Incentive-based Social Welfare Administration in Indonesia: Implications for sustainable development in women’s and children’s protection

This article brings together two discrete studies of Indonesian welfare innovations, the conditional cash transfer and the deinstitutionalisation of children, both delivered at the lowest administrative level by social workers. Patterns across the two studies indicated a confounding variable influential in social workers’ innovation implementation and administrative decisions. This variable, incentive-based remuneration, was inhibiting implementation and potentially sustaining the social inequalities and rights violations that each innovation proposed to address. Social workers’ over-reliance on remuneration incentives has inherent problems. Increases to base-rates of pay and realignment of incentivisation in development are needed to support change.