Empowering or Overpowering? Engaging Community for Sustainable Coastal Development in Lombok, Indonesia

Suadnya IW¹*, Ross H² and Chamala S²

1. The University of Mataram, Mataram, Indonesia
2. School of Natural Rural Systems Management, The University of Queensland, St Lucia, Queensland, Australia

After more than thirty years of a centralistic, top down and technocratic approach to development in Indonesia, the new government introduced policies in 1999 favouring participatory approaches and community empowerment, and giving local government more authority to engage the poor in coastal area development programs. A Community Empowerment Bureau was established and many empowerment projects initiated. However, in practice community engagement remains limited, and the implementation of the new approach has created a culture of dependence in both bureaucrats and community. This paper examines why this has happened, and how the Indonesian government could engage communities more effectively in development programs.

A two-phase study of recent participatory development projects was conducted in coastal Lombok in 2002 and 2003, focusing on the empowerment process and the degrees of empowerment achieved. After an island-wide overview, three coastal villages were studied in detail to observe the dynamics of community engagement in development projects. The findings indicate that Government policy initiatives have brought some change in institutions, organisations and projects, but not in bureaucratic work culture. No training and capacity building on empowerment philosophy and engagement methodologies has been offered for staff to implement the new policies, and former “top-down” and “targets” approaches are still practiced. The Government tried to establish development groups, but the empowered, pre-existing community groups were ignored resulting in exclusion rather than inclusion, and overpowering rather than empowering the communities. This led to deterioration of traditional social capital.

The respondents feel that better community engagement can be achieved by capacity building for both government staff and community members, and enabling development to include the traditional groups. This would achieve greater empowerment, inclusiveness and build social capital for sustainable development.

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