Education-to-work transitions for young people in Central Flores Eastern Indonesia

10 Sekretariat Perizinan Penelitian Asing Kementerian Riset dan Teknologi DIREKTORI PENELITIAN ASING DI INDONESIA 2013

2. Education-to-work transitions for young people in Central Flores Eastern Indonesia

Tujuan Penelitian : Mempelajari dampak bertambahnya pengangguran bependidikan berusia muda pada kehidupan pedesaan, khususnya pada hierarki lokal Bidang Penelitian : Antropologi Daerah Penenlitian : NTT Kab. Ngada di Flores Tengah Lama Penelitian : 12 dua belas bulan mulai 20 Mei 2013 Mitra Kerja : PSDR LIPI Dr. Yekti Maunati, M.A. Abstrak Educational achievement is often highlighted as a key factor in narratives of national development. For rural areas, these narratives promote schooling as a gateway to work and as a way out of agrarian ‘backwardness’. Unfortunately, in many countries, increasing numbers of educated rural young people – those who have at least inished senior high school – experience diicult transitions from education to work, due to interrelated global and local economic conditions. This project will study these transitions in one such country: Indonesia. Although diicult education-to-work transitions clearly afect rural economic developmental processes, little research has been done in Indonesia on these transitions. This project will ill that void. This project aims to understand the efects of the growing pool of rural under employed educated young people on village life in Central Flores Kabupaten NgadaBajawa, in particular on local hierarchies and associated power relations. Whether young people contest or enforce existing hierarchies and power relations, they can only afect these hierarchies and relations when they engage or actively disengage with other villagers, especially informal rural authorities e.g. parents, clan, church and customary leaders and government oicials. I hypothesize that it is in these relations that local hierarchies and power relations acquire new meaning, for both the young people who are underemployed, and for the in formal rural authorities. Moreover, I posit that it is not only these hierarchies and power relations that acquire new meaning, but also the related social domains, 11 Sekretariat Perizinan Penelitian Asing Kementerian Riset dan Teknologi DIREKTORI PENELITIAN ASING DI INDONESIA 2013 which can be roughly deined as customary practice and religion, family and marriage, and work and leisure. In practice these domains overlap. However, for analytical purposes these domains need to be separated. To understand how rural underemployed educated young people impact upon village life, the main questions in this project are: how do these young people position themselves vis-à-vis informal rural authorities and vice versa, and how does this afect local hierarchies and power relations?In short, this project aims to: 1. identify rural underemployed educated young people, explore their understandings about their underemployed status, and study the strategies they develop and deploy to cope with their situation; 2. show how these young people relate to rural informal authorities parents, clan, traditional, or church leaders and government oicials; 3. show how informal rural authorities react to underemployed educated young people; 4. scrutinize in particular the relations between rural underemployed educated young people and informal authorities within the following social domains: customary practices and religion, family and marriage, and work and leisure; and 5. develop understanding about how these domains acquire new meanings for all villagers through the dialectical relations between rural underemployed educated young people and informal authorities.

2. 1 Mr. Thijs Schut