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Webs of Interdependence and Solidarity: Growing marginalised women’s influence and leadership in rural Indonesian villages

Rachael Diprose, Bronwyn Anne Beech Jones and Ken M.P. Setiawan

Scholarship on Indonesian politics has primarily focused on efforts to increase Indonesian women’s participation in electoral politics and formal leadership structures, and the networks and resources required to generate electoral success, highlighting how women candidates have negotiated multiple barriers (Aspinall et al. 2021; Bayo 2021; Prihatini 2019a, 2019b). However, a focus on women’s representation in electoral politics is but one dimension of understanding women’s political participation and influence in public life. Understanding how women challenge gendered institutional barriers and norms to widen their voice and leadership in rural Indonesia is especially important given that major studies on village governance under Indonesia’s Village Law (2014) have described varied, but generally low levels of women’s participation in community decision-making (for example, Syukri et al. 2017; Dharmawan et al. 2018), and that women feel afraid to contributing to planning forums (Akbar et al. 2020), indicating that barriers to women’s participation remain difficult to circumvent.

In this chapter, we widen and enrich our understanding of women’s local political participation by focusing on everyday village settings and how especially marginalised women navigate institutional and social barriers and opportunities for women’s leadership, through women’s groups. Village settings comprise complex and intimate social structures on which women depend and in which they are embedded but are often at odds to challenge, especially as countering structures of authority creates risks to women’s reputations, safety and access to future support. We highlight how women’s efforts to exercise influence in such settings take on more informal, amorphous forms that are less confrontational to village structures of power and authority, often taking place through women’s groups and networks and in alternative ‘spaces’ for influencing powerholders. These groups foster solidarity among women from a range of backgrounds and can draw from supportive coalitions that include authoritative actors and men—a process we conceptualise as women’s networked collective action.

We argue such strategies and spaces are essential to creating change and increasing women’s political participation and influence at the local level. Although such strategies and actions may be accompanied by, or contribute to, other more institutionalised forms of collective action (such as electoral politics), we emphasise that the more informal strategies constitute the kernels from which women’s solidarity and mutual support grow and are needed to overcome social and institutional barriers to gender equality.

Such strategies and spaces of influence, we also argue, are augmented by the support of supra-local women’s civil society organisations (CSOs)—specifically those that focus on transformative change in gendered power structures. These CSOs can support poor women to grow their critical gender consciousness, skills and networks. They can also act as brokers, connecting marginalised women to power structures and helping facilitate the creation of new spaces of influence, both beyond and connected to those sanctioned by the state. In so doing, CSOs have an important role in supporting the formation of what we conceptualise as webs of interdependence: platforms and mechanisms for women, especially from marginalised groups, to exert influence in spaces of power and invite policymakers into newly created spaces.

To illustrate these arguments, we draw our empirical base from a large collaborative research project in Indonesia that explored women’s collective action and empowerment and the role of women’s CSOs in this process (Diprose et al. 2020). We examine women’s influence in two villages in East Java Province in Gresik District, only one of which one had the strong presence of a women’s CSO, which helped establish and then supported a new women’s group. A comparison of these sites helps us to draw out the role for women’s groups and CSO influence in women’s local political participation.¹ Our interdisciplinary team involved researchers from a variety of backgrounds, predominantly Indonesian, but also Dutch and Australian, and we used a feminist research approach involving qualitative mixed methods (long village stays, observation, semi-structured interviews and focus group discussions) that were designed to help vulnerable women feel safe and comfortable in sharing their stories and which sought to foreground the voices of women and represent and learn from women’s lived experiences.² Women’s CSOs were pivotal in the collaborative research design and analysis.

We first outline our conceptualisation of women’s empowerment and collective action and provide a brief background on women’s political participation in Indonesia. We then discuss various gendered social norms and attitudes towards women that constitute significant barriers for rural women to exercise their voice safely. These women are among the most marginalised and experience the most stigma in Indonesian villages. We illustrate these barriers through the experience of Lastri,³ one of our research participants in Gresik District. Through the experiences of Lastri and other women in Gresik, the chapter then explores the practices and strategies through which women foster the solidarity, networks, resources, capacities, skills and knowledge necessary to counter challenges to shaping structures of power and decision-making in rural areas. In so doing, women exercise influence in different ‘invited’ and ‘created’ spaces and create positive change—transforming women’s sense of self, renegotiating care work, claiming rights and influencing decision-making processes. Overall, we suggest that the informal spaces and strategies women use have transformational potential to challenge inequitable power relations.

Conceptualising empowerment and women’s collective action

Examining the influence of poor women in villages demands attention to how multiple forms of marginalisation compound. The intersectional approach used in this research elucidates how multiple inequalities interact with one another and compound structural barriers for marginalised groups; identity categories of gender, class and location are not ‘distinct but always permeated by other categories, fluid and changing’ (Cho et al. 2013: 795). Intersectionality aligns with conceptualisations of women’s empowerment as relational and multidimensional processes (Kabeer 2011) that aim to transform unjust gendered power relations, especially by building ‘critical consciousness’ of injustice and inequality among women (Cornwall 2016: 344; Batliwala 2007; Kabeer 1994). Different operations of power ‘within’, ‘to’, ‘over’ and ‘with’ are important in processes of growing women’s individual agency and collective power and influence (Rowlands 1997; Kabeer 1994). Power ‘within’ is especially connected to developing a critical consciousness of unequal and unjust structures within women’s everyday lives (Dulhunty 2021; Kabeer 1994; Cornwall 2016).

In supporting women to exercise agency,⁴ intermediaries (for example, community associations, well-placed individuals, entrepreneurs) often link ‘formal’ (such as state actors and influential social leaders) and ‘informal’ actors and spaces by facilitating services for citizens and in filling gaps in state service provision (Davis 2017). In line with one of the co-authors of this chapter (Diprose 2023), we argue such intermediaries can be conceptualised as brokers—‘network specialists’ who understand and connect the perspectives of different actors (Bierschenk et al. 2002), navigate and connect knowledge systems and bridge gaps in social structures through networks across scales (Lindquist 2015; James 2011). CSOs can play multiple brokerage roles, opening spaces and strategies for women in villages, notably through supporting the creation of new women’s groups.

Individual and collective transformation can occur through participation in women’s groups built on a foundation of mutual trust, which in turn can become the basis for collective action (McGee 2016). Through groups, women can grow their confidence and self-belief (power ‘within’) and strengthen solidarity (‘power with’), as well as engage in collective action (Dulhunty 2021: 734). As we will explore, these groups can function as alternative spaces where women—individually and together—increase their awareness and expand their senses of self, while also facilitating women to strategically move between spaces and apply strategies to effect change or disrupt local power structures. The brokerage role of CSOs, as Diprose (2023: 401) has conceptualised, is thus to ‘traverse scales and perform brokerage functions in helping rural women from marginal groups to connect to and influence powerholders in Indonesia’. In this chapter, we examine one such initiative, the Women’s Schools, where women have grown their power and influence both among themselves and with/over others.

Meanwhile, collective action scholarship has broadly distinguished between more formal forms driven through, or by, an organisation or government structure (Evans and Nambiar 2013), while informal collective action takes place within more ‘amorphous social networks’ and offers greater flexibility for members to participate and mould actions to their changing needs (Pandolfelli et al. 2008: 3), with women more likely to engage in informal collective action in low-income settings (for example, Agarwal 2000). Even so, the relationship between formality and informality is interconnected, uneven and messy (Davis 2017). Davis (2017: 316) argues that even when ‘more universal norms, stable structures, and rationalised processes’ become institutionalised, informal livelihoods, work, norms and practices (such as citizen activism, neighbourhood civil society and social norms) persist. As such, the binary between formal and informal groups and forms of collective action is in practice quite fluid.

Important in understanding the forms and processes of growing women’s power is identifying the spaces available, or that can be constructed, for women to exercise influence over powerholders, and how women, particularly from marginalised groups, might connect to these spaces. Miraftab (2004: 3) conceptualises spaces and strategies of action together, arguing that grassroots groups and movements use a variety of spaces and forms depending on the context in which they act and what they deem as strategic to their aims.⁵ Miraftab (2004: 1) also distinguishes between ‘invited spaces’—where grassroots actors legitimised by donors (for example, funding agencies) or the state focus on coping mechanisms and propositions to support survival—and ‘invented spaces’ that are ‘claimed by their collective action’ and directly demand structural change. Groups occupy and use both sets of tools and spaces agilely and strategically, with invented spaces sometimes opening ‘possibilities of citizen participation in invited spaces’ (Miraftab 2020: 439).⁶ Forming alternative invented spaces and practices in conjunction with invited spaces shows how women and CSOs shift between invited and invented spaces to ‘assert their presence within spaces of invitation’ (McEwan 2005: 977–78). This, we argue, occurs through the webs of interdependence forged via membership of groups and through networks with other women and coalitions of supporting men.

By forming new women’s groups, supporting CSOs can strengthen women’s organising structures and sources of knowledge/resources, and help broker networks with other women and authoritative actors to build supporting webs of interdependence and coalitions of influence. In our empirical analysis, we consider the more everyday micro-strategies that women use in contemporary Indonesia to garner support and build a critical mass to influence structures of power across a spectrum of spaces, and the roles CSOs play in growing these webs of interdependence. This is especially important for understanding how women seek to counter the historical influence of the state in structuring the nature and form of women’s political participation.

Women’s historical political participation in Indonesia

State gender ideologies have strongly influenced women’s political participation in Indonesia at both national and grassroots levels, meaning that while the state has encouraged women’s participation, the goals of state-sanctioned women’s organisations often align with government priorities (Blackburn 2004; Davies 2005). The influence of state gender ideologies on women’s political participation was particularly pronounced during the authoritarian New Order regime led by president Suharto (1966–98), during which all leftist organisations were banned and their members imprisoned or killed,⁷ which, alongside subsequent systematic ‘demonisation’ (Pohlman 2017), had a particularly detrimental effect on women’s political activism. As a result, women’s groups virtually disappeared from the grassroots level, except for religious groups and state-endorsed organisations such as the Pembinaan Kesejahteraan Keluarga (PKK, Family Welfare Guidance organisation).⁸

Instead, women’s roles were constrained to that of wives, mothers and household managers, and women’s political participation was limited to involvement in ‘wives’ organisations such as Dharma Wanita under the New Order’s patriarchal gender policy conceptualised as ‘state ibuism [‘motherism’]’ (Suryakusuma 1987).⁹ While these organisations offered some women certain forms of representation and voice, everyday women’s influence over policies related to their lives and wellbeing was constrained (Diprose et al. 2020). State gender ideology, however, did not completely halt the development of women’s organisations; religious organisations continued their social work by avoiding an overtly political stance (Blackburn 2004). New women’s organisations and networks also emerged as the result of economic growth and increased education levels among women. Many of these new organisations were strongly influenced by feminist ideas and the global human rights movement and were critical of the state and women’s subordination (Davies 2005).

The resignation of Suharto in 1998 heralded a shift to democratisation and a change in gender politics. Women’s organisations rapidly grew—importantly, in areas where few had existed before (Blackburn 2004). State corporatist organisations, such as Dharma Wanita and the PKK, increased their focus on women’s participation in politics and changed their structures, allowing for more democratic participation (Diprose et al. 2020). Greater state concern for gender issues was expressed through the establishment of new state bodies to promote women’s rights, such as the National Commission on the Elimination of Violence against Women (Komnas Perempuan) in 1998, and legislative and policy change (Setiawan and Tomsa 2022). The introduction of a gender quota for legislative elections has increased the number of female candidates and seats won by women (Prihatini 2020).

Despite these changes, gender norms that emphasise traditional roles for women, especially as wives and mothers, remain deeply entrenched in politics and society. Indonesia’s conservative religious turn has also constrained efforts to push for institutional and structural changes that benefit women (Setiawan and Tomsa 2022). This then raises the question of how women’s organisations navigate entrenched norms, as well as more recent challenges, that impact women’s political participation, especially beyond Indonesia’s urban centres.

Contexts and methods

To explore these dynamics, we investigate women’s voice and influence in two villages, one in each of two subdistricts in Gresik District: Wringinanom and Bungah. Both villages have high levels of poverty, have economies dominated by local markets, agriculture and fishing, and are geographically isolated, with limited access routes to the district capital and few public transport options. These conditions meant that before our study, village governments tended to prioritise funding for infrastructure development, especially paving roads.¹⁰

There were also three types of existing women’s groups in both sites: integrated health posts (posyandu), the PKK and the religious women’s organisation Fatayat (the women’s affiliate of Indonesia’s mass Islamic organisation, Nahdlatul Ulama). The PKK and Fatayat each had few members (often the same people) and none from marginalised groups.

Women occupied few leadership positions in either village over time and, when they did, they were positions of weak influence. In the Wringinanom village at the time of the research, only one woman held a role (of limited power) in the village administration (2019–25). In the Bungah site, two women held roles in the village government and one as a representative on the Village Consultative Council (Badan Permusyawaratan Desa, BPD), but her appointment resulted from a subdistrict directive in 2018 to include a female representative. All three were drawn from a small pool of elite PKK members.¹¹

However, they differed significantly in one aspect: in the Wringinanom village, the CSO Women’s Groups and Sources of Life (Kelompok Perempuan dan Sumber-Sumber Kehidupan, KPS2K), a local partner of the national organisation KAPAL Perempuan (Institute for Women’s Alternative Education), established a women’s group known as an informal Women’s School (Prabaningrum and Abheseka 2020). By contrast, the Bungah village at the time of the research did not have a CSO-supported program or women’s group and is thus used in our study as a counterfactual (or control) to the CSO intervention in Wringinanom (see Figure 13.1).

Figure 13.1 illustrates how we explore multiple forms of women’s influence on development in these two villages. We chart the shape and extent of influence of women’s individual leadership and existing women’s groups, and then turn to more closely examine this CSO-facilitated new women’s group. The figure illustrates key aspects of subsequent empirical analysis—the ways poor women grew their skills, knowledge and networks through new groups and by being connected to other women and powerholders outside their village. We argue that by growing these webs of interdependence, CSO-supported pathways of change, shown in Figure 13.1, helped spur transformative changes to the village and district context of women’s political participation and influence on development.

Figure 13.1: Conceptualising pathways of change and webs of interdependence

Gendered social norms, stigma and risks for women’s participation

The two research villages are also characterised by strong patriarchal norms that create risks for women who challenge them. The embeddedness of such norms means that women’s participation in group activities outside the household, beyond health clinics and prayer groups, often challenges deeply entrenched ideas about women’s roles and obligations as daughters, wives and mothers. This illustrates the salience of state gender ideology discussed earlier in this chapter and shows how, in practice, women are primarily positioned within the domestic sphere, excluding them from more public-facing roles and decision-making.

One example of the entrenchment of patriarchal norms is the high prevalence of child marriage in both subdistricts.¹² Wringinanom subdistrict recorded 1,329 cases of child marriage in 2016 and 821 cases in 2017 (Radar Surabaya 2018). CSO staff noted that village government officials emphasise that marriage is preferable to pregnancy out of wedlock and prioritise respecting the wishes of parents.¹³ One woman in Wringinanom, Nining, recalled:

I was married at 13 and had children by 15. I had an arranged marriage. I stayed at the Islamic boarding school [pesantren] for four days, then I was taken and told that I was getting married. It was after I graduated from primary school, I was taken home right away and proposed to [for marriage]. I didn’t know what my husband’s face even looked like. After four days I was just taken … That’s what the arranged marriage was like.

In both villages, even in private conversation, poor women very rarely were able to voice lived experiences of culturally taboo issues such as child marriage, frustrations with care work, illnesses (especially those related to reproductive health) and domestic violence, as this would contravene social norms that domestic and marital matters should not be openly talked about. As such, women had limited capacity to grow their political influence on issues important to their needs. As a result of entrenched patriarchal norms, in both villages, there was also a strong negative stigma associated with women venturing outside the home for something other than socially sanctioned activities related to the running of the household, income generation (if approved by their husbands) or religious commitments.

We see the multiple barriers to women’s participation in Lastri’s story. While she later became the Gresik district coordinator of the Women’s School introduced by KPS2K, Lastri encountered many challenges at the outset. First, Lastri’s parents and husband did not give her permission to participate in the Women’s School, arguing this would not generate income for the family. To prevent her participation, Lastri’s husband gave her an increased load of household chores. This left Lastri feeling conflicted as she did not want to make a decision that was not supported by her family but did want to improve her knowledge and skills.

Second, Lastri lacked the confidence to participate in the Women’s School. Coming from a poor family, she had received little formal education and had no experience in participating in village meetings. Third, resistance to women taking on leadership roles is reflected in the social stigma they encountered in even engaging with the Women’s School group in Wringinanom. Lastri and others were accused of being ‘improper’ when they engaged with Women’s School activities and were labelled as ‘that “type” of woman’ or what might be loosely translated as ‘women of ill repute’ (perempuan nggak bener) by members of the community, including other women.

These reactions also reflect deeply entrenched social attitudes towards women’s political participation, as discussed earlier in this chapter. Often men spread rumours about group activities to tarnish the reputation of certain women’s groups and the members involved, and to discourage other women from joining. Lasinem, a friend of Lastri and fellow member of the Women’s School, recalled that her friend had been advised by her husband to not join the Women’s School as he said it had taught Lasinem to ‘challenge her husband’. After joining the Women’s School group, Lastri continued to face negative reactions from villagers about her participation:

Previously, I was tainted with that brush. If we went to the [activities held by the] Women’s School outside the village, like in a hotel, we were deemed to be ‘perempuan nggak bener’. People labelled us like that so as to discourage [women from] attending the school.

Women such as Lastri particularly rely on their social networks and the support structures provided by communities to help them respond to the many challenges of poverty. Challenging norms risks being alienated from these support structures.

In both villages in Gresik, women also come up against gender norms that they are unsuitable for public-facing leadership roles. In Wringinanom, Aulia was the only woman among the 16 village government officials at the time of the research. She was initially elected hamlet head and later moved by the village head to a position he considered more suitable for a woman, the head of administrative and general affairs for the village government. Her male replacement explained that ‘it was intended so [I could] be with the community, as “socialising is easier as a man than a woman”’.¹⁴

Equally, in the Bungah control village, whenever villagers were asked whether there were any female leaders or influential women in the village, as well as the head of the PKK, they also consistently referred only to Mafiroh, the first woman neighbourhood head, appointed in 1999, and one of only a handful in the area to have ever held such a leadership role; she operated with little support and constantly had to demonstrate her leadership worth. Now aged in her fifties, Mafiroh recounted how towards the end of the New Order era, she served in the village civil defence (Hansip) group. Only through demonstrating her skills in this group was she able to gain the neighbourhood head role.¹⁵ Villagers reflected on how Mafiroh had challenged gendered preconceptions and proved her leadership skills, in doing so, somewhat reshaping how women’s capacity for leadership was considered by others, with one man stating: ‘We only knew women could become leaders because Ibu Mafiroh became the neighbourhood head. I now know that, and in fact, they are more agile and work faster than the male neighbourhood heads do.’

Mafiroh challenged widespread gender norms that suggest women do not have the capacity to be leaders. However, Mafiroh’s story also shows the limited transformational capacity of individuals challenging gendered power structures alone: few women have held any leadership roles in Bungah since and have little support to do so. We later return to consider the participatory potential of ‘invented’ spaces and everyday strategies of solidarity building for poor women who are frequently excluded from state-sanctioned leadership roles.

Limited opportunities for organising

From the above discussion, it is clear that few organising opportunities and widespread gender norms limit women’s participation in public life and capacity for political leadership compared with men. The few forms of women’s organisations in these villages (the PKK, Fatayat and posyandu, each of which is state-sanctioned) are traditional, state-corporatist women’s groups that constitute state-sanctioned ‘invited spaces’.

Women from poorer families in both villages, such as Lastri, are less likely to be members of state-corporatist organisations, which are dominated by the wives of government officials—a legacy of compulsory membership under the New Order (Jakimow 2020). In Gresik, PKK leaders—at the village, subdistrict and district levels—are middle to upper class, with a district government official explaining that ‘it is not possible that they [a PKK leader] would be from the middle to lower class’. Poor women in both villages expressed feeling excluded from the PKK, despite their interest in joining village-level organisations, or did not know about programs run by the PKK.

A focus group interview of five women farmers in Wringinanom captures how the selection of leaders, or cadres, limits who can join the PKK in their village:

Interviewer: Why aren’t you in PKK?

Ratih: Because we aren’t invited. You have to be selected. Per neighbourhood unit here, there can be one or two [selected].

Interviewer: Who is selected usually?¹⁶

Susi: The cadres, PKK cadres.

Similarly, in the Bungah control village, the PKK has comprised a small group of elite women, who tend to conform to the gender norms of women as wives and mothers. Leaders of the PKK were also prominent members of Fatayat’s Qur’an recitation and prayer group. To even access the conditional cash transfer for children’s education Program Keluarga Harapan (‘Family Hope Program’) women had to join the PKK. The village head framed this policy in punitive terms: ‘[I]t’s like being warned, warned in the sense that if you do not go to PKK, it [cash transfers] will not be given.’ While the policy boosted the on-paper PKK membership to about 200–250 women, it meant group participation took a form sanctioned by the state and was only to access funds (few participated in activities); they did not gain a transformative sense of self or skills, knowledge or support from the group.

‘How to become a leader inside myself’: The Women’s School in Wringinanom

Given these limited opportunities for women to organise and act collectively, the local CSO, KPS2K, in coordination with its national partner, KAPAL Perempuan, began work in Gresik District via an agreement with the district government in 2014. This enabled the CSOs to establish Women’s School groups in villages, ensuring the involvement of the poorest village women to address their self-identified complex needs and grow their skills and opportunities. The Bungah village government rejected the creation of a Women’s School there, as the village head was resistant to the work of CSOs, stating that ‘empowerment programs create social conflict’.

To establish the Women’s School in Wringinanom, access was granted but the village government was not strongly supportive. In initial discussions with KPS2K about potential members, the village government directed staff to the elite-dominated PKK for members. However, to instead connect with poor women, KPS2K went door-to-door, collecting data on poverty levels and inviting 80 women to attend a preliminary meeting at the village hall.¹⁷

Lastri recalled how the invitation to join the first Women’s School gathering left her feeling confused: it was not a space with which she was familiar. Many women felt nervous about attending the meeting as it was held at the village hall; such spaces are normally for state-sanctioned activities from which women had usually been excluded. About 30 per cent of the women invited to participate in Women’s School activities did not attend because their husbands did not give permission to do so. Despite these fears and barriers, other women forged new networks by participating in Women’s School activities, growing their own power and that of the group, and later convincing friends to participate in activities.

Growing skills, capacity, knowledge and confidence together

At Women’s School meetings, KPS2K and KAPAL Perempuan provided training to members in public speaking, writing, advocacy, parenting, agricultural skills and the culturally sensitive issue of reproductive health. Through these training sessions, women built their confidence in speaking and deepened their understanding of gender and rights. Lastri recalled after the first training session being aware that ‘women have the right to make decisions about what is right and wrong, like in the family environment. We have social protection, rights to be fought for.’

Deepening an understanding of gender roles as constructed, rather than natural, and how these norms shape women’s everyday lives, had a profound impact on women’s sense of self. One Women’s School leader described how she returned home from training ‘in a daze’ as what she had learned contradicted what she had been taught since she was a child—‘that you can’t question your husband, you have to be obedient, your husband is like a god’. Women’s School members have also built networks of trust and confidence by meeting regularly in more everyday, social forms at a group leader’s house to share stories and seek advice, especially about how to handle problems they are facing at home and with their families.¹⁸ Here, we see how the informal ways in which women gather and organise are important for growing their power ‘within’ and together as sources of mutual support: their webs of interdependence.

The self-confidence, gender awareness and capacities that women fostered together in their Women’s School group led many to apply their new understandings and skills in their own lives and share their knowledge with neighbours. Interviewees described using new strategies of negotiation in their families, especially in expressing their opinions as well as negotiating household labour and mobility outside the home. Indah explained how after attending Women’s School sessions, ‘we realised what a woman’s needs are and that there are ways to be able to discuss [these needs] with children and families. In the past I could not leave my child at home, but now I can negotiate with my husband to go out.’

By growing individual awareness of their rights through groups, women also supported one another to access services, particularly reproductive health care—again, growing women’s power and the kernels of solidarity on which to build other forms of organising and influence.

Mutual support and accessing health services

The Women’s School group’s focus on reproductive health was shaped by Lastri’s experience. Through participating in the Women’s School, Lastri understood her rights to health care. After many years of not seeking medical treatment for symptoms, she was encouraged and supported by her friends in the Women’s School to gain the relevant healthcare card and seek a free health check—despite her husband remaining unconvinced of their importance—at a hospital that partnered with the Women’s School, at which she was diagnosed with cervical cancer.

Lastri’s friend Endang captured the interconnectedness of these processes of building solidarity with other women (power with) and understanding and self-belief (power within) to engage in collective action for self-identified needs:

I am ‘aware’ because I have learned at the Women’s School that I also have rights. If I am not promptly referred to the hospital, I am the one who will be unwell. So, I have a right to make a decision that can make myself healthy. That’s what I learned at the Women’s School. Not how to become a public leader, but how to become a leader inside myself. To make decisions like those.

After Lastri’s diagnosis, Women’s School members discussed commonly disregarded symptoms of reproductive system diseases. Then, building on Lastri’s experience, the Women’s School group, together with hospital and district government networks described below, successfully implemented free annual early detection tests in 2015–17.

This example shows the messy, often-overlapping relationship of informal and formal spaces of organising. Lastri was able to form close friendships with other women who had a similarly marginalised position in the village by participating in the created space of the Women’s School. These relationships were strengthened outside more formal training sessions through informal discussions about the challenges they faced. Through this web of interdependence, Lastri and her friends raised awareness about women’s right to health care and challenged the boundaries of local political influence by drawing from her experience to spearhead the testing program partnership with the hospital and district government. The Women’s Schools provided women with the skills and voice to demand and negotiate for more power in both the private and the public spheres. Lastri and her friends have also worked hard with KPS2K and the National Insurance Scheme staff to help community members process the cards needed to access Indonesia Sehat (‘Healthy Indonesia’) programs and other forms of government social protection.

‘We worked together’: Women’s groups growing their power and influence in villages

Across the research sites in Gresik and beyond, there was significant diversity in the strategies used to participate in spaces of influence and to exercise voice and power on issues affecting women. Growing the confidence to approach authoritative actors was built on the skills, capacity, knowledge and mutual support developed through the new women’s groups. This then saw more women than those involved in elite-dominated state-corporatist organisations being increasingly able to create or access spaces in which power is exercised in rural Indonesia, including more institutionalised, state-sanctioned spaces. Some of these different strategies and spaces of influence are discussed below.

Women’s representation in structures of political power

In addition to women’s limited representation in village government and other leadership positions described above, in both villages, historically few women attended village decision-making meetings (musyawarah desa, or MusDes) and village development planning meetings (Musyawarah Perencanaan Pembangunan Desa, or Musrenbangdes), at least before the establishment of the Women’s School group in Wringinanom. In the Bungah control village, few villagers overall, and even fewer women, have been able to attend such ‘community’ meetings, as participation has been by invitation only and limited to the PKK chairperson and sometimes the secretary or treasurer. These women have rarely advocated for village development initiatives that are of priority to women, except for requesting a village fund allocation to fix the early childhood education building.¹⁹

In the Wringinanom site before the CSO interventions, there was low participation by women in village meetings as they were rarely invited and dared not just turn up. Attending and actively participating in MusDes was nerve-racking for many women interviewed, with Indah reflecting:

[S]eeing them [government officials] in uniforms made us scared. Not only that, we felt reluctant to approach the village government. Back then it was really difficult for us. Even entering the village office is a rare thing for us to do.

Women’s growing influence: Exerting pressure, using networks, negotiating spaces

Despite these barriers, through the Women’s School, more women in Wringinanom have sought to grow their power and influence in these more institutionalised, state-led decision-making forums. This has included collecting and using poverty data to lobby the government, which gave women a useful and non-confrontational way to directly engage with the village government on pressing issues in their villages. This, together with other forms of action, grew the legitimacy of the women’s groups in villages, which was crucial for them to develop their activities and to later have increased presence and voice in village forums. These processes were absent in the Bungah village.

The public speaking skills, gender awareness and confidence fostered via the Women’s School helped members and other women participate in public forums and in their advocacy (together with KPS2K staff) to be invited to MusDes and Musrenbangdes, in which women’s social and gender development priorities were generally overlooked. Building on their growing engagement with village leaders, they repeatedly contacted the village head via WhatsApp, called him for updates and found ways to meet him in everyday settings, also reaching out to other leaders to advocate on their behalf. Using such a relational approach through informal, everyday spaces and relationships, and leveraging new and expanding networks, is one strategy women used to access and influence more formal decision-making strategies and forums.

Such pressure eventually resulted in Women’s School representatives being invited to attend the Musrenbangdes. During the forum, Women’s School members for the first time were brave enough to read out the 10 key women’s needs they had identified before the Musrenbangdes. Partway through, they were instructed to stop by organisers, who considered their contribution to be too long and wasting time:

At the beginning I went with friends. We were not invited, but we always asked the village head, ‘When is the village Musrenbang? When is it? When is it?’ So, because we asked so often, after a while he was overwhelmed … The Women’s School also wanted to attend the Musrenbangdes … In the end, we were invited … There were 10 proposals, but the four suggested [by a Women’s School cadre] were rejected.

Women’s priorities were not initially accommodated by the village government and, as is common, infrastructure was prioritised. The Women’s School cadres thus shifted their lobbying attention to the district government for support, highlighting how Women’s School participation and influence in village development were aligned with the district’s gender-inclusion priorities. The women leveraged their growing networks with district leaders developed through participation in district events, workshops and planning efforts—often initially facilitated by KPS2K.

For example, KPS2K had informally engaged and gained the commitment of influential actors in the district government to be gender-responsive in their programs and allocate funds. In 2016, under a new district government, KPS2K personally engaged key young actors in the District Development Planning Agency (Bappeda) and the Family Planning, Women’s Empowerment and Child Protection Office. These actors were considered to be both open-minded and in strategic positions of influence, particularly given their authority in developing the District Medium-Term Development Plan and their capacity to navigate the bureaucracy and frame women’s empowerment in the appropriate language for the bureaucracy.

Slowly, Women’s School members from villages were drawn into planning and advocacy processes. This resulted in not only new networks for village women and access to powerholders, but also new government efforts to accommodate the interests of women and children by initiating a district Musrenbang especially for women. One of the Bappeda staff explained:

Recommendations related to women’s needs are heard [in the forum]. [For] the women’s Musrenbangdes, besides inviting women’s organisations, we also invite women at the grassroots level, because we want to have a clear picture of what their basic needs are. Their needs are not usually echoed in the media, nor heard in [conventional] forums, so women are more reluctant to have a voice. When they are among fellow women, we can know, ‘Oh, what women need is this, or that’, so we can focus more on what they actually need.

Later, when their participation and funding were blocked by the village, Women’s School lobbying (with KSP2K) to the district government through their networks saw the village government acquiesce to district pressure. Indah explains:

The district head supported us … We had proven the function of the Women’s School to the district and the district government officials. It wasn’t just us in the Women’s Schools who did the work, there were also district committees like the monitoring committee. So … we worked together. That is why in 2017 we began attending the village Musrenbang. At the Musrenbangdes we really pursued village funding. It was in 2017 that such goals began to be realised [with a fund allocation].

Here, we see how women worked together and used multiple strategies to exercise leadership and influence, also tapping multiple networks for support—or what we call women’s ‘networked collective action’. The outcome of such leadership and multiple sources of pressure on the village government was the official recognition of the Women’s School members as participants in village meetings and funding for initiatives. Further, despite the entrenchment of patriarchal norms, after five years of collective efforts, women in Wringinanom also influenced village development by working with KPS2K and village leaders to develop new regulations to support gender inclusiveness and support for the Women’s School, including a funding allocation for the schools to build women’s knowledge and skills. Again, such processes of change were not observed in the Bungah control village.

Networked collective action

In the discussion above, we can see the ways women in the Wringinanom research village made significant efforts to establish relationships and networks of trust with authoritative actors with influence over governance processes and social norms, which contributed to what we conceptualise as women’s networked collective action.²⁰ That is, the efforts taken by women and other actors to collectively influence governance, development, policy programs and structures of power to be more gender inclusive. Networked collective action involved women building or strengthening webs of interdependence with other women (through groups and informal spaces), and webs of trust with other community members, especially authoritative actors, often through engagement in everyday settings. It then involved women leveraging their newly established or existing networks to garner support for their cause.

This support then created multiple sources of pressure on authoritative actors such as the village government and, ultimately, decision-making forums and other power structures, to influence outcomes. Such processes were helpful for overcoming challenges, particularly resistance to gender inclusiveness among authoritative and influential figures. Women’s informal spaces and more formal groups bolstered this process by extending networks, providing a new arena in which to build individual and collective agency through shared knowledge, skills and resources, providing mutual support and a source of protection, and fostering a sense of solidarity and collective agency.

Women’s networked collective action across scales also influenced district actors to make greater investments in women’s health issues as well as education extension programs for women. Such action has also influenced the regulatory environment in relation to child marriage, as one school member explains:

We made recommendations in the subdistrict and district Musrenbang. KPS2K has always advocated for eliminating child marriage. We approached district government offices and we alerted them to the consequences of child marriages for women’s economic wellbeing, domestic violence, maternal mortality and children’s health.

As a result, in 2018, the district government published a circular letter on the elimination of child marriage, which gives instruction to government officials to wind back endorsement of such marriages.

Brokering spaces and networks

We can also see from the case above how KPS2K and KAPAL Perempuan performed a brokerage role for the poorer, more marginalised women in Wringinanom in connecting them to the structures of power across scales (Diprose 2023), such as to the district government and the National Insurance Scheme. These CSOs supported poor women to grow their power and influence in ways that were not observed in Bungah, where individual women and existing elite-dominated women’s groups were limited in their ability to counter power structures without diversified mobilising structures.

The CSO’s role in connecting women to structures of power was also interrelated with networked collective action among grassroots members. We also saw this in the ways the Women’s School connected to the district officials to in turn pressure resistant village elites, but also for wider-scale development planning in the district to give increasing attention to women’s needs (cf. Diprose 2023). CSOs brokered spaces for women’s influence on powerholders by negotiating with powerful state and non-state actors, so women were increasingly recognised and invited into spaces where power was exercised (cf. Diprose 2023). Working with strategic actors in the bureaucracy also resulted in changes to the nomenclature and priorities outlined in the District Family Planning, Women’s Empowerment and Child Protection Agency budget in 2018 to provide support for KAPAL Perempuan/KPS2K’s Women’s Schools and a district policy to replicate the Women’s Schools in 10 other villages. This was given further endorsement through its inclusion in the 2016–21 Gresik District Medium-Term Development Plan. Women’s Schools have been replicated in other places with funding from districts, with the women in Wringinanom sharing their knowledge and experience with other women in this process.

Conclusion

For women in rural Indonesia who are deeply embedded in intimate social networks on which they rely, collective action does not necessarily involve overt public demonstrations of protest against powerholders from whom they are personally distant. Rather, it involves creating connections both among women and with others to mutually pursue change in status quo power relations in ways that minimise overt confrontation—for example, by seeking new everyday interactions with other authoritative social and political actors to build trust for later support and networked collective action.

Growing the confidence of women to approach authoritative actors in our intervention site was built on the skills, capacity, knowledge and mutual support developed through the new CSO-supported women’s groups. Our study therefore shows interrelations between the space of the Women’s School, created through the CSO intervention, and more amorphous everyday spaces and strategies. The formation of coalitions of influence also relied on growing support from influential powerholders through everyday interactions. Building trust and multiple sources of pressure together then saw women increasingly able to create or access spaces in which power is exercised in rural Indonesia, including more institutionalised, state-sanctioned spaces.

Women in the villages discussed above, and in many other villages in our wider study (Diprose et al. 2020), have traditionally been less represented in ‘invited’, state-sanctioned spaces where power is exercised, such as in electoral politics, holding office or participating in village decision-making. It was only in the empowerment-focused CSO intervention village in Wringinanom where significant change in women’s influence in village development was observed.

The Women’s School and its networks have contributed to significant impacts on women’s wellbeing, including changes in gendered household relations, gaining access to services, new village and district funding and regulations, group recognition, the assertion of women’s rights and slowly changing gender norms. These dynamics were not present in our Bungah research village, where only poorly attended state-sanctioned women’s groups were permitted and legitimated. Limiting support to certain women’s groups such as the PKK constrains who can voice their concerns and effect change, as well as perpetuating norms about the ‘types’ of participants in governance and politics.

Creating new groups aimed at growing women’s sources of mutual support and power, and augmenting more amorphous spaces for women to connect, allows for reflexive possibilities in which participants, especially those from marginalised groups, can identify shared problems as well as imagine alternative realities. In Wringinanom, these interactions have sown seeds of solidarity on which women have drawn to exercise their collective influence to create positive change for themselves, their peers and their community.

In finding opportunities and through more amorphous social arenas of engagement with powerholders, women disrupt overwhelmingly male-dominated sites of decision-making, which often cause women to feel afraid and unwelcome, such as spaces associated with the village government. Feminist scholars have long problematised binaries between private/public spheres and formal/informal politics, arguing that often politics involving the private sphere (for example, gendered divisions of labour, reproduction and parenting) is delegitimised by imparting certain values and capacities on this sphere (Volpp 2017). A formal/informal binary also risks deeming some forms of community participation in decision-making and policymaking legitimate and other types of organising as illegitimate (Miraftab 2004; McEwan 2005). We must therefore be attuned to how distinguishing between formal and informal politics can, if treated uncritically, associate formal, organised politics with ‘male forms of political organising’ and confine women’s organising to ‘informal organising’, denying ‘the struggle which took place to redefine the personal into the political’ (Brownill and Halford 1990: 397).

The webs of interdependence we have examined grew out of everyday interactions and friendships between group members, training programs and the multiple spaces where women exercised their influence, including households and hospitals as well as village and district forums. By centring the formation of webs of interdependence, we have complicated a binary between formal and informal spaces, instead emphasising how poor, marginalised women claimed space for themselves, together forming solidarity and exercising strategies across multiple issues and spheres, from reproductive health to participation in village development.

We have also shown how women’s CSOs can take on an important role in augmenting, structuring, resourcing and organising processes of recruitment, knowledge, trust-building and network creation among women, in contexts where groups are otherwise absent, fragile or less inclusive for the most marginalised women. In so doing, CSOs broker marginal groups’ power bases through strengthening organising structures and sources of knowledge/resources and their horizontal networks, connecting women across space, class and social issues (Diprose 2023). They also broker spaces for women’s influence on powerholders through direct negotiations and brokering networks with authoritative actors to build supporting coalitions of influence.

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1. 1 On agreement with CSOs and research participants, we have chosen to refer only to the subdistrict rather than the village’s name, and all interviewees have been given pseudonyms to protect their anonymity, especially taking into consideration the gendered social norms and stigmas women reported and the risks they take in expressing their voice and agency.

2. 2 Funding for some of the initial data collection (2019–20) for this chapter was drawn from the Australia–Indonesia Partnership for Women’s Empowerment and Gender Equality, although this did not contribute to the production of this chapter. The CSOs examined also funded parts of their initiatives from this partnership, although this did not influence published analysis or findings.

3. 3 See Note 1.

4. 4 Scholarship on the agency of women in their everyday lives in Asia has tended to focus on women’s public activism, with everyday agency conceptualised as ‘women’s relational and emotional lives, their experience of domestic practices and daily social and sexual interactions, on the way they build relationships, and their involvement in forms of interdependence and mutual aid’ (Parker and Dales 2014: 164).

5. 5 These include ‘formal channels’, understood in this chapter as institutionalised, state-sanctioned spaces (for example, laws, local government, courts), oppositional practices (for example, protests) as well as what Miraftab refers to as more informal strategies of coping, resilience and opposing structures of power.

6. 6 These spaces are also co-formed and relational in the sense that limited opportunities for participation and voice in invited spaces may push for the formation of alternative spaces (McEwan 2005).

7. 7 This saw the end of the mass women’s organisation Gerwani, which involved more than one million women, including many non-elite women in rural areas (Wieringa 2002: 179).

8. 8 The PKK was endorsed by Suharto’s authoritarian regime as a women’s organisation with reach in villages. The PKK disseminated the state’s official gender ideology, emphasising women’s domestic roles, and organised female volunteers in state-led development programs. In 2000, the PKK changed its name to Family Welfare and Empowerment but remains largely connected to development priorities set by the central government.

9. 9 Dharma Wanita is a state-corporatist organisation for wives of civil servants. Under the New Order, its activities echoed government priorities. Since the end of the New Order, membership is voluntary.

10. 10 In 2018, 40 per cent of the village budget in the Wringinanom research village was allocated to infrastructure projects.

11. 11 For instance, the female BPD representative was chosen directly from the PKK by the village government and is the daughter of the PKK head. One PKK member described how she was perceived as a good fit because of her mother’s position: ‘[P]eople like that have high loyalty. And that is passed on to her child.’ The PKK has successfully nominated two women to become part of the village government, including an early childhood education teacher, who became section head of general administrative affairs in 2018.

12. 12 Until 2019, Indonesian state law defined the marriageable age for girls as 16 years old, in tension with international conventions.

13. 13 Interview with KPS2K staff, Sidoarjo, East Java, 6 March 2019.

14. 14 Even the head of the village PKK—and wife of the village head—attended some village meetings but had little organisational role as her husband did not approve of her being active in this public role.

15. 15 Positions of village defence were open to young people (between 20 and 40 years old) who had elementary education and no permanent employment or landownership.

16. 16 24 February 2019.

17. 17 At the district level, KPS2K also consulted with government planning and women’s empowerment agencies to compare government poverty data with data collected through this social mapping. KPS2K selected Wringinanom subdistrict and this research village in particular because of its high poverty rates.

18. 18 The house where this takes place was chosen as a suitable meeting space because the leader lives alone with her children (her husband works outside the village), and because the house is far from the village office and close to the neighbouring village, which means that friends who live there can also attend.

19. 19 Very few other villagers go to these meetings and, even then, they only tend to participate when financial incentives are offered; programs that offer no incentives lack participants in meetings or other activities. Moreover, when the income generated from the villagers’ livelihood surpasses the incentives offered for participation in government programs, villagers are less inclined to give up their time to participate. One villager explained: ‘In this village, with a little bit of work, they can get money … It is difficult to encourage [the villagers] to participate [in activities] when there’s no money offered.’

20. 20 Our findings on processes of ‘women’s networked collective action’ were like those for other research sites in the larger study (Diprose et al. 2020).