violence is low, especially given that the local discontent which initially drove the conflict has dissipated. Such developments raise questions as to whether Indonesia risks a return to the illiberal past when the military dominated many aspects of civic and political life and in some cases acted with impunity.
There has been an accentuation of Indonesian democracy's illiberal characteristics during the course of reformasi. The religious and nativist mobilisation that surrounded the controversial 2017 ...Jakarta gubernatorial elections was only one manifestation of the sort of pressures leading to such accentuation. This article surveys the impacts of a stronger recent turn towards illiberalism across diverse areas of policy making in Indonesia, including decentralisation, civil-military relations, economic and foreign policy, as well as in the approaches to recognising past abuses of human rights. We find clear variation in its impacts, produced by differing constellations of old and new forces and what is at stake politically and economically in each arena of competition, as well as the salience of coherently expressed public pressure for reform. In particular, where the state and market have failed to address social injustices, more illiberal models have emerged, some under the guise of populist discourses that nonetheless continue to serve predatory elite interests and shift attention away from the inequalities in society. Such developments could be observed all the way to the 2019 presidential contest.
•Resource nationalism is growing despite the risks of reduced foreign investment.•Political bargain model explains the political economy of extractives.•Extractive political settlements elucidate the ...timing of resource nationalism outcomes.
Since the early 1990s, heavy state intervention in the extractives sector—or resource nationalism—has become more common in resource-rich lower income countries. This article considers what domestic and global conditions in the political economy of extractives account for the resurgence of resource nationalism in Indonesia despite the risks to foreign investment, including who benefits and how. We examine Indonesia's regulatory reforms and analyse the intersections between global and domestic dynamics that have resulted in Indonesia taking a majority ownership share of Freeport Indonesia. We contend that within long-durée Cycles of Resource Nationalism, the geospatial concentration of minerals in maturing industries has given more bargaining power to Indonesia vis-à-vis foreign investors. However, we argue the specific timing and scope of resource nationalism in Indonesia has been contingent on the conditions in particular sectors of the domestic political economy and the ways that foreign investors and the domestic elites have reconfigured their goals to be mutually compatible. In democratising contexts, resource nationalism provides a discursive rubric by which elites can garner support and legitimacy to reorganise the underlying ‘extractive’ political settlement, within which foreign investors can influence elite incentives but less so the deeper configuration of power relations.
Voluntary supply chain regulation has proliferated in recent decades in response to concerns about the social and environmental impacts of global production and trade. Yet the capacity of supply ...chain regulation to influence production practices on the ground has been persistently questioned. Through empirical analysis of transnational regulatory interventions in the Indonesian tin sector-centered on a multi-stakeholder Tin Working Group established by prominent global electronics brands-this paper explores the challenges and limits of voluntary supply chain governance as it interacts with an entrenched 'extractive settlement' in Indonesia's major tin producing islands of Bangka and Belitung. Although the Tin Working Group has introduced localized initiatives to tackle issues such as worker safety and improved land rehabilitation, it has also contributed in diffuse and largely unintended ways to consolidating the power of political and economic elites who benefit from centralized control over resource extraction. In this sense, supply chain governance has generated 'hidden costs' through unintended effects on power struggles between competing social groups at national and sub-national levels-generating marginal benefits for ameliorating specific regulatory 'problems', while consolidating and reproducing barriers to deeper transitions towards inclusive or sustainable regimes of extractive governance.
Many domains of transnational policy are now governed through dynamic, multilevel governance processes, encompassing transnational, national, and subnational scales. In such settings, both membership ...of policy communities and distributions of authority within them become more fluid and openly contested—increasing the importance of the politics of legitimation as a basis for distributing influence over policy processes and outcomes. Drawing on insights from theories of organizational and institutional legitimation, this article theorizes three distinctive strategies of policy influence exercised by transnational actors in multilevel governance settings, through which strategic efforts to legitimize transnational actors and forums are deployed as means of transnational policy influence. The three strategies involve: transnational field building, localized network building, and role adaptation. The effects of these influencing strategies on policy processes and outcomes are illustrated with reference to the case of Indonesian land governance, in which highly dynamic, contested, and multiscalar governance processes lend our theorized strategies particular salience.
Contesting Development Lesch, David W; Woolcock, Michael; Diprose, Rachael
2008, 2011
eBook
This pathbreaking book analyzes a highly successful participatory development program in Indonesia, exploring its distinctive origins and design principles and its impacts on local conflict dynamics ...and social institutions.
Contestation over land, resource access and rents has long underpinned both sub-national conflicts and centre-periphery tensions in Indonesia. This paper explores resource conflict management in ...Indonesia, with a particular focus on the political economy of Riau province. It argues a centre-periphery bargain was struck at the onset of democratisation to redistribute a larger proportion of oil and gas rents to Riau, de-escalating support for the emergent Free Riau Movement. Through a combination of national and sub-national political settlements between narrow but adaptive coalitions of political-private sector elite interests, these coalitions have maintained their power and control over resource rents in three key sectors: oil and gas, timber, and palm oil. Brokers have been instrumental in maintaining the influence of these coalitions over time - helping to co-opt households into industry supply chains, who then support aligned political elites. This has produced relative stability in the political order in Riau, but one which displays the tenets of illiberalism in which the space for contestation is limited and social interests tend to acquiesce for small gains.
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