The Feminine Perspective,Wealth Generation and Nurturing Ecosystem Integrity

Chandra Kirana
Director of GreenIndonesia

Jokowi's cabinet is feminine in many ways. One outstanding feminine attribute is the way it reaches out to reconnect with people, and with Indonesia's lands and seas to face the ecological, social and economic challenges of today. Another feminine attribute is the way the administration without much ado faces these challenges head-on and openly. Finally, Jokowi's strongest attribute that won him the hearts of voters is his caring and nurturing demeanor. All of this is silently making a loud statement about what is important.

The current dominant global and Indonesia's national economy is a masculine-gender biased economy that sees nature as a repository of resources, valuable only because they can be extracted and exploited for financial profit on an industrial economic scale, thus the tendency to create monocultures. From a governance and policy perspective this economy tends to create one-size-fits-all types of policies. Classic examples are the vast areas of palm oil, or pulp-wood plantations. One of the most dramatic of these examples in the history of Indonesia's development is the one million hectares of peat forests that were transformed into rice farming areas in the late 1990's towards the end of Suharto's administration.

Within this kind of economy, development is achieved at the cost of ecological and social integrity without exception. The direct relationship and the degrees of these costs of course vary. But underlying this practice is the inability to see how nature and human societies form an intricate web of important connections that enables life on earth. It is the interconnectedness of all living beings that allow ecosystems and societies to evolve. When this interconnectedness is ignored, in the end the economy itself will be placed in jeopardy.