Demography, development and citizen’s rights

Demography, development and citizen’s rights Riwanto Tirtosudarmo ;   A Researcher at the Indonesian Institute of Sciences (LIPI), Jakarta

JAKARTA POST, 06 November 2012

Demography will remain one of the toughest challenges for Indonesia’s future. The silent nature of demographic pressures, however, makes the general public unaware of its profound impacts, economically and politically. Managing demographic pressures requires a proper understanding of demographic characteristics and their interplay with other variables.  The most noticeable characteristics of Indonesia’s demography are its large size and its uneven distribution between Java and other islands. In the past, reducing population growth through family planning programs was considered a success, especially during the New Order period.  Efforts to reduce the uneven distribution through various programs of relocating people from Java to other islands, however, only had very limited results.  Widjojo Nitisastro, the main architect of economic development under Soeharto’s New Order regime, was deeply aware that demography should be controlled for meaningful development to be achieved.  While opening the market economy, Widjojo, an economic demographer, was aware that the majority of the population was poor and mostly engaged in agriculture.  He argued that although the acceleration of economic development was the primary goal, a commitment to reduce the number of poor people could not be negotiated. Under Widjojo, poverty was significantly reduced by a combination of economic development and population control. Recently, I was involved in an expert meeting to discuss a draft report on population and development. The report prepared by the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) aims to review the implementation of recommendations from 1994 International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD) in Cairo.  The ICPD meeting in Cairo was a landmark as for the first time, individual rights were strongly advocated in the discourse on population and development. The inclusion of individual rights in the praxis of population and development was a result of strong lobbying from feminist groups who perceived that family planning programs, as the main device to control population growth, grossly violated the human rights of women.  For Indonesia, the pressure of a new discourse on population and development that emphasized the importance of individual rights contradicted the long practice of family planning programs.  Although several adjustments in the implementation of family planning programs have been made as an official response to the new international pressure on Indonesia’s preoccupation with population control, the policies generally persist.  After Soeharto stepped down from power in 1998, the state no longer had the power to force the people to practice family planning as before.  In the beginning of the 21st century, the demise of authoritarian regime was followed by the dawn of a political landscape that advocated political liberalization, decentralization and human rights.  It is then only a coincidence that the individual rights that were propagated by 1994 ICPD met with the new Indonesian political system in which the state no longer had the luxury to impose its will in matters related to population control.  The question however still remains: How deep is our actual understanding and consciousness about the notion of individual rights? Two years before commemorating the two decades since the ICPD conference in Cairo, the UN is anticipating another ICPD conference in 2014. Now is therefore an appropriate time to reflect on the nexus of individual rights and development in the context of Indonesia’s current political landscape. Following the collapse of Soeharto’s authoritarian government, surprisingly, macro-economic development continues producing relatively high levels of economic growth. Internationally, Indonesia is recognized as one of the so-called developing economies and has become a member of the G20.  This phenomenon shows that the technocratic principles laid out by Widjojo Nitisastro and his economic team in the 1970s through the 1990s have apparently been institutionalized and constitute the basis for macroeconomic endurance in Indonesia.  In the longer perspective, the sharp decline in economic growth during the 1997 financial crisis can be seen only a hiccup in the overall figure of economic growth.  The problem of economic development, as many observers have noted, is not in growth but in its uneven distribution, both socially and geographically.  The increasing number of those in the middle income group, who mostly live in Java’s urban areas, indicates the continuation of a colonial dual economy between Java and the outer islands. The promise of decentralization and regional autonomy apparently has not resulted in the evening of economic prosperity of the Indonesian citizens.  This situation is serious and calls for the government to play a more assertive role and to not let market forces dominate the economy. So, what should we do about demography and related population issues that continue to challenge the state and its social, economic and political development?  The new political landscape should not be seen as a burden of the state in managing demographic pressures as the existing demography also partly resulted from the state’s own policies.  A new mindset is critically needed in managing demographic pressures in which the rights of individual as citizens should form the center of the new strategy. Trust between the state and its citizens should be strengthened and citizens’ rights and responsibility to control their own body and family have to be given a high priority.  The consciousness of citizens on their rights and responsibilities is indeed a condition that is unlikely to change if they are economically poor and the level of their political consciousness is also low.  Apart from continuing development strategies to reduce poverty, a strategy to advocate for citizens’ rights and responsibilities through citizenship education is therefore very urgent in order to support a rights-based strategy for addressing demographic challenges. ●