Forgotten People: Poverty, Risk and Social Security in Indonesia

Front matter

Forgotten People: Poverty, Risk and Social Security in Indonesia

Verhandelingen van het Koninklijk Instituut voor Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde

Edited by Rosemarijn Hoefte (KITLV, Leiden) Henk Schulte Nordholt (KITLV, Leiden) Editorial Board Michael Laffan (Princeton University)

Introduction

In the last two decades, major changes have taken place in the livelihoods of Indonesian people. Some groups in society have experienced major improvements in living conditions, benefitting from steady economic growth of about 6.5% annually (Burke and Resosudarmo 2012:301), while other groups have missed the boat and face economic stagnation, social exclusion, political underrepresentation, dispossession of land and growing inequality (Alatas et al. 2012, Hall et al. 2011, McCarthy et al. 2012, Nooteboom 2008:43). This inequality is often based on class and ethnicity and includes spatial dimensions such as inequalities between cities and rural areas and between regions (Mishra et al. 2009, Suryadarma et al. 2006). A significant group of people who seem to have largely missed out in the new Indonesia are the Madurese! (Stenross 2011:27—29).

Although the national economy has almost doubled since 2000,? a large proportion of the Indonesian people still live in poverty and face daily difficulties in making ends meet. According to a 2012 World Bank Country Report: ‘Out of a population of 234 million, more than 32 million Indonesians currently live below the poverty line and approximately half of all households remain clustered around the national poverty line set at [a very low] 200,262 rupiahs per

1 Throughout this book, the term ‘Madurese’ simply refers to Madurese-speaking people. Among them, there are many differences regarding area of origin, self-identification and official representation. Madurese themselves make more refined qualifications regarding region of origin and language use, and their self-identification might differ from those imposed by outsiders. Madurese from Madura, for instance, do not always regard Madurese from mainland East Java as Madurese.

The Madurese originally came from the densely populated and resource-poor island of Madura. Since the 17th and 18th centuries Cribb 2000:33, 52, large groups of Madurese have moved to eastern parts of mainland Java (including Surabaya, Malang, Pasuruan, Sitobondo, Bondowoso and parts of Jember, Banyuwangi and Lumayang). See: Cribb 2000:52; Stenross 2011:24; Tennekens 1963:310. They also live on the Bawean and Kangean islands. Nowadays, they can be found in all the major cities of Indonesia and in rural West and Central Kalimantan Husson 1997a with major concentrations in Pontianak, Sambas and the large cities of East Kalimantan, Balikpapan and Samarinda.

2 The country’s gross national income per capita has steadily risen from $2,200 in 2000 to $3,720 in 2009, and it continues to grow at rates above 6 — 6.5% annually (www.worldbank .org country overview, accessed February 2013).

© GERBEN NOOTEBOOM, 2015 | DOI 10.1163/9789004282988_002 This is an open access chapter distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution- Noncommercial 3.0 Unported (CC-BY-NC 3.0) License.

month ($22).3 This poverty consists of ‘old’ patterns and ‘new’ forms of poverty.

Poverty in Indonesia is not as static as the World Bank and BPs (National Board of Statistics) figures of persistent poverty might suggest. Some of the poor have lived in abject poverty all their lives, others have only recently fallen into poverty, while others have managed to climb the social ladder. Key elements are social relations offering support and protection, but surprisingly little is known about the meaning and scope of these relations today (Hiisken and Koning 2006:8). The existence or absence of social ties and relationships of care, support and social security make a great difference to the ultimate consequence of poverty on people's lives. Today, poverty in Indonesia is diverse and dynamic and, consequently, social relations of support and protection that provide social security are worthy of a more detailed study.

In this book, this persistent and yet dynamic nature of poverty will be explored in detail. The book aims at understanding the unstable, vulnerable and dynamic livelihoods of poor, Madurese people living on the margins of a nation in flux. It is based on extensive fieldwork in a village in Bondowoso, East Java, and among migrants in Samarinda, East Kalimantan, between 1998 and 2010. To maximize contrast in the case studies, the first selected location is an upland village (Krajan*) in rural Bondowoso, East Java, and the second is the urban Samarinda in East Kalimantan (see Map 1). In East Java, the population of Krajan speak Madurese and moved there long ago, whereas the Madurese migrants in East Kalimantan are relatively recent arrivals. While livelihoods and social relationships are reasonably established in East Java, the livelihoods of Madurese migrants in East Kalimantan are both dynamic and precarious. The book will use these two case studies of Madurese livelihoods outside Madura as a window to study the universal theme of poverty, social security and risk in Indonesia. The cases contrast the relatively stable setting of a rural society in East Java with the vagaries of migrant life in the bustling city of Samarinda and, at the same time, they are linked through the study of one ethnic group.

Although the case studies in this book deal with people living in small areas, namely the village of Krajan, close to the Argopuro Mountain in East Java, and those people working and living in the brick kilns, stone quarries, plantations and slums of Samarinda, East Kalimantan, it develops an approach which aims

3 www.worldbank.org country overview Indonesia (accessed February 2013). Exact figures differ depending on the kind of poverty line used. In January 2014, Kompas speaks of 28,55 million people in Indonesia who live below the very low BPs poverty line (Kompas, Special Supplement Indonesia Satu, Wednesday January 8, 2014: A-D).

4 Most of the names of places and people in this study are pseudonyms.

INTRODUCTION

“SVILV TVLIDIC ‘0107 44149 :AOUNOS suonDo0] yoivasay ‘visauopuy fo dow 1 dv to go beyond the study of small localities. The study aims to overcome static images of poverty and simplified distinctions between migrant survival strategies and village support systems in isolated areas. Before addressing the key themes of this book, we will first look at the Satrawi and Patik families in East Java and illustrate the dynamic nature of poverty in more detail.

Fallen from affluence: the Satrawi family

It is hard to estimate Satrawi’s age. I guess he is around sixty. Work starts to become a burden now and income hard to gain, especially when times are tough. Mr (Pak) Satrawi married about thirty years ago to a daughter of a relatively rich family but, nowadays, not much of these riches are left. They had six children and adopted a seventh. Now, three of their children are married, one has died and three still live at home.

‘Nowadays, my household owns only a tiny plot of infertile land, not enough to feed the family for more than two months’ Satrawi tells me. ‘In the past, however, we belonged to the better-off’. Faded remnants of woodcarvings above the doors and inside their house recall this more glorious past. Today, the house looks shabby and worn-out, windowpanes have been sold, and the roof is in urgent need of repair. ‘Our match (jodoh) was not good, they say. I probably should not have married my wife’, Satrawi sighs, ‘but what else did we do wrong?’

In front of his house, and in the houses of neighbours and old friends, I was gradually told the full story of the Satrawi family. It is a long history of a family going from riches to rags through a combination of misfortune, sheer bad luck and perhaps an inability to read the changes in the social and economic fabric of Krajan society.

After marriage, they inherited many rice fields, dry fields and cattle — they were part of the top echelon of rural society. Many recall how, in the past, Satrawi was charitable towards poor people, gave alms to the needy and staged huge parties where everybody felt welcome, even his poor neighbours. Gradually, twenty years ago, decline set in in the house of Satrawi. The rituals (selamatan) performed to commemorate their parents’ deaths were costly, cattle were sold and land had to be pawned. Their second daughter died a year after her marriage while giving birth, leaving a grandchild to be taken care of and more costly rituals to perform. Ami, their third daughter divorced and remarried three times within six years, costing a fortune. Additionally, she had to be treated in hospital for over a month and so cattle were sold and more land had to be pawned. They had to cover most of these costs themselves as gifts and support from relatives and neighbours were insufficient.

Notwithstanding dwindling resources, Mrs (Bu) Satrawi continued to spend money freely on ‘expensive’ food such as meat, chicken, noodles, coffee and sugar. She was known for her collection of sarong and ‘her children looked like princesses’, as people say in the neighbourhood. She kept up her lifestyle even when the family income was far too low to finance all her luxurious expenditures. The pawned rice fields had to be sold, and more land had to be pawned in order to obtain credit to keep up appearances and to meet the demands of the ritual exchange economy (organizing large selamatan and giving expensive presents). They still hoped to recover from their misfortune but, as their main resources such as cattle and land had gone, household income fell drastically making it impossible to repay debts and regain the pawned lands.

In 1997, at the onset of the economic crisis, their situation was dire. They had fallen into the lowest stratum of the village. During the economic crisis at the end of the millennium and the subsequent rapid inflation, Satrawi’s cash income dropped yet further and he could no longer buy items such as fish, eggs, noodles, coffee, sugar or cigarette wrapping paper. He had to use the dried leaves of maize cobs to roll his own cigarettes. Every time I met him, he smiled happily, but his face looked older and more tired. If I asked him how he was, the answer was always the same: Biasa, biasa saja, kerja terus |...] Alhamdulillah saya masih makan’, (‘The same, the same, we just work on [...] Thank God, I can still eat’).

Nevertheless, Satrawi was still invited to weddings, praying groups and selamatan, often as a special guest or as a prayer leader (freeing him from the obligation to contribute financially). He is known as a good and respectable man, a good prayer leader, as one who never complains and is always ready to join mutual help and cooperative labour activities. He does not try to keep up appearances now that he is poor. By knowing his place, he is accepted by everyone. ‘His wife is different. She still has difficulties in adjusting to lower living standards and rejects work such as helping with kitchen activities in the houses of rich people’, Bu Maryami, a neighbour, commented. ‘She never learnt to work. Still today, she cannot do dirty work and instead calls her daughter to do it. Bu Satrawi is still so haughty. People here do not want to help her’.

Although the cash income of the household decreased substantially and prices tripled in the course of the crisis years, Satrawi’s family did not slide much further down. Their own resources were completely used up, but friends and neighbouring landowners continued to offer work regularly. By working their fields, Satrawi earned some stable income in kind (rice and maize). They also helped his family out with some small loans,

CHAPTER 1 free meals and invitations to religious parties and selamatan where food is served and can be taken home. Also, Satrawi’s fourth son, Saleh, married into a richer family who owned rice fields and were also active in house construction. ‘I hope Saleh will be able to support himself, and maybe us, in the future’, Satrawi said.

Upwardly mobile: Patik

The story of one of Satrawi’s neighbours, the Patik family, forms quite a contrast. The house of Pak Patik is made from solid bricks and stands on a hill a hundred metres above the crowded and dirty neighbourhood where Satrawi lives. While the family of Satrawi was falling from relative wealth to poverty over the course of a dozen years, in the same period the Patik family moved from rags to riches. Once, Patik and his wife worked for the Satrawi family, but now Satrawi works for the Patik family.

Pak Patik, a cattle trader, is a self-made man, and he is proud of this. He likes to wear good shirts and jeans, and often wraps an expensive Madurese sarong over his shoulders, making his tall figure even more imposing. When Patik enters a house, he enters slowly and with dignity. He says he is not even afraid of the village head, and that one day he will run for village head himself. However, when sitting in the same room as Bagenda, the village head, he is noticeably silent. Other villagers all agree that the story of Patik is a fine one, and that he is very clever, perhaps too clever, in accumulating wealth.

In the past, he was one of the former friends and frequent visitors to Satrawi’s selematan and, just after his marriage, he worked as a poor labourer in Satrawi’s fields. Nowadays, as a rich man, he seems to have forgotten the former generosity of the Satrawi family. Patik’s children played in Satrawi’s house and were given sweets and snacks, but now they order him around when working in the fields and only pay him a little respect because of his age. However, their father is said to be worse. ‘Patik has no heart, villagers say. Even if he has ready money in his pocket, he does not lend money to less fortunate villagers such as Satrawi. ‘Those people don’t know how to deal with money’, Patik says, ‘I will not give them money, because they only know how to spend it. They should take better care of their own money’. Saleh, the son of Satrawi, put it differently: ‘If I ask for help or money, there is none to be had they say, but, if I am in need and want to sell a cow, or if I need to pawn a piece of land, definitely there is money’. Indeed, half of the five hectares of land that Patik has acquired over the last fifteen years was once the property of pak Satrawi, his former patron and protector who is now a labourer on his own land.

In Patik’s perception, he acquired his wealth on his own merits. At least that is what he likes his visitors to believe. However, people say that, in fact, it was his wife who did most of the work in managing the lands, controlling the household budget and building up a large network of labourers through exchanging gifts with neighbours and friends in the village. She comes from a relatively well-off family but only inherited a small area of rice field because her father used almost all of his land, cattle and money to finance his pilgrimage to Mecca. According to neighbours, she used to work terribly hard, and for years did not ask for anything for herself being determined to regain the ‘lost’ family property. She became famous for saying: ‘Don’t spend, save the money to buy a calf first’. Although thrifty, neighbours generally respect her, and all mention her kindness. She secretly offers free meals to poor children from the neighbourhood on a regular basis and is willing to provide small incidental loans (in the form of cash, rice or maize) to the wives of their labourers. Besides this, labourers praise the food she serves for being tasty. ‘There you get real coffee, and plenty of sugar in it’, they say, ‘she is not like her husband, who is even too greedy to buy cigarettes for his workers’. Without her, probably no-one would have been willing to work for Patik and so she helped him build his wealth.

In Patik’s view, he, and he alone, can take care of their family wealth, and he even tries to check all his wife’s expenditure. Others are not entitled to his support ‘because nobody has helped me in the past’. He once said, ‘Why should I help someone who should be able to take care of themselves?’ Only if people are struck by disaster is he willing to support them, he says. ‘He doesn’t notice common people. In the past he was poorer than I am, but now he only thinks about money, not about us’. Patik says himself that he doesn’t want to have too many social relations. ‘Having too many friends is an expensive business’.

What went wrong with the Satrawi family? Was it simply bad luck with the family hit by a series of misfortunes? Clearly, they made poor choices in maintaining a high level of consumption and by failing to accumulate as household resources dwindled. They also clung too long to their previous elite status and sold productive assets such as land and cattle to maintain this status. They kept on investing in social relations through expensive rituals, helping out and gift giving even when they were impoverished. Maybe they backed the wrong horse by clinging on too long to old village values of sharing and mutual help and expected more help in return when times got tough. When confronted with a series of misfortunes and becoming impoverished, little came back from all the past investments.

Were all the investments in social relationships unsuccessful? During and after the crisis, they clutched to their last straw: the once large network of neighbours and friends. Where other villagers and returning migrants had difficulties in finding work, they remained part of a social network which offered access to work, small loans and irregular distribution of food. Slowly, with help from children and relatives, the family has recovered to the level of ‘poor but decent’ in recent years. Until today, however, they have not regained their former lands.

For the Patik family, social relations are also important, but perceived as ‘expensive’. For them, social obligations are a barrier to social mobility, but also needed to mobilize labour. They strategically juggle between opportunities and obligations. While the thriftiness of Patik is resented, his wife is praised for being good, and she maintains good relations so as to able to mobilize loyal workers. The case of the Patik family also shows that social relations might be less relevant for social climbers, as their maintenance might hamper accumulation, while they do does not protect against falling into poverty. Here, the double meaning of social relationships comes to the fore; they can be useful and protecting, as well as exploitative and a means to control people. Social relations have multiple meanings for different people in different periods of time.

These examples show that the lives and living conditions of poor people are not stable, should not be taken for granted and can change quickly. Poverty and affluence are not fixed categories, and neither are friendships and other social ties. Wealth can diminish over time, and friends and relatives can disappear or turn out to be unreliable partners. Sometimes minor events or misfortunes are sufficient to trigger the downfall of a family while others receive support and are able to cope with the difficulties. Conversely, with some luck, hard work and favourable conditions, some Madurese manage to rise above others and establish a stronger livelihood or better support relationships. How should one capture these differences among socioeconomic classes, events and trajectories?

Key Themes of the Book

The examples also show that people seldom bring about major changes in their livelihoods on their own. Households consist of men, women, children and often elderly parents. Even if these members have conflicting interests, they eat together, work together, pool resources and care, and support one another. As a household, and sometimes as individuals, members exchange gifts, cooperate or compete, and claim or provide support to other households and individuals in times of need. Establishing and maintaining good relationships with others is of crucial importance in enhancing and maintaining a living but, at the same time, others can also be a major source of insecurity. It is precisely the ways in which poor people handle insecurities, both alone and together, and the dilemmas associated with exchange and support that form the core of this study.

This book thus has a larger story to tell. It is about the difficulties that people face in making a living, and about the ways in which they try to safeguard their livelihoods when times get hard. More than anything, it sets out to understand the everyday responses of people when they are confronted with misfortunes, hazards and major and minor crises in their lives. It describes the multiple ways in which people try to secure their livelihoods over time, directly through their own efforts or indirectly through support from others. Such actions vary greatly between people of different socioeconomic backgrounds, occupations, age and gender. Central to this book is the idea that people follow diverse trajectories guided by individual and cultural preferences that are shaped within structural boundaries, which I call styles. It offers an alternative to poverty studies focussed primarily on incomes and assets as well as to structural approaches which emphasise structural inequalities and the adverse consequences of capitalism and globalisation. This book searches for new conceptual ways to deal with diversity and agency, and aims to integrate both the strategic and structural dimensions of making a living and securing support at a daily basis. How should one capture these differences between socioeconomic classes, events and trajectories, and how can we develop a dynamic understanding of livelihood insecurity and poverty in Indonesia?

Many of the people who are described in this book can be called poor - living below or close to the official Indonesian poverty line — and are living in a more-or-less continuous state of insecurity. Poor people however do not stand alone, but search out and receive — directly or indirectly — support from others. Moreover, they are not always ‘frozen’ below or close to the poverty line since poorer and richer periods alternate as a result of seasonal fluctuations in income, lifecycles and alternating periods of misfortune and relative prosperity. Clearly, the poor I describe are not living in isolation, but need and use other individuals and institutions to secure their living, to access resources, to gather wealth and status and to provide support in times of need.

The book aims to find the middle road between studies focussing on the agency, capability and opportunities of the poor and critical approaches which emphasise structural inequality, adverse incorporations into the capitalist system and the adverse effects of structural power differences.° First, it highlights the material basis of poverty by studing the resource base and livelihoods of peasants and migrants and the diversity found within the livelihoods and the reportoires of mutual help and social assistance. Second, it describes the different combinations people make in linking their livelihoods to mutual relationships of support, social security arrangements and institutions of mutual help to show opportunities for social protection and room to manoeuvre for poor people living under adverse conditions. And third, I analysis the intricate interplay of structure and agency, individual survival and social protection. This approach differs from conventional approaches that insufficiently take into account the capabilities and agency of poor people living under conditions of coercion and which are oftend one-sided in the emphasis on social exclusion and vulnerability. This book uncovers patterns and trajectories in the ways people try to obtain and maintain this access both individually and collectively within constraining and enabling structures. Before we study these issues in detail, key concepts of livelihood, social security, risk and insecurity will be discussed.

Livelihood

The livelihood approach, developed by DFID (the British Department for International Development) and still influential among human geographers, rural sociologists and development economists, takes the above-described dynamics of poverty into account (Bebington 1999, Chambers and Conway 1992, Scoones 2009:171).° The livelihood framework offers a good way to start to capture poverty as multidimensional. Moreover, it acknowledges the strategic and creative choices people make in dealing with poverty. Livelihood studies not only focus on the ownership of assets and structural constraints in society, but also on the actual and potential ways to access resources. As Frank Ellis put

5 Such as for instance Hall et. al. (201), Tania Murray Li (2007, 2014).

6 Livelihood studies and intervention programmes have never been very popular within Indonesian policy circles. This might have to do with the participatory nature of most livelihood programmes — participatory development planning is not a strong point in Indonesian policy — or with the fact that applying a livelihood approach implies recognition of the capabilities and capacities of local people - a feature which has often been ignored. The Indonesian state-led anti-poverty programmes can be better characterised as welfare policies. Hiisken and Koning (2006:4).

it: ‘a livelihood comprises the assets (natural, physical, human, financial and social capital), the activities, and the access to these (mediated by institutions and social relations) that together determine the living gained by the individual or household’ (Ellis 2000:10).” A livelihood thus includes assets, entitlements, individual characteristics, relationships and activities.

A livelihood is not something temporal, but embedded in social, economic and political relationships which stretch over time. Chambers and Conway (1992: 8) define, in their classic conceptualization, a sustainable livelihood as follows: ‘a livelihood comprises the capabilities, assets (including both material and social resources) and activities required for a means of living. A livelihood is sustainable when it can cope with, and recover from, stresses and shocks and maintain or enhance its capabilities and assets both now and in the future, while not undermining the natural resource base’.

Over the years, livelihood studies have received criticism for generally failing to integrate regional, global—local and state-power connections. Most livelihood studies have been unable to analyse the social, structural and cultural embeddedness of action (Scoones 2009:174). In livelihood studies, being somewhat preoccupied by people’s and households’ strategies, there is an inherent risk of too narrow a focus on the actions and strategies of a group of poor people. One of the consequences of adopting a livelihood perspective is that a fairly positive image of poverty is created. In its focus on capabilities, it fits well with recent development approaches that put ‘rational’ individuals and their actions to the fore. This explains its appeal in neoliberal policies, and partly explains its popularity.

A livelihood perspective can be blind to the structural causes of poverty, such as unequal power relationships and unequal access to resources. It also fails to explain why some poor people are better able to climb out of poverty than others, and why some are better protected against shocks and stresses than others. This can be addressed by paying close attention to the notion of embeddedness and the social relationships which offer potential access to resources and social assistance in times of need. It is helpful to add a social security perspective to livelihood studies that takes power differences and structural inequalities into account.

7 See also on livelihood: Akram-Lodhi and Borras 2007; Bebington 1999; De Haan and Zoomers 2005; Farrington, Carney, Ashley and Turton 1999; Kaag, Brons, De Bruijn, De Haan, Nooteboom, Van Berkel, Van Dijk and Zoomers 2004; Moser and Norton 2001; Scoones and Wolmer 2003.

12 CHAPTER 1 Social Security

A central aspect for poor people confronted with misfortune is access to social security. This security can be either provided by the state or locally organized. In Indonesia, the state has been relatively weak in providing social welfare to its people, but discussions and attempts to establish systems of social welfare, such as national health insurance, labour benefits and anti-poverty schemes, regularly surface. Some nationwide schemes have been established, but these are far from effective. Social welfare remains ad hoc and selective in its concentration on disasters and poverty alleviation programmes, and sensitive to political priorities during election times. Over the past three decades, pension schemes, social protection programmes and health insurance have become available to greater numbers of the Indonesian population including civil servants, military personnel and private sector actors rich enough to buy private social security bonds. Within the last decade, increasingly, the poor are also reached through several government programmes. These include subsidized rice (Raskin), free health cards (Jamkesmas), cash transfers for poor students (BSM), conditional cash transfers (PKH) and a temporary unconditional cash transfer (BLT) (WorldBank 2012b:12). However, it has been shown that at best, only half of the targeted people in extreme poverty have been reached by ‘at least one of these programmes’ (WorldBank 2012b:47). Overall, full coverage is still a long way off. Moreover, for the majority of the Indonesian population, the government tends to add to their insecurity rather than to their security through the risk of eviction, legal insecurity and direct or indirect processes of dispossession (Aspinall and van Klinken 201, Collins 2007, Ford and Lyons 2006, Hall et al. 201, Hiisken and Koning 2006, Von Benda-Beckmann and Von Benda-Beckmann 1998, Wilson 2011).

This does not mean that the people studied here do not do anything to organize their own welfare. On the contrary, they do so constantly, and they often do this in a social way by involving relatives, neighbours and friends, and also, as many studies show, political leaders (Collins 2007, Hiisken and Koning 2006, Kreager and Schréder-Butterfill 2005, Marcus and Asmorowati 2006, Suryahadi and Sumarto 2003, Von Benda-Beckmann et al. 1994). Often this does not concern general social security but the security of life, health, a social position and access to resources. In Chapter 4, some key mechanisms in this respect will be evaluated.

Since the 1988 and 1994 classic studies of Von Benda-Beckmann et al. on insecurity and locally organized social security, the study of local forms of welfare provision and social security has increased. This approach investigates welfare organized by people themselves, or provided by village, ethnic or religious institutions, NGOs and charity organizations. These local forms of support are not embedded in state regulations and legislation, are generally not formalized in explicit rules and regulations, are context-specific, are restricted to small areas and are mainly organized by local people. This will be explained in more detail below.