Highlights from

Citizen/Gender Budget Advocacy in Indonesia

By Lisa VeneKlasen, Just Associates

Launched over two years ago, this budget research and advocacy project[1] brings together 13 diverse Indonesian civil society groups organized into multi-disciplinary teams in three different cities. Each team includes groups involved in women’s rights, grassroots mobilization on poverty and economic justice, democratic governance, policy research, and transparency. Through periodic collective analysis, planning and strategizing, the project seeks to develop the capacity of civil society groups to understand and influence budget policy in order to give some teeth and specificity to their demands for basic healthcare, transportation, police protection, equal rights, and transparency. For the groups involved that have already succeeded in advancing legislation on their issues, complementary budget proposals increase the likelihood that policies will become reality. Gender is an important aspect of the project because it provides a set of analytical tools and perspectives on power and organizing that are particularly helpful in pinpointing exclusion of all kinds, and promoting more inclusive, representative and effective strategies and policy proposals.

One of the assumptions guiding the project is that citizens become engaged with government and political process, particularly in a context like Indonesia (e.g. coming out of dictatorship, conflict, etc.), when they recognize that government and public policy are arenas for addressing community problems and securing their rights. At the same time, citizen-organizing strategies provide NGO budget critiques and demands with the legitimacy and clout necessary to be taken seriously by policymakers. For this reason, the project began with a training workshop on participatory methodologies. Coming out of that workshop, groups were able to carry out a systematic consultation process with the communities they work with, and in this way, define priority problems that then became the focus of the budget work. This aspect of the learning has benefited the groups primarily involved in research as well as those that are dedicated to citizen participation. For example, the Bandung Institute for Government Studies (BIGS), a research NGO, has focused its budget work on the problem of housing in slum areas. After completing an initial desk review of housing policies and budgets, BIGS sought additional funding to bring on a team of community organizers to work closely with people in the slum areas in order to detect common concerns and define local solutions. BIGS recognizes that working closely with slum dwellers is not only essential for effective policy advocacy—a relationship of trust also improves the accuracy of their surveys and other research.

The gender analysis has produced many insights about the mixed impact of decentralization on women and the challenges of meaningfully engaging women in political processes. In many cases in Indonesia, bringing government to the local level has placed power in the hands of traditional and parochial interests and individuals who are firmly against women’s equality and their participation in public life. These local elites also use local government to further entrench their control over local resources. Throughout Indonesia, a small number of women may attend public fora but are unlikely to speak out. Thus, women may be represented in public events, but their voices and issues are not heard. In order for them to engage in and use public and political processes to advance their issues, they require separate space to define and articulate their concerns before entering the broader political process. In short, for women, presence does not equal representation, thus affirming the need for alternative strategies for engaging women effectively.

One of the partners, the Forum for Transparency in Indonesia (FITRA), in collaboration with a local consultant who was formerly with the Association of Mayors, is examining whether who participates in the policymaking and budget process has an impact on the policy outcomes. They are comparing municipalities run by women mayors and men mayors. Although being a woman or a man is no indication of gender sensitivity, they have initially found that in these particular cases, when a woman is mayor, there are generally more women in government, and this has an impact on policy and budget allocations. (This may also indicate that mayors have too much power.) These are initial findings and FITRA is continuing their research to better substantiate these early results. The process of doing the research has been of great interest to the mayors as well, who expect to learn about budgets and gender mainstreaming through their participation with FITRA, and have begun to see the usefulness of consulting different groups to get a sense of needs and priorities.

Most of the women’s groups involved in the project, Koalisi and Komnas Perempuan in particular, have used the information and skills on budget analysis to extend and strengthen their ongoing policy advocacy. For them, a key lesson has been that budgets are a critical ingredient to ensure the enforcement of legislation. For example, Komnas and Koalisi are interested in developing the budget component of an anti-domestic violence bill currently under discussion in Parliament. They will propose specific allocations and reforms affecting health, justice and other sectors that address domestic violence.

While demonstrating the power of diverse NGO teams for effective advocacy, the project has also revealed a lot about the inevitable differences within civil society in Indonesia, and the particular challenges of engaging with government, given the history of repression and corruption. For one of the partners, shifting from a strategy of confrontation and pressure to one of engagement and even collaboration with local government was not acceptable to its vast membership (street vendors, slum dwellers, and pedicab drivers who continue to be mistreated by the Jakarta city government in their view). At the same time, their continued strategy of confrontation deserves partial credit for making engagement meaningful for the other NGOs, and making government aware of the potential fallout from neglecting citizens’ interests. This was seen in the case of the Urban Poor Consortium and its shifting role with KOTA, the Jakarta city coalition of NGOs for good governance. UPC opted to sue the city government on two different occasions regarding budget matters such as non-disclosure of information about where funds intended for flood victims had been spent. And they won!

Other features and early lessons from this project include:

  • It has deliberately brought together and forged unlikely and innovative alliances among NGOs involved in policy and social research, women’s rights, grassroots mobilization and service delivery. By so doing, the project demonstrates that diverse teams with distinct competencies make for effective and powerful policy players.
  • Bringing together women’s groups with mixed NGOs has strengthened the political impact and outreach of the women’s groups and has significantly improved the effectiveness of the other NGOs by encouraging them to adopt a more systematic approach to inclusion, representation and participation. For example, PATTIRO, whose mission is to organize citizen fora to promote public debate and surface key citizen concerns, became aware after the project’s second workshop that there were few women participating in their citizen fora, and thus, the strategy was not adequately promoting democracy. Subsequent gender training, conducted at their request, has led to a significant shift in their organizing strategies. They are now holding special women’s fora to give women the space and confidence to articulate their interests separately before coming together with the broader community.
  • The project has carefully left gender and women out of the project title, opting instead to focus on the operational aspects of gender that ensure greater inclusion, reach and impact of any effort. This choice is influenced by the confusion and negativity generated by gender mainstreaming and the tendency to marginalize a project that highlights women. The non-gender specific NGO partners have found the tools so useful that they have all highlighted gender and women in their projects as they have progressed.
  • The combination of periodic, directed training and analysis with action grants has enabled groups to learn from practice, integrate new information and sharpen strategies.
  • The combination of theory, strategies and tools from different disciplines and approaches including gender, human rights, citizen participation, fiscal analysis and communications has proven to offer a powerful combination for engaging citizens in debates and decisions about the best use of public resources.

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[1] This project was coordinated by Lisa VeneKlasen of Just Associates with Debbie Budlender, a South African gender economist, and supported by the Asia Foundation.