Indonesian Social Policy Development in a Context of Global Social Governance

This paper presents the roles and positions of global social policy actors in Indonesia. More concretely, it analyses ideas of international organizations about the development of social policy in the emerging economy of Indonesia. Many studies link the development of social security primarily to economic development. For example, Suryahadi et al. assume that Indonesian social security development “is very much related to and driven by the development of the Indonesian economy in general”.

In order to better understand the global context within which such development have occurred, this paper asks the following key questions: Which external policy actors have engaged in social policy issues in Indonesia? What were their perspectives, ideas, preferences or requests? And, how has their role changed as the country has developed?

At the time of their contribution, Alexandra Kaasch was Junior Professor in Transnational Social Policy at the University of Bielefeld (Germany), Mulyadi Sumarto was a faculty member at the Department of Social Development and Welfare, Gadjah Mada University (Indonesia), and Brooke Wilmsen was Australian Research Council DECRA Fellow at La Trobe University (Australia).