Deservingness in Indonesia's Social Assistance Policy: Social Protection for All?

Abstract

As reflected in the United Nation's Sustainable Development Goals, social protection is widely recognised as a critical component of development strategies. While developing countries have rapidly introduced social assistance programs to alleviate poverty since the 2000s, a significant portion of the population in the Global South remains excluded. The 60% surge in social assistance programs in response to COVID-19 sparked optimism among international development stakeholders that countries in the Global South would bolster their commitment to expanding social protection. Nevertheless, recent trends indicate that this expansion was temporary, and vulnerable groups continue to face exclusion from these programs.

While existing research has evaluated social assistance programs and examined the influence of international organisations and domestic politics in their institutionalisation, few studies have investigated the concept of deservingness, which is critical to a country's political commitment to vulnerable groups (Leisering, 2018). This study adopts the notion of deservingness as a concept operating within a broad social context that gives meaning and determines consequences (Watkins-Hayes & Kovalsky, 2017). This thesis examines how deservingness influences patterns of inclusion and exclusion in social assistance programs for children, women, and the elderly in Indonesia.

Using Indonesia as a case study and applying the anthropology of policy approach, this research examines the underlying ideas in Indonesia's social assistance programs and how they reflect the construction of deservingness among these groups. It investigates how different policy actors influence the construction of target groups in social assistance programs. It explores the dynamics affecting national and sub-national policymakers in formulating programs and framing notions of deservingness. This study contributes to the literature by leveraging Indonesia's decentralised polity, where different levels of the government advance various schemes that reflect diverse notions of deservingness towards vulnerable groups. Through interviews, participant observation, and document analysis conducted virtually and in person during the COVID-19 pandemic, this study unpacks how socio-cultural values and hegemonic policy narratives influence state actors and shape policymaking in social assistance across different jurisdictions.

The overall argument of this thesis is that the construct of deservingness is not static but contested and dynamic. This research reveals how the interplay of socio-cultural values, externally driven policy paradigms, and state officials' bureaucratic, political and practical interests co-produce the conceptualisation of the "deserving poor" in different ways across various jurisdictions. This thesis advances the following arguments: First, the dominant ideas of deservingness in social assistance emerge from the convergence of religious, gender and family norms with the hegemonic influence of the social investment paradigm, reinforcing a productivist framing of social assistance and forestalling a rights-based approach to social protection. Second, a dominant coalition of "liberal economic technocrats" within the national government bureaucracy shapes Indonesia's predominant poverty discourse, promoting a residual approach to social assistance that excludes specific vulnerable groups. Last, local-level socio-political dynamics lead to a complex and fluid concept of deservingness, often differing from national-level priorities, with local policy entrepreneurs playing a crucial role in aligning political goals with bureaucratic and practical interests. These three dimensions - societal norms, national technocratic approaches, and local political dynamics - interact and work in tension with each other, creating varying patterns of inclusion and exclusion in social assistance across different governance levels. Show more