You shall not enter the list: Inscriptional Practices and The Politics of Deservingness in Indonesia

Authors

Hestu Prahara, Universitas IndonesiaFollow

Abstract

Indonesia’s first state-led community-driven development (CDD) began in 1990s with influential support by the World Bank. This paradigm sees the community not merely as an object but rather as an active subject of development. To ensure the shift at the paradigmatic level, a social engineering process known as community empowerment project was designed using monitoring instruments to guarantee inclusive development planning, prevent elite capture, and promote internal audit capacities. In this process, extensive use of bureaucratic instruments, e.g. paperwork, assessment forms, official stamps, program proposals/reports, and financial reports facilitated the formation of community participation. How did the use of documents shape the intended inclusive development projects under the CDD paradigm? This paper discusses the ironic trends of how the participatory framework in CDD, in fact, intensified social exclusions. The discussion is based on my experience observing the implementation of public consultation approach in PBDT 2015 (Pemutakhiran Basis Data Terpadu/Unified Database Updating). In such a program, the local stakeholders, together with community trustees at the kelurahan (village) level held a meeting to verify the enlisted poor households. The verification was crucial to create a unified database that could be used for future reference of the beneficiaries for several social assistance programs in Indonesia. I argue that tensions and negotiations toward deciding which names deserve to be on the list perpetuated forms of exclusion that embrace the exercise of prejudice based on ethnic and moral references in producing the hierarchy of deservingness at the community level.

References

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Recommended Citation

Prahara, Hestu (2018) "You shall not enter the list: Inscriptional Practices and The Politics of Deservingness in Indonesia," Antropologi Indonesia: Vol. 39: Iss. 1, Article 5.
DOI: 10.7454/ai.v39i1.9752
Available at: https://scholarhub.ui.ac.id/jai/vol39/iss1/5