NGOs, THE INTERNET AND SUSTAINABLE RURAL DEVELOPMENT

Abstract

Today sustainable rural development is of paramount importance in Indonesian development. Yet, different social actors have different perspectives on it. Non-government organizations (NGOs) in Indonesia have established themselves in pivotal positions in the social, economic and political landscape across the country, and a large amount of their work has been connected with development in the rural sector. But, there has been little attempt to understand how NGOs in Indonesia, particularly rural NGOs, engage with the issue of sustainable rural development itself. Since rural development is one of the oldest issues to be discussed among activists, since the early days of Indonesian NGOs, it is interesting to see how they understand the issue of sustainability in rural development and rural reform. An empirical study was conducted recently to see how some Indonesian NGOs, in their endeavour to respond to and broaden the discourse, utilize Internet technology. The study employs a combination of quantitative and qualitative approaches to build a detailed story about how different organizations working in rural development deploy strategies to deal with the issue. By doing so, it aspires to contribute to the advancement of theory relating to the efficacy of the Internet as a tool for social reform and sustainable development by taking Indonesia as a case study.

Keywords:

• Internet adoption
• Indonesia
• non-governmental organizations
• rural sector
• sustainable development
• reform

Notes

Interview: Muhammad Riza (30 November 2005); Indro Surono (3 December 2005).

Interview: Antonius Waspotrianto (28 October 2005); Indro Surono and Agung Prawoto (3 December 2005); Yulia I. Sari (19 December 2005).

AOA, which is currently part of the new WTO trade round launched in November 2001, has elements that are likely to be problematic for Indonesia, e.g. (i) another round of reduction in tariffs; (ii) possible measures that could ensure state trading enterprises (STE), such as BULOG (Indonesia's STE for rice and other sensitive commodities) from having import monopoly powers; (iii) very little, or no real disciplines on domestic supports, e.g. no overall caps or limits on the green box spending is being discussed for the developed countries (which means that dumping of cheap agriculture produce by the USA and EU into developing countries will continue, and could even increase); and (iv) special and differential treatment for developing countries under discussion, e.g. the concept of special products and a special safeguard mechanism (spearheaded by Indonesia) is extremely inadequate since these are merely band-aid measures. Food security and rural livelihoods cannot be limited to a small number of crops but should encompass the broad range of products small farmer produce (Kwa 2004).

See Appendix for a more detailed account. However, it should be noted that in the early days of the Internet use in Indonesian NGOs, it was advocacy organizations that pioneered the use of the Internet for pushing social movement. An interview with Wahyu Susilo of INFID (1 December 2005) reveals the birth of Nusanet initiated by INFID as the first secure communication exchange platform for civil society activists. Nusanet played an undeniably important role for Indonesian CSOs in establishing links with their partners across the archipelago in order to fight for democratization and across the globe for mobilizing global solidarity, especially in overthrowing Soeharto's regime.

Interview with Indro Surono (3 December 2005). Agung Prawoto (3 December 2005); Muhammad Riza (30 November 2005); Antonius Waspotrianto (28 October 2005).

Interview with Muhammad Riza (30 November 2005); Antonius Waspotrianto (28 October 2005); Agung Prawoto (3 December 2005).

Onno W. Purbo's blog http://asiablogging.com/blog/221/role-of-ict-in-rural-development/.

Interview with Indro Surono (3 December 2005); Muhammad Riza (30 November 2005); Antonius Waspotrianto (28 October 2005).

This section is based on the survey and interview with YDA's Executive Director, Muhammad Riza (30 November 2005), and also appears in Nugroho (2007b).

SatuDunia is a newly established Indonesian node of the global network OneWorld.net (www.oneworld.net), which was established since 1995 and currently has more than 1,600 partners internationally. SatuDunia is an initiative of HIVOS, Yayasan Jaring and OneWorld UK and was officially set-up on 16 December 2006. See http://www.satudunia.net/?q=node/238 (2 April 2009).

Recall the integration of rural sector within WTO regime through AOA, as outlined in Section 2 above.

See http://agrodev.multiply.com and http://indosl.multiply.com, the mailing list is http://groups.yahoo.com/group/agrodev/.

See, for example, Freeman and Perez (1998).

This points are also observed by some scholars (Harney & Olivia 2003; Hill 2003; Lim 2003b; Hill & Sen 2005).

‘Configurational capability’ is defined here as an organization's capacity and ability to arrange their use of the Internet by modifying its settings and configurations, including hardware and software, and at the same time, also modifying the organization's routines such as working arrangements and internal policies. There are four aspects of configurational capabilities observed when NGOs implement the Internet: (i) cognitive (configuring distributed knowledge of different kinds), (ii) organizational (configuring distributed actors and other repositories of knowledge and know-how), (iii) design (configuring functional features and solutions), and (iv) affective (configuring motivation, shared value, issues and concerns). The first three aspects were also observed by scholars who also found similar capabilities when researching low-tech companies in PILOT project (Bender 2005, 2006; Bender & Laestadius 2005; Hirsch-Kreinsen et al. 2005). The affective aspect, which may have escaped their attention because of the nature of the organizations being studied, appears very strongly in this study. These aspects together build the organization's configurational capabilities.