President Jokowi said that the use of the Village Funds must also be allocated to boost economy as well as to tackle poverty and reduce gap in the villages (see
Setkab official website). For the next stage, however, President Jokowi hopes that a bigger portion of the Funds can be used to develop economic potentials in the villages.
Village Fund and Poverty
Both Village Fund (Dana Desa) and poverty stand at crossroads today. In recent times, implementation of Village Fund had conceptualised as a positive norm in the legal system of Government Regulation No. 22/2015 on Revision of Government Regulation No. 60/2014 on Village Fund Source from APBN. It stretches across the entire spectrum of validity claims of Village Law No. 6/2014. From inside of Village Law system, the Village Fund neither represent the financial decentralisation nor represent the legal principle of village’s recognition.
Village Law’s implementation had reduced by Village Fund issues in the legal-positivism discourse. It had not talked about the poor or middle-class of villagers, but what administration speaks, what supra-village’s priority, what are forbidden, what the sanctions are, and how the governmentality procedures dominates the villagers.
There are no analysis of poverty alleviation within Village Funds’s indicators. Government had found difficulties to build the new concept of Village Poverty Index as one of Village Funds indicators, as described in Government Regulation No. 60/2014 before.
The indicators had been changed to the construction cost index (Indeks Kemahalan Konstruksi), but it had not itself supplied any substantive orientation for managing practical tasks of poverty alleviation. It is neither ‘informatively poverty alleviation’ nor immediately practical in the village.
Through a practice of self-referential that requires the establishment of governmental bodies, there is a gap between the government and the villages in how they define the poverty problems. Government still have debates on any indexes as such as Index of Village Driven Development (Indeks Desa Membangun), Village Development Index, and Village Profile Index.
Those debate constitutes a new burden between local government, Village Government (Pemerintah Desa) and Village Consultative Agency (Badan Permusyawaratan Desa). For example, the causes of poverty in village are both education and health’s factors, but the one of Index give another recommendation, as like the road infrastructure, it follows typology of disadvantage villages. In this context, the Index has a limited effectiveness in functionally participation of poor villagers.
In this way, the poor villagers is not linked with all deliberative process through Village Consultative (Musyawarah Desa) that is organised by Village Consultative Agency (Badan Permusyawaratan Desa). The road becomes normative issues and it can not link up with empirical explanations of poor villagers.
Forest and Tiger
The aims of Village Law to address poverty and social inequality can work in macro-structural context, but it needs strong village autonomy that village has a capacity to negotiate state’s intervention through a kind of Index, like ‘the forest embraces the tiger’.
In historically long period, we found state and village relations as like a tiger (state; kingdom) and forest (village; rural), in the ancient books of Negarakertagama/Desawarnana. Nowadays, that relations relevant to the new village development, the tiger must respect the forest as a habitus of life. From this point on, tiger and forest, validity claim of Village Fund must be understood in epistemic terms as a ‘validity proven for both tiger and forest’.
This brings us to the core of the proceduralist paradigm: according to ‘the inclusive village’ of Sutoro Eko (2017). ‘The inclusive village’ has several characteristics: (a) village’s autonomy that village has a capacity to negotiate state’s intervention; (b) democracy and multiculturalism that are constructed well by villagers; (c) village’s head as the people’s leader; (d) integration between politics and social order; (e) village has outward looking of both network and cooperation; (f) and village’s prosperity growth.
Here the idea of inclusive village states the necessary conditions for reexamine the legal paradigm of Village Fund itself. Certainly this understanding retains a communicative power in Realpolitics context, through as follows: (a) regulations of Village Consultative (Musyawarah Desa) as a source of Village Funds’s legitimacy; (b) political opinion of Village Fund corrected by self-organize of interest’s groups in village; (c) village’s regulation (Peraturan Desa) as symbolic power of village’s reconstitutions; and (d) government regulation facilitates the collective actions of villagers that is based on economic potentials in the villages itself, through procedures of shareholding.*
Writer: Anom Surya Putra
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