Pathways of Change through Women’s Collective Action: How Women are Overcoming Barriers and Bucking Trends to Influence Rural Development in Indonesia

Abstract

This overview to the edited volume is structured to briefly explore the following key points that emerge in the case analysis of how women’s collective action has created changes for both women’s well-being and the implementation of the Village Law, as well as how such change has been supported by a wide range of CSOs across different contexts and sectors. First, we identify variation in the diversity of priorities and initiatives that villages have introduced as a result of women’s influence on the implementation of the Law. Such initiatives go beyond infrastructure and economic development projects (although women have also prioritised these kinds of initiatives) and traverse multiple sectoral issues in seeking to address challenges for villagers, particularly women, through village development. Second, we identify the different types of changes that are evident in the case studies that have implications for women’s everyday wellbeing, as well as their influence on structures of power, decision making and village development at the individual and institutional levels, and in broader contexts. Third, we discuss how changes have come about for rural village women and what factors have contributed to the changes that are illustrated through the case studies. This includes a discussion of how context dynamics constrain or enable women’s influence, variation in core challenges (or sectoral issues) for women, and how collective action has contributed to forging these changes as is illustrated by the case studies. Fourth, we explore the temporal dimensions of change. And finally, we explore some of the pathways by which such changes have occurred in the research areas, that being different contexts.

Brokerage, power and gender equity: How empowerment‐focused civil society organisations bolster women's influence in rural Indonesia

“…They also engage with political elites through informal channels of mobilisation and influence (Alexander et al, 2016) and through more formal participation in state forums (Diprose, Savirani, Setiawan, & Francis, 2020; Diprose, Savirani, & Wells, 2020). CSOs can also reduce the distance between authoritative actors and decision‐makers and the women's groups they support (Kabeer et al, 2012) through bridging knowledge fields (Narayanaswamy, 2017) and translating agendas by (re)framing goals in discourses and ideologies that appeal to different constituencies (Diprose, Kurniawan, et al, 2019; Diprose, Savirani, Setiawan, & Francis, 2020; Diprose, Savirani, Hartoto, & Setiawan, 2020).…”