Women and the law-making process in post-Suharto Indonesia

Aditya PerdanaHamburg University adperd@yahoo.com

Outline• Defining women’s CSOs and political parties

relations• Method• Women in Indonesian social and political

structures• Parliamentary quotas for women: Election and

Political Party laws• Domestic Violence Law in 2004• The Bill on Gender Equality• The relationships between women’s CSOs and

parties• Conclusion

Defining women’s CSOs and political parties

relations• The relationships between CSOs and

parties: organizational connections to facilitate dialogue and political interactions

• The relationship provides some links from CSOs “to the party’s members, decision-makers and/or decision making bodies” (Allern, 2010: 57) that open up their communication

• three dimensions: political activities, the strength of the connection, the direction of influence between them

Defining women’s CSOs (cont.)O Women’s political representation: formal and

descriptive representation influences substantive representation (Schwindt-Bayer, 2010)

• Women’s movements strategies: autonomy-state involvement, inside-outside positioning, separatism-coalition building, and discursive political-interest seeking (Beckwith, 2007).

• Main question: how women’s groups deliver women and gender issues in the law-making process?

• Two main policy issues: electoral issues (women’s quota in parliament) and the gender issue (justice and equality between genders and anti-household violence law).

MethodO three categories of Indonesian

women’s CSOs: NGOs, mass membership organizations, and social movements

O seven major parties in the parliament O Causal Process Tracing O semi-structured interviews, literature

and archival research based on multiple sources

Women in Indonesian social and political

structuresO Cultural inheritances: patriarchies and patrimonial

O Ibuism: the cultural dominance of womanhoodO the struggle of gender and development in

Indonesia : 1900s suffrage issues 1950s women’s equality New Order (1967-1998) corporatist organizationPost Reformasi (1998) to promote gender reform

O the country has various visible gender policies, but weak implementation

Parliamentary quotas for women: Election and Political Party laws

• Prior to the 1999 election: voters education• Women were under-represented in public

offices• Failed to endorse gender quota in Party

Law 2003, but succeeded in Election Law 2003 and 2008

• Good cooperation and intense communication among different women’s groups

• 2004 (11 %) 2009 (18 %) 2014 (17%)

Domestic Violence Law in 2004

• the necessity to have clear legal aspects that could protect victims of violence

• The Elimination of Violence against Women Policy Advocacy Network (JANGKA PKTP) was established in 1998. JANGKA PKTP drafted domestic violence bill.

• Formally, the 31 members of DPR initiated an anti-domestic violence bill in September 2002. The bill was drafted and adopted from JANGKA PKTPs version

The Bill on Gender Equality

O first discussed in 2009 O a consensus to endorse a new

procedure for implementing the integration of the CEDAW commitment into the entire social and political system

O this draft needed to be revised in order to accommodate opponents’ opinions before being deliberated in the next session

The relationships between women’s CSOs

and parties• the autonomy-state involvement strategy:

able to maintain and achieve policy changes

• inside-outside strategies: combining weak and strength connections to other groups

• the separatism-coalitional strategy: no federation of women’s networks to address women’s issues in the law-making process

• the discursive politics-interest politics setting strategy: affect and change the political structures

The relationship (cont.)O women’s CSOs are distributing support

to all parties O closeness and distance depends on the

issues involved with each law-making process

O a distant relationship: limited relationship in the political sphere, their weak connections, and limited direct influence.

O the importance of informal institutions

Conclusion• women CSOs are able to advocate, to

campaign, and to lobby members of the House to help drive their own agenda in the political sphere

• organizational weaknesses: the lack of substantial arguments and non-systematic political approaches with politicians.

• female activists have yet to enhance their role as lobbyist; to increase their knowledge about gender and development in order to present policy alternatives to policymakers.

• the low commitment to implement laws