2019 Indonesia Study Group
4 December. Benjamin Hegarty (University of Melbourne). Young men and access to HIV care in Jakarta, Indonesia
Indonesia has recorded a worsening HIV epidemic among key populations (those most at risk of being affected by the virus), in particular among young men who have sex with men (MSM) in large metropolitan centers for migration and employment (Jakarta and Bali). Despite increased access to HIV testing and medication through local clinics, a recent Lancet study suggests that approximately 24 per cent of people who test positive do not continue on to a consistent treatment regime. Given that HIV is a virus that requires ongoing medication and (in some cases) complex medical care, this represents a major cause for concern.
Based on an ANU Indonesia Project grant (2018), this research investigated young men’s access to HIV care in Jakarta. This presentation presented the results of focus group discussions and interviews with outreach workers (peers who counsel and assist at-risk individuals), healthcare workers who work at a number of Jakarta healthcare clinics (Puskesmas) and at-risk young men in the capital. It found that recent legal regulations and political rhetoric related to gender and sexual norms are major barriers to addressing Indonesia’s HIV epidemic. Despite this, a strong commitment from a skilled cohort of medical professionals at the local level, combined with investment in the healthcare system (especially through Universal Health Care system, BPJS), has provided the infrastructure for a comprehensive and inclusive response.
Dr Benjamin Hegarty is a McKenzie Postdoctoral Fellow in Anthropology and Development Studies at the University of Melbourne. His expertise combines ethnographic and historical methods with critical theory to investigate how gender and sexuality are implicated in transnational processes. His research in Indonesia received the Australian Anthropological Society PhD Thesis Prize, and appears in Medicine Anthropology Theory, The Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology and the Journal of the History of Sexuality. His collaborative research efforts with Indonesian critical public health scholars and physicians in the area of HIV/AIDS have been funded by a number of competitive grants.
27 November. Shane Barter (Soka University of America). Territorial autonomy in Indonesia and beyond
Territorial autonomy, in which regionally concentrated minorities gain the ability to govern their territory with special administrative powers, is an increasingly important political compromise around the world. It is increasingly the go-to option for overcoming separatist conflicts and protecting minority rights, enabling national minorities to see themselves as majorities and to develop their national identity. However, when it is imposed and conflicts have not been resolved, autonomy can serve to worsen conflicts. Even when autonomy is in the hands of more legitimate leaders, it still suffers from some shortcomings. Despite being a form of decentralisation, autonomous regions tend to be highly centralised, and despite supporting minority rights, autonomy tends to sow tensions with local minorities.
This presentation explored these themes in Indonesia. Here, Papua and pre-MoU Aceh illustrate the ineffectiveness of imposed autonomy. Meanwhile, post-conflict Aceh sees political centralisation and pressures on internal, second-order minorities. In these and other cases, territorial autonomy falls short of living up to its full promise, demanding that we rethink territorial autonomy.
Shane Barter is a political scientist at Soka University of America. His research and teaching interests related to politics in Southeast Asia, armed conflict, state and society, democratisation and religious politics. He is visiting The Australian National University in November 2019.
18 November. Anu Lounela (University of Helsinki). Rivers and sociality in the making in Central Kalimantan
Rivers are an important basis for the social life of the Ngaju Dayak,an indigenous population inhabiting the swamp area of Southern Borneo. In recent decades, large-scale projects of natural resource extraction causing extensive environmental degradation and recurrent forest fires have brought about many changes in the ways the local Ngaju people imagine “good life” and engage with the small rivers crossing the swamp forest near their settlement. While the swamp forests used to be inundated during the rainy season, now large parts of the forests are dried by canals thus becoming agricultural or garden landscape. On the other hand, new restoration efforts dam the rivers to bring the swamplands back. Due to these changes and new governance regimes, the local population is finding it difficult to maintain traditional forms of production such as slash and burn rice cultivation, hunting, forest product collecting, and so forth, some of them shifting to commodity production or short-term employment. The seminar discussed the flows and changes in the waterscape and how the shape sociality and values in different ways at the crossroads of multiple scales of governance and commodification.
13 November. Ayu Pratiwi (University of Turku). Intra-household gender dynamics and sustainable agricultural technology adoption: Evidence from Indonesian rural households
This study examines whether the adoption of sustainable agricultural technologies is affected by the intra-household gender dynamics between a husband and wife, using a 3-year panel dataset of more than 300 coffee and cocoa-farming households in Lampung, Indonesia. We investigate the household members’ off-farm labor participation, off-farm income, and formal education. The results indicate that off-farm labor participation increases the propensity that a household adopts sustainable agricultural techniques. We also find that women are more concerned about the environmental issues whereas the men are more focused on productivity. The wife’s level of education, income, and participation in formal work increased her decision-making power within the household, hence the increased adoption rate even in the cases when the wife is not a full-time farmer. This gendered approach provides important insights into natural resource planning and management in rural agricultural communities.
6 November. Pierre van der Eng (ANU). Antecedents of corporate social responsibility in Indonesia, 1900s-1950s
This paper queries the general view that CSR perceptions and practices were entirely new to Indonesia when the country’s 2007 Corporate Law made CSR compulsory. The paper finds that foreign-owned firms experimented with forms of CSR during 1905-1911. There are few indications of the motivations of foreign firms and their managers in Indonesia to engage in CSR, but the principal factors seem to have been practical reasons and humanitarian concerns. Foreign-owned firms extended CSR-like social amenities to their employees and to communities in the areas where they operated from the 1910s until well into the 1950s. It is unclear whether locally-owned companies duplicated such practices. Starting in 1958, most foreign firms were nationalised and converted to state-owned enterprises. It is unclear whether these continued CSR practices. The paper concludes that CSR was only new to Indonesia during the 2000s as a concept, not as a management practice.
14 October. Lea Jellinek. Waste: Lessons from Indonesia
Handling waste is a major problem for governments. In Indonesia, open waste dumps are overflowing from Surabaya to Aceh. Waste is dramatically affecting the land, waterways, soils, sea, air and health of Indonesian citizens. A major problem for recycling is plastic mixed in with kitchen and garden waste. The government’s answer is to build incinerators in preference to teaching people how to separate. The one incinerator built 20 years ago in Surabaya, had to be closed down within a week due to malfunction. National and local governments need to legislate waste separation at the household level but they fail to provide sufficient funds for facilities or household education. Regional laws against the dumping of waste in rivers and along roadsides exist are not enforced. This talk investigated how people can be taught to separate waste and the different approaches adopted in Indonesia. Lea concludes that it is totally feasible to separate waste at the household level if the government and private corporations support this activity but ultimately corporations who produce the waste need to be responsible for reducing, recycle and reusing it.
25 September. Minako Sakai (UNSW at ADFA). Embracing family, Islam and work: Women’s economic empowerment in Islamising Indonesia
This study aims to examine how middle-class Muslim women are dealing with the contradictory gender expectations arising from their economic and domestic roles. Amidst this emerging trend, Muslim women are breaking into areas that are new for women, even into occupations of which negative public perceptions exist. In developing their businesses Muslim women actively engage in almsgivings and charitable activities to assist the community, while making their harmonious family life public. With the heightened importance of publicly performed Muslim piety among the middle-class Indonesians, this paper argues that strategically utilising Islamic discourses plays an important role in mitigating a potential gender role tension and also in facilitating women’s economic activities. The paper shows that middle-class Muslim women exemplify appropriate discourses to support income-generating activities with reference to Islam. Consequently, community perceptions of these Muslim businesswomen are becoming positive, indirectly fostering the women’s expanding entrepreneurial and business initiatives in increasingly Islamising Indonesia. Utilising such discourses to assist Muslim women’s agency is essential in achieving middle-class women’s economic empowerment in Indonesia.
14 August. Thomas Barker (University of Nottingham, Malaysia). Indonesian cinema after the New Order
Since the end of the New Order in 1998, feature film making in Indonesia recovered from its nadir that followed the twin financial and political crises of the late 1990s. Today Indonesian cinema is a vibrant culture industry producing stars, television spin-offs, blockbusters, international collaborations, sequels, remakes, and international film festival success. Given that most scholarship on Indonesian cinema was theorised during the New Order, the post-authoritarian context demands new ways of studying and understanding cinema that take into account the liberalisation of the economy and how new modes of political participation have altered relations between state and society.
Studies of feature film in Indonesia primarily used a ‘national cinema’ framework that embodies a division between high art and popular culture, between commerce and idealism, and between natives and non-natives. Post 1998 Indonesian cinema is governed by market relations which shape funding and production relationships, creativity and censorship, the role of the state, and the importance of audiences as consumers. By re-conceptualising cinema as pop culture, this talk positioned cinema as a cultural product that helps to explain ‘going mainstream’ of film over the last twenty years as it moved from the cultural periphery to integrate with other pop culture forms such as music, advertising, and television and becoming increasingly transnational in focus.
11 June. Nathanael Sumaktoyo (University of Notre Dame). Double minority candidates and Muslim voting behaviour: evidence from Indonesia
How do Muslims in a Muslim-majority society respond to an ethnic and religious minority political candidate (a double minority candidate)? To the extent that there is an opposition to the candidate, would such an opposition be driven more by the candidate’s ethnicity or religion? Taking advantage of the presence of an ethnic and religious minority candidate in a gubernatorial election in Indonesian capital Jakarta and employing both observational and experimental designs, I find that ethnic considerations drive voters’ choices more than religious ones. Ethnic sentiment and the candidate’s ethnic background negatively affected voter support for the candidate more than religious sentiment and the candidate’s religious background. This finding holds even after accounting for voters’ religiosity and religious tolerance. I discussed how these findings inform our understanding of Muslim voting behaviour and religious mobilisation in Muslim countries.
8 May. Anne Booth (SOAS). Survey of recent developments: The growth of social protection in Indonesia
This seminar previewed the forthcoming article co-authored by Anne Booth (SOAS University of London), Moh. Raden Purnagunawan (TNP2K), and Elan Satriawan (TNP2K), in the Bulletin of Indonesian Economic Studies.
The presentation examined the various initiatives which have evolved since the crisis of the late 1990s which aim to protect the poor and vulnerable in Indonesian society. The presentation examined subsidy programs (food LPG, electricity, fertiliser and housing assistance) which account for well over half of the social protection budget, and also the family assistance, school scholarship and health card programs. It examined the extent to which these programs really do assist the poor and how targeting could be improved. The presentation also reviewed the recent debate about infant and child health and what steps the Indonesian government can take to improve health outcomes in early childhood. The seminar concluded with a discussion of the fiscal burden of these policies and what reforms in fiscal policies will be necessary if Indonesia wants to increase social protection spending.
1 May. Marcus Mietzner (ANU) & Edward Aspinall (ANU). Jokowi’s re-election: National and local dimensions
While President Jokowi was re-elected on 17 April for a second term, and the national result looks similar to that of 2014, there have been important electoral shifts in the regions. Key Outer Island provinces on Sumatra and Sulawesi turned to Prabowo, while Central and East Java saw a dramatic increase in support for Jokowi. This leaves Indonesia’s electoral map more regionally polarised than in any other post-Suharto presidential election. In this seminar, the speakers drew from their recent field trips during the campaign to Central and East Java (Ed Aspinall) as well as Maluku (Marcus Mietzner) to discuss the reasons for and implications of these shifts.
24 April. Phil Cummins (ANU). Earthquake risks in Indonesia
The 21st century began with a remarkable series of great earthquakes occurring off Sumatra, starting with the 2004 Great Sumatra Earthquake and culminating most recently in the 2018 Palu earthquake. While some have caused many deaths, none of the post-2004 events have resulted in fatalities on the massive scale of the 2004 Sumatra Earthquake and Indian Ocean Tsunami. Can we expect this trend to continue for future Indonesian earthquakes?
Risk for natural disasters is often expressed as a product of hazard, exposure, and vulnerability. I argued in this talk that all three factors comprising risk have increased markedly in Indonesia since the late 20th century. I presented a combination of modeling results, compilations of historical accounts and analyses of recent geodetic data that suggest that, although currently the Java-Bali region may be in a period of quiescence, the potential for large, destructive earthquakes is high, and that when such events occur their impacts are likely to be severe.
Phil R. Cummins received his PhD in Geophysics from University of California Berkeley in 1988 and worked as a postdoctoral and research fellow at The Australian National University until 1996, when he moved to the Japan Center for Marine-Earth Science and Technology (JAMSTEC). After leading a geodynamics research unit at JAMSTEC, in 2001 he took up a position leading earthquake and tsunami hazard research at Geoscience Australia (GA). In 2011, he accepted a joint appointment between GA and ANU as Professor of Natural Hazards, where he combines teaching and research in natural hazards at ANU with technical application of earthquake and tsunami science at GA.
11 April. David Nellor and Della Temenggung (PROSPERA). Indonesia’s growth outlook – Solving the rubik’s cube of Indonesian growth
Bappenas is currently preparing the technocratic background study for the Indonesian medium term development plan (RPJM), which will be incorporated with the elected president’s priorities to form the RPJM 2020-24. In collaboration with Bappenas, our study contributes to four areas: (i) Setting the macroeconomic framework and projections; (ii) Undertaking the growth diagnostics to determine the binding constraints on growth; (iii) Determining the scale and areas of focus for infrastructure consistent with the macroeconomic outlook; and (iv) Defining a strategy for the financing of investment over the medium term.
10 April. Yogi Vidyattama (University of Canberra). Water sanitation program in decentralised Eastern Indonesia: The roles of community and social dynamics
This research analyses the extent to which the World Bank run Community-Led Total Sanitation (CLTS) program can help communities in poor regions to develop their sanitation services. The study takes two poor districts, Timor Tengah Selatan (TTS) and Sikka in East Nusa Tenggara as case studies. We argue that such strategies need to be adapted to the socio-economic-geographic conditions and the local culture in the area. This includes the possibility of financial assistance, which is not suggested in the original CLTS method.
3 April. Sarah Stephens (University of Melbourne), Amara Steven (ANU), Veronica O’Neill (University of Sydney). Research travel grants presentations
Poverty tourism in Yogyakarta, Sarah Stephen (The University of Melbourne)
This research aims to explore the varying ways poverty tourism manifests in Yogyakarta and how these experiences relate to poverty tourism trends more broadly. The project will examine how the Yogyakartan experience of poverty tourism enables us to explore the complex ways in which questions about benefits to the poor, questions about consuming cultural experiences, and globalization intersects.
Women in Indonesia’s Blue Economy: understanding user needs through female stories and experiences in Nusa Penida, Cilacap and Lombok, Amara Steven (ANU)
The investigation will look to understand how policies have affected women, their role in society and how and/or if there has been an impact on female empowerment. The research is in response to a recent academic paper titled “Fisheries industrialisation and Blue Economy policies in Indonesia: impacts on tuna fisheries in Cilacap and seaweed farmers in Nusa Penida.”
Framing illegality: the discourse of maritime piracy in Indonesia, Veronica O’Neill (The University of Sydney)
This thesis draws on frame analysis theory to explore how maritime piracy is framed in Indonesian government discourse. Through the examination of texts and information gathered from interviews, a qualitative analysis is conducted to determine the different frames used in the discourse
1 March. Yose Rizal Damuri (CSIS Jakarta). The impact of e-commerce on business in Indonesia: preliminary findings
E-commerce has been growing rapidly in the last few years thanks to the massive internet expansion in Indonesia. While there has been a lot of discussions on the supposed benefits from online trade, empirical studies are lacking. Using a dataset generated from a unique survey of 1100 firms we explore how the use of internet technology (and in particular e-commerce) affects market coverage, sales and profits, as well as the cost structure of businesses. Our findings confirm that being online allows firms to improve their performance. On average, going online can improve sales by 12%, and smaller firms seem to gain more benefits than the bigger ones. This study also explores the difficulties that firms in Indonesia face in conducting online trading.
Yose Rizal Damuri is the Head of the Department of Economics, Center for Strategic and International Studies. His research activities focus on international trade, regional integration and globalization of value chain. He is active in several research and advisory networks both in Indonesia and in East Asia, such as Indonesia Service Dialogue (ISD) and Asia-Pacific Research and Training Network on Trade (ARTNeT). He received his Bachelor of Economics from the Faculty of Economics, University of Indonesia. He continued his study at the National Centre for Development Studies, Australian National University (ANU), Canberra and got his Master of Economics of Development (MEcDev). He received his PhD in International Economics from the Graduate Institute of International Studies (HEI), Geneva, Switzerland.
20 February. Masayoshi Ike (Swinburne University of Technology), Bronwyn Anne Beech Jones (University of Melbourne), Owen James (University of Sydney). Research travel grants presentations
Soenting Melajoe, the first all-female edited women’s magazine in the Dutch East Indies (1912-1921), Bronwyn Anne Beech Jones (University of Melbourne)
The presentation will contextualise the intentions of Zoebeidah Ratnaa Djoewita and Siti Roehana in founding Soenting Melajoe in 1912 and their patron Datoe’ Soetan Maharadja
Sustainability practices of Japanese manufacturing multinational corporations (MNCs) in ASEAN Member States, Masayoshi Ike (Swinburne University of Technology)
This research proposes to examine the practice of Japanese manufacturing MNCs in addressing sustainable development in the ASEAN region, with the objective of understanding the processes by which sustainability practices are developed and implemented by these MNCs in their subsidiary operations.
Intra-party governance and anti-corruption policy in Indonesia, Owen James (University of Sydney)
This research aims to better understand what the internal political party mechanisms for preventing and punishing corruption are, investigate the extent to which they are institutionalised features of the parties, and then analyse why they have not had a significant effect on the incidence of corruption.
13 February. Philip Yampolsky. Indonesian regional music in commercial media: Inclusion, fusion, exclusion
This talk reported on a fifteen-year project to research the representation of Indonesian regional music and theater on VCD (video compact discs, until recently the main commercial medium for music in Indonesia). Representation is a key term here. There are countless varieties of local music in the regions (daerah) of Indonesia, but only a small portion of them appear on VCD. And the manner in which those that do appear are represented is often heavily influenced by two national manners or modes of presentation, one musical and one aesthetic. The musical mode or manner is that of national popular music, which is essentially Western in instrumentation and idiom; and the aesthetic mode is that of television and stage performance. That regional music on VCD very often conforms to these norms clearly reflects widespread Indonesian ideas of what regional music should be or should aspire to become. For most of this report, my approach will be descriptive, seeking simply to identify the categories and trends in regional VCDs. In a coda, however, I will discuss an example (from Indonesian Timor) of the kind of traditional rural genre that — failing to conform to the prevailing norms, and hence having no commercial appeal — is excluded from VCD production. Here my stance becomes critical — not of Indonesians or Indonesian media, but of current scholarship, which, fascinated by the popular, the diasporic, and the global, allows such rich rural micro-genres to vanish (as they almost certainly will) undocumented and unstudied.
Dr Philip Yampolsky has studied the music of Island Southeast Asia since 1971. In the 1990s he recorded, edited, and annotated the 20-CD series Music of Indonesia (Smithsonian Folkways Recordings: https://folkways.si.edu/music-of-indonesia-series/smithsonian). From 2000 through 2006 he was Program Officer for Arts and Culture in the Jakarta Office of the Ford Foundation. In 2007 he founded a world music institute at the University of Illinois (Urbana-Champaign). Since retiring in 2011 he has concentrated on researching and documenting traditional music in rural areas of Timor (both the Indonesian and the independent halves of the island).
23 January. Adam Triggs (ANU), Febrio Kacaribu (University of Indonesia), Jiao Wang (ANU). Risks, resilience and reforms: Indonesia’s financial system in 2019
This seminar previewed the authors’ forthcoming article in the Bulletin of Indonesian Economic Studies.
A critical challenge for Indonesia’s economic development is to deepen its financial markets while maintaining financial stability. Authorities have developed a new regulatory framework for preventing and responding to financial and economic crises, including new and reformed institutions. This puts Indonesia ahead of many countries in the region where such frameworks are lacking. But Indonesia’s crisis management framework is not perfect. It has deficiencies which, in the event of a crisis, could see simple liquidity challenges become systemic solvency crises. Regional and global financial safety nets would provide only limited support. A crisis in Indonesia is unlikely. But maturity and currency mismatches in its current account, SOE risks, tightening financial conditions, an appreciating US dollar, an escalating trade war and rising geopolitical tensions in the region may test the resilience of Indonesia’s financial system in 2019. The seminar surveyed the recent developments and key risks facing Indonesia. It explored the adequacy of its crisis management framework, how this framework could be improved, the implications of the upcoming election and what reforms need to be undertaken to reduce risks and deepen in the Indonesian financial system.