Sharing Session on Results, Best practices, Reflections, and Recommendations of Social Innovation Platform’s Journey in West Java

On April 7, 2022, RDI held a sharing session with the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) on the results, best practices, reflections, and recommendations of the Social Innovation Platform project in Sukabumi Regency, West Java. This sharing session was aimed to disseminate current results and lessons learned, along with bringing about recommendations to scale up the SIP initiatives to the national and regional levels in achieving sustainability and continuity. After the series of co-creation and co-design of the quick prototype conducted, it was such an honor to share recent experiences in the establishment of community-led grassroots initiatives.

Through this session, RDI presented current local narratives and real-time challenges and opportunities at the community and policy levels. Thus far, coordination across government agencies and local communities is incorporated to accomplish the best practices in one of the chosen prototypes, namely “Obyek Daya Tarik Wisata (ODTW) Kampung Keluarga Berkualitas”. However, on many occasions, the trajectory of tourism application remains challenging due to political factors and power relations that are happening between communities and local governments. As such, strengthening the advocacy strategy by aligning the SIP initiatives with higher government agencies, such as the Tourism Agency and the Village Community Empowerment Agency might push toward a “Sustainable Tourism in Rural Areas” goal. In the last session, RDI expressed gratitude to be able to conduct the SIP project and to learn new things regarding the dynamics of rural development in West Java.

To sum up, there are many lessons learned that could be taken from the journey of implementing grassroots initiatives in the context of rural development. It concluded that socio-political dimensions are subject-matter to considering the benchmark of development in rural areas. Having said that, SIP has shown convincing results in enhancing locals’ capacity to overcome current challenges impacted by COVID-19. However, this experimental project of SIP was done quite briefly and the observation only took place during field-visit. Therefore, the future project may need to involve ethnographic or participant observer research methods.

Author: Fahmi Rizki Fahroji