Brokers and citizenship: access to health care in Indonesia

Abstract

Faced with unresponsive and intimidating bureaucracies, citizens across particularly the global south regularly rely on intermediaries to gain access to public services. Focusing on how such brokers arrange access to health care in Indonesia, this essay discusses the impact of brokered state-citizen interaction on the character and experience of citizenship. On the basis of extensive fieldwork in both urban and rural Java we argue that brokers not only enable the realization of citizen rights, they also transform the experience and interpretation of these rights. Brokers 'vernacularize' citizenship, in the sense that citizenship comes to be experienced and interpreted not just in terms of a formal relationship with a national state, but also in terms of the character of personal relationships and attendant obligations that exist between citizens, brokers and power holders.

Informality and citizenship: the everyday state in Indonesia

“…In the vignette at the start of this article, Rini performed such a role as intermediary. Berenschot, Hanani, and Sambodho (2018) focus on how brokers like Rini enable citizens to gain access to subsidized health care. So do Jakimow's 'state-led volunteers' (2018), who use their participation in government programs to cultivate useful contacts to better help their neighbours.…”

“…They want state agents to apply a more personalized ethic attuned to prevalent social norms. Berenschot, Hanani, and Sambodho (2018) highlight the way in which citizens draw strategically on norms of reciprocity to ensure access to healthcare. They describe, for example, how poorer citizens provide political support with the aim of cultivating relations with influential brokers.…”

“…Gibbings 2016). Berenschot, Hanani, and Sambodho (2018), Jakimow (2018) as well as Hearman (2018) note, for example, that citizens often frame their claims in terms of needs and social obligations rather than in terms of rights. In this sense, informal citizenship is self-reproducing.…”

Spatial Barriers and the Tendency of the Utilization of Mediated Citizenship by Villagers in Accessing Public Services

“…The mediation that mediators did nullifies the access experience to basic services as a right. Instead, people consider this access depends indeed on the personal obligation between the citizens and their intermediaries and between intermediaries and front-line service providers (Berenschot, Hanani & Sambodho, 2018). The informal nature of citizen-state interactions helps interpret the observation that rights-based discourse is relatively absent in Indonesia (Gibbings, in Berenschot & van Klinken, 2018: 106).…”

Incumbent bureaucrats: Why elections undermine civil service reform in Indonesia

“…Teachers and school principals can determine the school admissions that can determine the future of students (Rosser & Fahmi, ). Local health workers, together with village heads, make important decisions about who will get fast treatment of a doctor along with subsidised healthcare (Berenschot, Hanani, & Sambodho, ). Village heads can influence the selection of recipients of welfare programs and cash transfers (Mulyadi, ).…”