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Governing rural Indonesia: convergence on the project system

In contemporary Indonesia as in many other parts of the global south, policy plays a limited role in guiding the practice of rural development. What proliferates, instead, is the project: a time bound intervention with a fixed goal and budget, framed within a technical matrix which renders some problems amenable to intervention, while leaving others out of account. Thinking about rural development in terms of projects has become so routine that alternative ways of thinking and acting are scarcely considered. Yet, it was not always so. This article compares the present conjuncture, in which the project system dominates, with historical conjunctures at which projects did not take the center stage. Two empirical studies serve to illustrate how a disparate set of actors – Indonesian government officials and politicians, social development experts at the World Bank, transnational conservation agencies and rural villagers – converged on the project system, with refractory results.