ABSTRACT
Two years after the massive earthquake centred south of Yogyakarta in central
Java, Indonesia, I visited a series of activists, educators, and governmental
officials to ask about the appearance of early childhood care and development
programs and their rapid proliferation in the area.1 In the Yogya office of PLAN,
the international child saving organization, my research colleague Nita Kariani
Purwanti and I talked to energetic workers who had been sent from Jakarta to
help in the reconstruction efforts. Here for the first time I heard the argument
that the earthquake had made it possible for these early childhood programs to
emerge. It was a dramatic statement, but then it had been a dramatic time for
Indonesia. The massive earthquake had followed a year and half after the
tsunami that had wreaked havoc in Sumatra and Aceh. In fact, a series of natural disasters in Indonesia in the early twenty-first
century seemed to manifest realignments in the political landscape as Suharto,
authoritarian ruler for 32 years, was forced from office in the wake of the 1997
Two years after the massive earthquake centred south of Yogyakarta in central
Java, Indo esia, visited a series of activists, educators, and governmental
officials to ask about the appearance of early childhood care and development
programs and their rapid proliferation in the area.1 In the Yogya office of PLAN,
the international child saving organization, my research colleague Nita Kariani
Purwanti and I talked to energetic workers who had been sent from Jakarta to
help in the reconstruction efforts. Here for the first time I heard the argument
that the earthquake had made it possible for these early childhood programs to
emerge. It was a dramatic statement, but then it had been a dramatic time for
Indonesia. The massive earthquake had followed a year and half after the
tsunami that had wreaked havoc in Sumatra and Aceh. In fact, a series of natural disasters in Indonesia in the early twenty-first
century seemed to manifest realignments in the political landscape as Suharto,
authoritarian ruler for 32 years, was forced from office in the wake of the 1997
GENDER JUSTICE AND DEVELOPMENT: LOCAL AND GLOBAL
Asian financial crisis, and democratization in its global, neoliberal form arrived in
Indonesia. The development efforts of Suharto’s New Order regime had been
textbook modernization in the authoritarian mode*and strikingly successful. Democratization in the era of Reformasi at the turn of the century reformed
development but in ways that showed significant continuity with New Order
forms. The new early childhood care, education, and development (ECCD)
programs that proliferated in the aftermath of the earthquake are an example of
this. Known locally as PAUD programs for Pendidikan Anak Usia Dini, or Early
Childhood Education, these programs represented the World Bank-inspired
intensification of attention to child development during the golden age (zaman
emas) from 0 to 8 (Departemen Pendidikan Nasional/Department of National
Education 2002, 2006). In the following, I consider how these new early childhood programs suggest
unexpected linkages between democratization, empowerment, and neoliberal
policy regimes in Indonesia. Approaches to empowerment and the idea of putting
power into the hands of locals share an interesting and dynamic overlap with
economic restructuring aimed at relieving the state of any role in community
development and welfare through an emphasis on self-reliance (Harvey 2005;
Sharma 2006; Swyngedouw 2005). Despite the shift to grassroots organizing and
to empowerment as a goal of development projects more generally, in Indonesia
there is tremendous continuity in the use of women’s work to provide social
welfare at the community level. At the centre of this consideration of
empowerment is its relationship to women’s work and the new desire to
empower the child. What does it mean to empower children at the cost of
exploiting women’s labour?
