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Author: Prodita Sabarini, CEO/Publisher, The Conversation Indonesia
Original article: https://theconversation.com/no-more-illusions-what-civil-society-must-do-now-to-defend-indonesias-future-255916
In 2034, the unified Republic of Indonesia splintered into independent states led by monarchs as the government collapsed under ecological, financial and political crises. Civil society was crushed, eliminating people’s power to shape their destinies.
The dystopian image emerged from a scenario planning exercise involving a group of activists during the fifth Indonesia Civil Society Forum in September last year. The exercise occurred a month before the swearing-in of former military general Prabowo Subianto as president and former president Joko Widodo’s son, Gibran Rakabuming Raka, as vice president.
Hundreds of representatives from civil society organizations attended the two-day event. The scenario planning exercise was jovial. The more outrageous the imagination, the louder the laughter. But six months into Prabowo-Gibran’s term, it feels less like an unlikely joke. Alarming signals indicate a disaster for our democracy is unfolding fast.
Six months, six alarms
The first alarm sounded on Prabowo-Gibran’s first day in office when they expanded the presidential cabinet from 34 ministers to 48 ministers, 56 vice ministers, and five agency heads. Prabowo mostly assigned the positions to his party coalition, police officers, and fellow military personnel—indicating a focus on transactional politics and consolidating power over efficiency in providing public services.
A bloated cabinet filled with political appointments will increase red tape, slow down decision-making, and programmatic execution. Indonesia’s current cabinet size is more than double that of countries with high ratings for ease of doing business and a high Human Development Index. Meanwhile, countries like Germany, Japan, South Korea, or Singapore keep their cabinet ministers lean with 19-20 ministers for efficiency and speedy decision-making.
Cuts to overall government spending—including research spending—followed. The funds were reallocated to finance a massive free-lunch program with questionable execution and the opaque and risky sovereign wealth fund Danantara. The market responded, with the stock market crashing by more than 5% and the rupiah falling to its weakest level against the dollar since the 1998 Asian financial crisis. These combinations sounded the second, third, and fourth alarms, pointing to pressure on the country’s economy.
The fifth alarm, which corresponds directly to the ecological catastrophe foresighted at the ICSF, is Prabowo-Gibran’s target of opening up 20 million hectares of land for food security. To illustrate the scale of destruction of natural ecosystems and local communities, that’s almost 1.5 times the size of Java or more than 34 times that of Bali. This would backtrack Indonesia far from its 2030 forest and land-use net-zero target.
The sixth alarm, and one that should put citizens hoping to meaningfully participate in their country’s democratic processes on high alert, is the creeping militarism signaled by the swift revision of the country’s military law. The amendment allows active military personnel to hold positions in 14 civilian institutions, including the Attorney General’s Office and the Supreme Court, evoking chilling memories of past authoritarianism.
While these early warning signals are flaring in Indonesia, we’re also seeing a shift in the United States’ domestic and foreign policy. With the U.S. retreating from its role in promoting liberal democracy, Indonesia’s civil society lost one of its funding partners.
What will the next five years bring if this is what the first six months look like?
A mirror moment
To understand how we arrived at this point—and how to move forward—we need to look in the mirror that we, as civil society and our international supporters, have been avoiding.
Reflecting on the 2024 ICSF, I realized something was missing from our exercise. In the two days of analyzing what worked and what didn’t and imagining various possible futures, we have yet to face the hard truth that having a strong civil society alone, without fixing the broken democratic political system, would render our efforts moot.
Political scientist Hurriyah was prescient in 2019 about the myth of civil society’s democratic role. She argued that while Indonesia’s civil society played a pivotal role in mobilizing public support and ensuring the integrity of the 2014 presidential election, its contributions were limited to short-term electoral gains rather than fostering long-term democratic consolidation.
Hurriyah’s analysis validated a 2001 analysis by Ivan Doherty of the nonprofit National Democratic Institute. Doherty had warned that developing and expanding apolitical civil society movements while neglecting political parties and parliaments would open the door for populist leaders to bypass dialectical democratic processes and mould the system to benefit themselves.
Doherty’s forecast was made 24 years ago. We’re seeing his prediction play out in our world today.
What should civil society do next?
Last year’s ICSF was our reckoning. This year’s forum must be a turning point.
What would it take for civil society to stop competing for shrinking donor attention and start building a shared political strategy? What if we treated the political education of citizens as a core foundation? What if civil society learned to become better at engaging with political parties and parliaments meaningfully? How can we build, support, and elevate a new generation of leaders to come up with fresh ideas and innovative ways more attuned to today’s challenges and opportunities?
Here are some ideas:
1. Establish a transparent middle-ground political engagement strategy and equip CSOs with principles and tools to navigate it
Disengagement has turned civil society into a group of ignored political commentators. Civil society organizations working in advocacy can try a middle ground. Combining realistic lessons from seasoned leaders and experimental approaches from young leaders, civil society can establish a political engagement strategy, along with a set of guiding principles and a toolkit to engage directly with political parties and parliaments.
CSOs working in advocacy can join forces in mapping key legislation cycles and political parties’ agendas. CSOs should simultaneously engage the public to decide on priority areas such as government accountability, human development, social welfare, environmental health, scientific research, and technology development.
CSOs can then develop a shared political engagement strategy, aligning engagement activities to CSOs’ strengths and sectoral expertise. A regular evaluation and reflection period should be integrated into the plan to capture lessons learned along the way, allowing for continuous improvement of the strategy and process.
A set of guiding principles and toolkit should also be developed to help CSOs interested in taking this approach navigate political engagement while being transparent, maintaining their integrity, and mitigating risks of co-optation.
2. Develop emerging leaders and strengthen organizational development to attract, develop, and retain high-quality CSO workers
One key issue identified in ICSF was the need to regenerate civil society movement leaders. We see too few new leaders from the millennial and Gen Z generation to bring fresh new ideas and solutions.
At last year’s ICSF, half of the participants were millennials and Gen Z—ready and eager for leadership roles. They should be empowered to lead key strategic initiatives with mentorship and counsel from senior, experienced leaders while preparing the next generation of leaders.
Another issue was professionalizing the sector to ensure good working conditions and career development for CSO workers, thereby attracting and retaining talented young people in this sector.
Idealism is a strong motivator to serve in this sector. However, to make working in this sector sustainable, CSOs should ensure, at minimum, basic workers’ rights––fair compensation and benefits, humane working hours–-and, ideally, continuous professional development, mental health support, a healthy working culture, clear career pathways, succession planning, and so forth.
We can join forces to create a regeneration lab where emerging leaders, supported by peers and seasoned mentors, can hone their leadership skills while actively addressing our most pressing social challenges.
This lab could also serve as a knowledge and resource hub, helping organizations professionalize, grow sustainably, and strengthen their capacity to create impact.
3. Strengthen civil society’s financial resilience through fundraising and social entrepreneurship training
Over the last decade, foreign aid has shifted its focus from strengthening democratic systems to prioritizing issue-based programs, thereby limiting the broader political engagement of CSOs. This shift, coupled with CSOs’ dependence on grant funding, has pushed many organizations into the role of implementers rather than advocates or agenda-setters. It has also fostered competition over collaboration, with CSOs often competing against each other for shrinking financial resources.
Well-meaning funders have attempted to address the fragmentation of civil society, such as encouraging CSOs to collaborate or facilitating forums like the ICSF. Funders should also invest in fundraising and entrepreneurship training to help CSOs innovate fundraising strategies, diversify their income streams, and build sustainable financing models.
4. Revive people power through serious public political education
One of the results of CSOs serving as program implementers is that over the last decade, there has been a dearth of serious public political education. This has resulted in democratic regression during extraordinary digital information transformation.
Reclaiming people’s power can only happen when the public is informed about issues, well-versed in how power works, how decisions are made, and how they can influence decisions that affect their lives. This includes understanding how they can actively engage with the country’s democratic system beyond simply casting their votes every five years.
This is a space where The Conversation Indonesia is committed to playing a leading role through our everyday work of producing research-based information, raising public awareness of critical issues through social media campaigns, and facilitating public dialogues between academics, civil society, journalists, governments, businesses, politicians to create understanding and spur collaborations.
We’re also eager to contribute in a more significant role by participating in the media industry and professional associations and by collaborating with civil society and universities to develop effective programs for schools, universities, and various community groups.
Claiming back our power
The next few years are critical for Indonesia’s democracy. The signs of the return of authoritarianism are evident. We must let go of the illusion that apolitical movements alone can protect democracy.
In last year’s ICSF, academic Yanuar Nugroho opened the forum with three principles:
“The future is not predicted or forecasted; the future is shaped. We shape our own future.
Civil space is never freely given; civil space must be fought for, even seized.
Loyalty as citizens and civil society activists lies in ideas—about democracy, equality, justice, sustainability, and other virtues, goodness, and public civility; not in people or individuals.”
If we follow these principles, we can prevent the disaster from unfolding. Let’s reclaim our power from destructive, self-interested elite groups and shape our future together.
