Description of the Material
(Innovativeness and effectiveness) |
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Local autonomy doesn’t mean freedom to exploit natural resources, there must be democratic system in natural resource management. |
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True Democracy does not belong to the village chief or government, but to the people (people’s sovereignty). |
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The supreme authority in village governance is elected on a consensus through village discussion. |
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An inconsistent concept of participation, formally espoused but not consistently applied at the community level, is quite common among development programs in Indonesia (and perhaps in other Asia/Pacific regions?). Therefore, building adaptive learning communities is assumed to be the most strategic choice. This option requires collaborative initiatives in the development of learning methods, processes, and tools, which empower grassroots communities to gain access and control over the change processes, which involve many players. |
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The poster we recommended is the result of collaborative initiatives from SDM and NTCDC partners’ organization and has proven to be effective for advocacy to bring out the community’s sense of local policy-making, especially in natural resources management. |
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The poster is used as a motivational medium. It can be used as a trigger for group discussion, it can be independently placed everywhere to be read by everyone (as a single poster). |
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| Material Development Process |
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Sustainable agriculture programs in marginal areas of Nusa Tenggara are showing positive results and where programs have been supported with non-formal/adult education approaches, the overall well-being of the people has improved. |
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While sustainable agriculture programs in marginal areas have started to become effective in resolving the problem of food security and have improved agricultural production, they have mostly failed in reversing the negative impacts of inappropriate policies beyond the village level. |
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An inconsistent concept of participation which is formally espoused but not consistently applied at the community level, is quite common among development programs in Indonesia. This is the reason why, for example, the new decentralization policies (Law #22 and #25, 1999) -which have been widely disseminated - have not yet been understood by the majority of village communities. |
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Considering those facts, SDM has assisted the development of educational media for the NTCDC, one of them being a poster of village democratization. These materials have been developed by SDM cooperatively with NTCDC partners, and will be used in their ongoing programs. |
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SDMs’ media development process scheme consists of ten steps in general: (1) Programme analysis; (2) Communication problems identification; (3) Method and strategy formulation; (4) Script/content development; (5) Medias’ format/specification identification; (6) Media development activities planning; (7) Try-out version; (8) Field test; (9) Revision; (10) Production and distribution. |
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Usually, the details are various depending on the media’s format. For this poster, the overview of the media development process was as follows: (1) Analysis (program/problems, situation, audience). Because the poster is a part of collaborative work of SDM and NTCDC, the analysis process was developed by communication process of NTCDC partner organizations (at Nusa Tenggara region, including SDM Kupang) and SDM Bandung and Kupang, by several meetings and communication by e-mail; (2) Determine communication objectives and develop communication strategy. This step facilitated by SDM Bandung and Kupang, considered the actual issue of democracy in Nusa Tenggara (data supplied by some partner organization from rural areas). From this process, the team agreed on the objectives of the media as follows: to trigger the discussion process in the community and local government as well, concerning the autonomy concept; to discover indigenous knowledge which has relevancy to the spirit of democracy; to socialize village autonomy policy (in Indonesia); (3) Planning of media development activities. For this purpose, the team distributed the job as follow: Content developer consisting of 3 persons from Bandung and 1 from Kupang. Layout and design by SDM Bandung; (4) Field test (try-out version). SDM Bandung teams conducted the test at West Nusa Tenggara, while SDM Kupang conducted it at East Nusa Tenggara. The input from the field test, organized by SDM Bandung (correction and revision); (5) Media Production, in Bandung; (6) Media distribution and utilization to all NTCDC partner organizations. The rest is in storage at Bandung and Kupang; (7) Monitoring and development of information management system. SDM Bandung and Kupang provide a questionaire to gain feedback from the user; (8) Evaluation and problem analysis. The main problem was at field level. The field officer tends to use the poster as a meaningless ornament and to give a lecture to community, whereas it should be used as a communication tool (interactive discussion). |
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| Distribution & Utilization Process |
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The poster was printed for 1000 ex. and distributed to all NTCDC partner organizations. SDM Bandung and Kupang kept the rest, in case there was a request from other partner organizations (outside NTCDC network). |
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Usually partner organizations utilize it as a medium in daily assistance at grassroots level (group meeting discussion), to raise their awareness of natural resource management. |
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Impact of the Material at the organizational and national level
(in original country) |
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Base on some partners’ organizations experience using this poster (in Nusa Tenggara areas) the availability of media has increased the effectiveness of extension efforts and stimulated the growth of learning processes in the communities. The poster has given added knowledge and started a discourse about the underlying values of the present community development programs. |
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Before developing it for NTCDCs’ network, SDM developed it with the Community Forestry System Programme (SHK) at East Kalimantan (2002). |
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