Rural Poverty Alleviation in Indonesia : Programs and the Implementation Gap

Abstract

Despite the impressive achievement in reducing the number of poor people during the New Order administration, the 1997/1998 monetary crisis had significantly increased the number of poor people in Indonesia. Although the government has launched many poverty alleviation programs, the decrease in the number of poor people is getting slower after the crisis. This article tries to analyze several prominent poverty alleviation programs implemented in Indonesia, which are Backward Village Program (IDT), Social Safety Net (SSN), Kecamatan Development Program (KDP) and Unconditional Cash Transfer (UCT), to understand why they are still not able to alleviate poverty effectively. Review on the related studies shows that the implementation gap was the main reasons why those programs could not achieve the expected goals. This article identifies that the implementation of poverty alleviation programs in Indonesia suffered from three main problems, which are incapable bureaucrats in delivering the programs, local elite capture and weak targeting mechanism.