Project Description
Democracy International conducted a Strategic Assessment for USAID/Indonesia. The main purpose of the assessment was to: 1) help the Mission better understand the Indonesian context and its impact on the Mission’s ability to achieve key programmatic results; 2) inform the design of a new Country Development Cooperation Strategy (CDCS); and 3) recommend programmatic approaches to address key findings. After visiting five provinces—Papua, East Java, East Kalimantan, East Nusa Tenggara, and South Sulawesi—the DI teams analyzed conflict trends, dynamics, drivers, and conflict enabling and mitigating structures using USAID’s Conflict Assessment Framework 2.0 (CAF 2.0). The team synthesized the findings and provided USAID with recommendations for its future programming priorities and approaches at the national, provincial/local, and community levels. These findings and recommendations included:
Finding: Use of private security organizations and militias by corporate and political actors normalizes the use of violence as a tool of power. Combined with the criminalization of peaceful protest and resistance to land grabs and resource extraction activities, democratic reforms and citizen security are threatened. Recommendation: Mitigate threats to environmental activists, journalists, communities engaged with extractive industries, natural resource management, and environmental protection.
Finding: Rising tensions between identity groups, especially around religion, ethnicity, and sexual orientation/gender identity, are infiltrating conflicts between government/corporations and citizens over land use. Recommendation: Support the prevention of religious and identity-based conflict, with a focus on diverse and resilient communities.
Finding: Key actors in positions of power such as government, civil society organizations, and the private sector lack sufficient capacity to resolve conflict peacefully and equitably. Overlapping claims to conflict resolution authority confuse matters further. Recommendation: Support the strengthening of national and provincial/local conflict resolution infrastructure.
Finding: Conflict drivers are found in every sector, including health, education, and environment. Recommendation: Integrate conflict sensitive approaches across all development objectives and throughout the program cycle.
In addition to the recommendations, the assessment team also identified numerous conflict mitigating factors, including legacies of tolerance and a strong national identity, a vibrant and connected civil society, cross-cutting social ties and traditional conflict resolution institutions, and limited access to weapons.