Social Protection: Understanding the New Politics and Practices of Distribution in South East Asia
Type
Double PanelPart 1
Session 9Fri 09:00–10:30 Room 1.406
Part 2
Session 10Fri 11:00–12:30 Room 1.406
Conveners
- Gerben Nooteboom University of Amsterdam
- John McCarthy Australian National University
Discussant
- Ward Berenschot Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies
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Add to CalendarPapers (Part 1)
- Implications of Vulnerability and Social Protection Programs for Young People in Mountain Java Lisa Woodward Murdoch University
An assumption of the Indonesian government’s social assistance programs, including Conditional Cash Transfers (CCTs), the Family Hope Program (PKH) and the Clever Indonesia Card (KIP), is that young people will be supported to develop their ‘human capital’ (knowledge and skills), and secure employment that brings material wealth and breaks the cycle of intergenerational poverty. While well designed and targeted social protection systems can and do play a significant role in alleviating poverty in the short term by boosting economic growth in developing countries, the long-term impacts and contributions of social protection policies for wellbeing in low and middle income groups are less well understood. This has led to concerns about the potential for social assistance programs to reduce intergenerational poverty and promote social inclusion because underlying drivers and structural causes of poverty remain.
The research upon which this presentation is based is part of a wider Australia Research Council project investigating the impacts and effectiveness of SPPs in Indonesia. This component explores the realities of young people residing in vulnerable households in villages in mountain Java and aligns their experiences with a critical analysis of SPPs and the social and political economic drivers of poverty and vulnerability in rural Indonesia. It argues that a range of additional measures are necessary to overcome intergenerational transmission of poverty and vulnerability.
This presentation addresses the following questions: What are the underlying structural drivers perpetuating intergenerational poverty and vulnerability in mountain Java? How do household vulnerabilities impact upon young people's options and attitudes towards education and pursuing rural livelihoods? How effectively do key social protection programs assist young people from vulnerable households to improve rural livelihoods? Are social protection programs ‘a silver bullet’ for overcoming intergenerational poverty in rural Indonesia?
- Maritime Livelihoods and Social Protection in Southeast Sulawesi Andrew McWilliam Western Sydney University
As the largest archipelagic state in the world with the fourth largest population (260million), it is not surprising that the Indonesian fisheries sector is a vitally important agro-ecology in the national economy. Fish and seafood consumption now provide 50% of national protein supply and per capital consumption is rising. At the same time the rapid industrial development of the country and associated habitat destruction, overfishing and unsustainable fishing practices, is placing increasing pressure on fisheries stocks and the capacity of small scale fishing communities to derive their livelihoods directly from diverse fishing activity. In this paper I focus on the results of recent research into Sama bajo maritime livelihoods in Southeast Sulawesi and the impact of both formal and informal social protection policies in alleviating poverty on the margins. The paper highlights the complex moral economies of Sama bajo fishing livelihoods where social protection is mediated through clientalism and indebtedness.
- The Conditional Cash Transfer on the Ground: Experience of the Indigenous Peoples in the Philippines Marie Bembie Girado University of Sydney
The social protection policy by means of conditional cash transfer (CCT) program rapidly expanded in the Philippines since it was first introduced in the country in 2007. This aims at giving social assistance to the poor by providing cash to beneficiary households and responding to their immediate needs while promoting social development through human capital accumulation. In 2018, the government expanded the program reaching a total of almost twenty one (21) million Filipino beneficiaries. More than a decade after, how close is the program in achieving its goals to alleviate the poor’s immediate needs and break the intergenerational cycle of poverty? The current statistics says that 21.6 percent share of the Philippine population lives below the poverty line, one of the highest poverty rate in Southeast Asia. Poverty problem remained stagnated as one in five of the country’s 106 million people live in extreme poverty, getting by on less than two dollars per day.
Gleaning from the poverty track of the Philippines despite the expanded coverage of the conditional cash transfers merits a query on how the assumption of addressing poverty works on the ground. This social protection mechanism aims to reduce the poorest households’ vulnerability to shocks and build human capital by smoothing consumption and sustaining expenditure on social welfare. The study will look at how the CCT works among beneficiaries, zooming into its effect on food security and livelihood from socio-cultural perspective among Indigenous Peoples in the Philippines, comprising fifteen percent of the population and representing the poorest sector in the country. Using ethnographic case study method, this study will look at the spending and consumption patterns of the beneficiaries in some of the poorest indigenous communities in the Philippines. Primarily, the study will focus on how the program affects food poverty and whether the program goes beyond the social welfare aims to promote livelihood among beneficiaries.
- Travelling Technologies and Moving Ideas: Conditional Cash Transfers, Targeting Technologies, and the Depolitisation of Poverty in Indonesia Gerben Nooteboom University of Amsterdam
In the last decade, the government of Indonesia has embarked on large social projects to fight poverty. Many of these programmes focus on health, education and on social assistance to the poor. The programmes are based on travelling global ideas and simplifications for poverty eradication (so-called magic bullets) and accompanied by technologies of measurement, implementation and evaluation. Although these programmes and technologies appear neutral, they bear implicit assumptions about the nature of poverty, governability, and (market-based) solutions. As a policy model, they obscure political dimensions of inequality and poverty by rendering developmental problems technical. Travelling models are attractive for politicians, appear politically neutral, obscure complex political dimensions on the ground and produce paradoxical social effects.
In this paper, we look at the travelling model of Conditional Cash Transfers (CCTs) and its transformative power in Indonesia. CCTs are a powerful example of magic bullet thinking and of travelling ideas in the world of development and anti-poverty governance today. Key questions for this paper are how these ideas travel, why they become popular among policy makers, how they render complex socio-political problems technical, and what social consequences they produce. The paper will focus on the genealogy of CCT adoption and implementation in Indonesia and includes case study material from its implementation based on long-term fieldwork in rural Java.
Papers (Part 2)
- Environmental Degradation and Livelihood Precarity in an Indonesian Coastal Community Carol Warren Murdoch University
This presentation focuses on the livelihood impacts of resource decline and the complexity of interpreting questions of poverty, food insecurity and social protection in settings where an ambiguous sense of ‘precarity’ poses so many shades of grey for measuring and responding to household and community livelihood trajectories. The presentation is based on research concerning the impacts of the decline of local fisheries on livelihoods in a west Balinese coastal community, as a case study of the precarity arising from environmental degradation increasingly affecting resource dependent communities in rural Indonesia.
The case study tracks the rise and decline of local livelihoods in a formerly ‘left behind’ (desa tertinggal) west Bali fishing community over four decades, and assesses the gaps in Indonesian social protection policies that have so far failed to take account of dramatic shifts in environmental conditions. Alongside vulnerability to life cycle crises of illness, disability and death, a broader state of precarity arising from the collapse of the Bali Strait fishery leaves the majority of villagers with few options that offer the prospect of a ‘sustainable’ future to support local communities.
The unravelling of the local economy as a consequence of overfishing and climate change does not fit neatly into conventional transition or stages of poverty scenarios. Nor have narrowly targeted social protection policies to date been adequate to address livelihood support needs. The mismatch between standardised and narrowly targeted social protection approaches which fail to take account of broader forms of precarity related to resource decline provokes widespread disenchantment with government policy and practice. It also raises important questions about the adequacy of current definitions and measures of poverty and vulnerability and their implications for distributional politics going forward, when ‘the end of land’ (Li, 2014), forests and capture fisheries has to be faced.
- In Search of Social Protection: The Government of Poverty and the Evolution of Entitlements on Indonesia’s Rural Periphery John McCarthy Australian National University
In response to enduring problems of poverty across the global south, social protection policies (SPPs) have emerged as the main policy approach, with over 60 countries now implementing Conditional Cash Transfers (CCTs) programs. The literature has discussed the benefits of SPPs, the politics that surround them, and the implementation problems affecting them. Yet, few studies have examined how CCTs work as distributional systems on the ground. Indonesia is developing the world’s second-most extensive CCT system, This study looks at the case of CCTs in the Indonesian province of Aceh. It combines ethnographic and survey approaches to examine the processes shaping patterns of entitlements and enfranchisement within pockets of deprivation in this Indonesian periphery. This paper argues that the technologies of government that CCTs employ, specifically econometric targeting, involve a particular politics of knowledge that has constitutive effects. While offering an apparent means of reducing the poverty headcount and assisting many poor families, the system provides opaque methods and processes and contributes to the unequal and contested politics of distribution found across rural
- The Social Policy Revolution and the Rural Poor: Household Vulnerability, Food Security and the Politics of Social Protection in 21st Century Indonesia Gerben Nooteboom University of Amsterdam
While States across the global south are embracing large social protection schemes, structural inequality and poverty remain critical problems. This paper considers the case of Indonesia, studying how new vulnerabilities drive food poverty and exploring the encounter between the social policy revolution and the rural poor.
Social protection programs have become the world’s favourite anti-poverty approach. These involve new rationalities for addressing poverty and provoke a new politics of distribution. This entails shifting from viewing productivist practices as the means for dealing with poverty to seeing distributional practices as the best possible solution for the poor (Ferguson 2015). While this opens up an aspirational space for a new politics of distribution, it remains to be seen whether or how these solutions work out: how they will affect the poor and vulnerable in challenging circumstances.
In the case of Indonesian poverty, inequality and highly concentrated asset ownership are highly political issues. The government of Indonesia has borrowed global SPP frameworks. The current president has consolidated and expanded various programs, increasing the budget on social protection programs by 32.8 %. Indonesia is now developing the world’s second largest conditional cash transfer (CCT). With growing public expenditures devoted to social protection, these programs (SPPs) have become a critical feature of the new policy landscape in contemporary Indonesia.
Critical questions can be asked concerning whether this global model – with its econometric approach and material definition of poverty – fits the Indonesian context. How and to what extent do the new and massive social protection schemes meet the needs of the poor? What social consequences are produced in this encounter between (global) and national social protection schemes and local specificities? Why is this solution politically attractive? While cash transfers to the poor offer an apparent means of reducing the poverty head count, will they eradicate poverty in the long run? To what degree do SPPs address the structural causes of rural poverty or change the social, political and economic contexts that generate risk? Moreover, how are these distributional programs working out in the messy circumstances where the poor access benefits?
Show Paper Abstracts
Abstract
In Southeast Asia we have seen the rapid rise of social protection schemes that offer basic coverage to the very poor. The spread of national social protection schemes follows (global) models for providing conditional cash and basic health insurance and seeks to address the critical political and social questions posed by persistent poverty and rising inequality. While much of the academic literature has focused on the technical aspects of program development and controversies over design and implementation, to date there are few studies of the politics and social-cultural adaptation processes associated with these programmes and their effects on food security and (rural) poverty. This panel will explore the rising popularity, the effectiveness and local social-cultural adaptation processes involved in the rise of social protection. SPPs pose a number of key questions for political scientists, anthropologists and geographers. For instance, why are social protection policies spreading so rapidly? Why these particular models? How does a particular politics of knowledge within state and donor policy communities lead to the uptake of particular policy models? To what degree do SPPs provide a means of managing the politics of poverty? How does the adoption of social protection policies play into patterns of electoral populism and patronage politics? What shapes the politics of distribution at the local level? How do the rationalities of governmentalized systems shape patterns of distribution and lead to patterns of inclusion and exclusion? How effective are social protection policies in fighting food insecurity?
This panel will focus on the implications of the new rationalities of social assistance, (standardizing methodologies for targeting and implementation) that have emerged and the new politics of distribution that accompany them. We invite papers for this session that examine key themes from a social or political perspective, and/or address the question of how social protection address policies address livelihoods concerns in the Global South.
Keywords
This presentation focuses on the livelihood impacts of resource decline and the complexity of interpreting questions of poverty, food insecurity and social protection in settings where an ambiguous sense of ‘precarity’ poses so many shades of grey for measuring and responding to household and community livelihood trajectories. The presentation is based on research concerning the impacts of the decline of local fisheries on livelihoods in a west Balinese coastal community, as a case study of the precarity arising from environmental degradation increasingly affecting resource dependent communities in rural Indonesia.
The case study tracks the rise and decline of local livelihoods in a formerly ‘left behind’ (desa tertinggal) west Bali fishing community over four decades, and assesses the gaps in Indonesian social protection policies that have so far failed to take account of dramatic shifts in environmental conditions. Alongside vulnerability to life cycle crises of illness, disability and death, a broader state of precarity arising from the collapse of the Bali Strait fishery leaves the majority of villagers with few options that offer the prospect of a ‘sustainable’ future to support local communities.
The unravelling of the local economy as a consequence of overfishing and climate change does not fit neatly into conventional transition or stages of poverty scenarios. Nor have narrowly targeted social protection policies to date been adequate to address livelihood support needs. The mismatch between standardised and narrowly targeted social protection approaches which fail to take account of broader forms of precarity related to resource decline provokes widespread disenchantment with government policy and practice. It also raises important questions about the adequacy of current definitions and measures of poverty and vulnerability and their implications for distributional politics going forward, when ‘the end of land’ (Li, 2014), forests and capture fisheries has to be faced.
In response to enduring problems of poverty across the global south, social protection policies (SPPs) have emerged as the main policy approach, with over 60 countries now implementing Conditional Cash Transfers (CCTs) programs. The literature has discussed the benefits of SPPs, the politics that surround them, and the implementation problems affecting them. Yet, few studies have examined how CCTs work as distributional systems on the ground. Indonesia is developing the world’s second-most extensive CCT system, This study looks at the case of CCTs in the Indonesian province of Aceh. It combines ethnographic and survey approaches to examine the processes shaping patterns of entitlements and enfranchisement within pockets of deprivation in this Indonesian periphery. This paper argues that the technologies of government that CCTs employ, specifically econometric targeting, involve a particular politics of knowledge that has constitutive effects. While offering an apparent means of reducing the poverty headcount and assisting many poor families, the system provides opaque methods and processes and contributes to the unequal and contested politics of distribution found across rural
While States across the global south are embracing large social protection schemes, structural inequality and poverty remain critical problems. This paper considers the case of Indonesia, studying how new vulnerabilities drive food poverty and exploring the encounter between the social policy revolution and the rural poor.
Social protection programs have become the world’s favourite anti-poverty approach. These involve new rationalities for addressing poverty and provoke a new politics of distribution. This entails shifting from viewing productivist practices as the means for dealing with poverty to seeing distributional practices as the best possible solution for the poor (Ferguson 2015). While this opens up an aspirational space for a new politics of distribution, it remains to be seen whether or how these solutions work out: how they will affect the poor and vulnerable in challenging circumstances.
In the case of Indonesian poverty, inequality and highly concentrated asset ownership are highly political issues. The government of Indonesia has borrowed global SPP frameworks. The current president has consolidated and expanded various programs, increasing the budget on social protection programs by 32.8 %. Indonesia is now developing the world’s second largest conditional cash transfer (CCT). With growing public expenditures devoted to social protection, these programs (SPPs) have become a critical feature of the new policy landscape in contemporary Indonesia.
Critical questions can be asked concerning whether this global model – with its econometric approach and material definition of poverty – fits the Indonesian context. How and to what extent do the new and massive social protection schemes meet the needs of the poor? What social consequences are produced in this encounter between (global) and national social protection schemes and local specificities? Why is this solution politically attractive? While cash transfers to the poor offer an apparent means of reducing the poverty head count, will they eradicate poverty in the long run? To what degree do SPPs address the structural causes of rural poverty or change the social, political and economic contexts that generate risk? Moreover, how are these distributional programs working out in the messy circumstances where the poor access benefits?
In Southeast Asia we have seen the rapid rise of social protection schemes that offer basic coverage to the very poor. The spread of national social protection schemes follows (global) models for providing conditional cash and basic health insurance and seeks to address the critical political and social questions posed by persistent poverty and rising inequality. While much of the academic literature has focused on the technical aspects of program development and controversies over design and implementation, to date there are few studies of the politics and social-cultural adaptation processes associated with these programmes and their effects on food security and (rural) poverty. This panel will explore the rising popularity, the effectiveness and local social-cultural adaptation processes involved in the rise of social protection. SPPs pose a number of key questions for political scientists, anthropologists and geographers. For instance, why are social protection policies spreading so rapidly? Why these particular models? How does a particular politics of knowledge within state and donor policy communities lead to the uptake of particular policy models? To what degree do SPPs provide a means of managing the politics of poverty? How does the adoption of social protection policies play into patterns of electoral populism and patronage politics? What shapes the politics of distribution at the local level? How do the rationalities of governmentalized systems shape patterns of distribution and lead to patterns of inclusion and exclusion? How effective are social protection policies in fighting food insecurity?
This panel will focus on the implications of the new rationalities of social assistance, (standardizing methodologies for targeting and implementation) that have emerged and the new politics of distribution that accompany them. We invite papers for this session that examine key themes from a social or political perspective, and/or address the question of how social protection address policies address livelihoods concerns in the Global South.