Recent Government Policies of Poverty Reduction: KDP, UPP and PNPM

This Chapter describes the failure of the previous ‘top-down’ approaches to achieve effective poverty reduction in Indonesia, which forced the government in the late 1990s to empower rural communities in order to increase their participation. So, after the global financial crisis, during the era of President Gusdur and Vice-President Megawati, the problem of poverty was tackled by the introduction in 1998/1999 of several national programmes supported by the World Bank and implemented at the community level, including the Kecamatan Development Programme (PKK). It also documents, that later onwards, the Urban Poverty Programme (UPP) was implemented to alleviate poverty in the urban areas throughout the country. The idea of a ‘bottom-up’ approach, however, was not completely implemented as the involvement of the local people has remained rather disappointing. The description of the introduction of the dual PNPM Mandiri programme in 2007 documents the role of trained facilitators whose task is to coordinate and integrate local people and institutions in order to prepare the local initiatives and projects, based on the needs of the local people, varying from economic needs to infrastructure. The success of the PNPM Mandiri programme is well documented in the increase in employment, and access to basic health care and education. The Chapter concludes that although the various programmes had initially been planned to empower the community, it was found that without an adequate involvement of the local people to take their own decisions, the programme simply became an adjusted development approach ‘from the top’ with a justification ‘from the bottom’ where factors of failing leadership and elite capture at the local level have contributed to the decline in the achievement of the community-based development approach throughout the country.