Building Safe Spaces to Support Young Women's Participation in Local Governance in Indonesia

"This report illustrates that systematic barriers prevent them [young women] from taking advantage of opportunities to participate in community decision-making structures, and reflects on how one NGO is working to overcome these barriers and ensure the voices of these marginalised citizens can be heard in local governance."

This practitioner research, carried out by FAMM Indonesia, brings the voices of young women - a group that the women's empowerment organisation sees as consistently excluded from decision-making spaces about the allocation of local government resources - into the conversation about social accountability. Supported by a research and learning grant from Making All Voices Count (MAVC)/Institute of Development Studies (IDS), the practice paper reports and reflects on action research during which young women across Indonesia engaged in understanding and challenging their exclusion from local spaces through building critical consciousness, organisational capacity, and social relations of solidarity. It offers insights on the personal and political changes that necessarily precede the expanded citizen engagement that is often assumed to underpin accountability initiatives.

FAMM's conviction is that "governance cannot be responsive and accountable if citizens, including young women, cannot participate." However, data shared in the paper show that across Indonesia, women's participation in the politics and justice sectors is very low. For example, data from the Central Bureau of Statistics (BPS, 2015) show that, of 100 village heads, only 6% were women. Further, few women work in the public sphere, with most engaged in unpaid domestic work. There are also high levels of child marriage (UNICEF, 2016) - between 15-32% in the 8 provinces where the FAMM Indonesia research was carried out - and girls stay in formal education for much less time than boys and men. All these factors reinforce young women's exclusion from decision-making forums at village level, which in turn reinforces their exclusion in other areas of life such as education and employment. Many young women have internalised their marginalisation and lack the confidence to participate in community forums.

FAMM Indonesia is a youth-led grassroots organisation that is associated with the international women-led human rights network Just Associates Indonesia (JASS). To ensure that young women have a stronger voice and to increase their participation in public decision-making, FAMM - whose members are found in 30 provinces - brings together grassroots women's groups from across Indonesia. They are young activists and organisers, who include young indigenous rural women and Muslim women, as well as lesbian, bisexual, transsexual and intersex women. Through FAMM Indonesia, members have the opportunity to participate in training and workshops, strengthening their advocacy and organising skills, and applying a gender perspective to their workFAMM Indonesia organises young women activists through feminist popular education, which is an approach to learning articulated by Brazilian educator Paolo Freire (1970), in which participants collectively and critically examine their everyday experiences. Building on Freire's ideas, feminist popular educators identify multiple, intersecting markers of oppression, including gender, class, sexuality, age, ability, nationality, location, and ethnicity. Intersectionality describes how these social identities intersect and overlap with related systems of oppression, domination, or discrimination. With these constructs/tools in mind, FAMM Indonesia establishes cross-movement and multi-generational dialogue to strengthen young women's leadership.

FAMM Indonesia's research builds on FAMM's own practice, but also on several broad propositions based on conclusions from existing research on women's participation in Indonesian governance, as follows:

• "Participation is part of good governance practice, and is not only about presence and consultation, but also about the rights of citizens in expressing the aspirations, ideas, needs and interests of their community in order to be adopted into policy.
• Village planning and development meetings need to be a space for marginalised people to enter the arena of development planning.
• Marginalised groups need to experience capacity-building in order to influence and get involved in determining policy through active community forums.
• Young citizens need to have awareness and understanding that they are a part of a community with the power to engage in the political process and decision-making together with government."

FAMM's research was conducted using a participatory action research approach that combined surveys, in-depth interviews, and focus group discussions. A key feature of participatory action research is that it involves community members as researchers, who form part of the team carrying out a collective enquiry. The process of studying, sharing control of data collection and analysis, and critically reflecting makes the issues under discussion become a common concern, which forms the basis for action. Developed by JASS and discussed in detail in the paper, the workshop model starts with a focus on developing power within the self, followed by building power with other people with a shared vision, and then transforming this to build a collective agenda, developing power to change established ways of thinking.

In short (see the full paper for details), the research found that young women's participation in local decision-making is often tokenistic because of a number of barriers they face, either in accessing decision-making spaces or in making their voices heard. The research team used power analysis to enable young women to understand the ways in which people who are more powerful can use their power to obstruct the participation of young women in forums. Visible barriers include, for example: meeting times that suit men's schedules and needs; women not being invited to meetings; stigmatising of women who do participate in public forums. Invisible barriers are social beliefs and norms that limit women to acting within the boundaries of their reproductive function within the family - e.g., women's participation in meetings limited to arranging logistics rather than contributing to decision-making. FAMM Indonesia found that understanding power relations and dynamics in rural areas is important in analysing how individuals and groups influence decision-making forums. Unequal power is more pronounced between the generations, sexes, and social groups in rural than in urban areas. In their research training workshop and focus group discussions, the young women conducted a mapping of the power holders, which helped them to decide which people they would collaborate with, in what capacity, in which arena, and how to share responsibilities. They also used the JASS movement-building model described in the paper to help them understand how power can be transformed for good.

In short, FAMM Indonesia's movement-building initiative (MBI) holds workshops for young women in urban and rural areas to strengthen their leadership capacity, encourage critical awareness, and develop their capacity to be community organisers. A core factor at the heart of the workshops is building awareness of power. Young women also learn to identify and appreciate the intersectional identity of other participants. All the modules in the MBI workshop (detailed in the paper) are interrelated and may be modified for different needs, whether for young women or government-level participants. By organising these workshops, FAMM Indonesia wants to show that intersectionality is not a barrier to building a strong women's movement, but, rather (in the words of the organisation's Niken Lestari), the "fabric to build a movement and opportunity to reflect on shared goals".

For instance, when young women engage socially to challenge several intersecting types of power, this can generate criticism and even backlash against them. To counter this - and the associated conflict in families and organisations - FAMM has developed a range of online and offline Safe Space options for women activists to "accompany" their members during hard times. The Safe Space may be a face-to-face meeting, a phone call, an email, or an online chatroom. A "host" listens to the member with no judgement and no conclusion; the Safe Space does not try to offer solutions. Instead, it offers a place for members to reflect on their own challenges in order to shift their perception of their situation. Futhermore, FAMM Indonesia publishes books, mostly in popular narrative form, about young women's experiences in understanding leadership and organising communities. These contrast with information about rural governance and related issues available on websites, which is mostly about government regulations, and written in formal language. FAMM Indonesia facilitates the production of creative content in popular language based on this knowledge - for example, featuring audio, visuals, and multimedia - which can be used in community organising. Content is also developed for media campaigns for collective action. Young women themselves are involved in producing this knowledge and soliciting feedback from the audiences they are hoping to reach. "FAMM Indonesia has learned that the process of producing popular knowledge strengthens self-esteem and young women's abilities. When their stories are distributed in public spaces, the young women grow in confidence, knowing that they are being heard."

Following a presentation of the research, its findings, and how they fit with FAMM's approach to movement-building, Niken Lestari and Francesca Feruglio, who managed FAMM Indonesia's practitioner research grant, discuss the kind of capacity-building needed to enable young women to overcome barriers to their engagement in local governance spaces, and thus fulfil their own declared potential to contribute much more to the development of their communities. Sample insights from Niken: "We realised that there was a lot of hidden politics in village governance and the invited spaces are only consultative, but have no decision-making power. So our position is now different. Our strategy is to strengthen informal relations and build informal spaces where decisions are actually taken....Our experience has underscored the need for young women both as citizens and future government officials to have access to capacity-building on leadership and organising." Elaborating on that latter point, in the words of the paper's authors: "Capacity-building for young women should be accompanied by the development of their economic autonomy and formal education. The opportunity to develop their economic skills is a motivating factor to get more involved in leadership capacity-building."