It is called Kota Kita. I wrote about it back in June 2022 when I interviewed Ahmad Rifai, the executive director and cofounder of the organization.

Considering the gloomy mood surrounding democracy not only in Southeast Asia but across the world, it is essential to share some more optimistic stories that can offer hope no matter the challenges.

Kota Kita is not only trying to bring about bottom up, citizen-led changes in the ways urban centers are governed in Indonesia. The organization also plays an important role as a regional hub for People Powered, one of the most prominent organizations promoting innovative democratic solutions in the world.

“Our goal is envisioning urban spaces in which everyone can have a say, a voice”, explained Rizqa Hidayani, a program manager at Surakarta, Central Java-based Kota Kita. “Yet we want to facilitate mechanisms that are not top down, that are truly genuine in which people do participate in the affairs of their neighbors or towns because they truly care”.

This is a sort of conundrum. Governments, including in Indonesia, might come up with approaches and systems to involve and engage the citizenry but the risk is that these exercises in democratic participation become formalistic and very top down.

On one hand, it is positive that the state is trying to do something. In Indonesia, there have been several instances of local government-led participatory practices.

But on the other hand, there is the challenge of going beyond exercises that are at risk of becoming just tokenistic. This is what Kota Kita is trying to reverse, promoting genuine participation.

It might seem an easy thing to accomplish but I believe instead that it is one of the toughest jobs on earth.

“We are facing challenges in institutionalizing deliberative democracy” shared Silvania Utami, an urban planner at Kota Kita who is coordinating the Think Climate Indonesia (TCI) Forum, a Canadian-sponsored initiative supporting think tanks in Indonesia to take meaningful and inclusive actions in the fight against climate change.

Utami raised an interesting point when she highlighted in our conversation that, while local government initiatives are important, “it is equally key to promote informal democracy, something that it is truly embedded in the social fabric of local communities”.

Deliberative democracy or any kind of similar initiatives promoting innovative ways of doing democracy, ways that go beyond the ballot box, can certainly coexist with electoral practices but at the same time, such exercises also challenge the current mainstream system.

This is a point raised by Rifai.

“Let’s not forget that electoral democracy is not the only avenue, it is not the only way”.

This statement reflects a general sense of frustration among people that, because they are disillusioned with the alienating way electoral democracy unfolds, can end up electing populist governments.

This dynamic showed its resilience once again in the Indonesian and United States presidential elections and has proved to be very tempting in many member states of the European Union.

A different way, perhaps an antidote to this state of affairs, can come from genuine attempts to involve and engage people. And this is what Kota Kita is trying hard to do.

“Yet, deliberative democracy itself is not a panacea. It is a dynamic process instead and there can be ups and downs because people are truly able to express their agency,” Rifai said.

One of the things that Kota Kita does best is to involve young people. This is one of the greatest satisfactions for Rifai because “we are nurturing, step by step, civil leadership among the youth”.

The current status of deliberative practices in Indonesia is not that exciting, he said. “There has not been significant progress but we are moving ahead by laying the foundations for a sustainable type of change in how cities and regions are governed”.

After all, Kota Kita is one of the biggest promoters of the concept of the “right to cities”, which according to the Right2Cities Network, is “the right of all inhabitants, present and future, permanent and temporary, to inhabit, use, occupy, produce, govern and enjoy just, inclusive, safe and sustainable cities, villages and human settlements”.

Children and youth should play a leading role.

“We are exploring different, new methodologies in involving and engaging these key target groups, trying to understand how children and youth can lead truly meaningful exercises in which they can share their opinion and ideally have real decision making power”, Hidayani said.

The Urban Citizenship Academy and other projects like YUP the Youth Inclusive Digital Urban Governance program are some of the best examples of the work that Kota Kita is undertaking: building grassroots-level leadership with the expertise and skills to bring changes.

These young people are going to grow with a new mindset, what the Kota Kita team refers to as one underpinning the so-called “mental democracy”, an attitude and a way of living.

The word “patience”, was one of my key takeaways from my conversation with the members of the Kota Kita team.

“Our work can be hard to understand,” Fildzah Husna, the communications officer in the organization.

“What we are doing is not always tangible and it is a process, it is a journey rather than just a destination”.

The challenges posed by climate warming, for example, are so daunting that any attempts at addressing them cannot bring about any results unless the citizens are involved. This is a great area of focus for Kota Kita because we truly need to reimagine urban planning and urban governance to tackle climate change.

The organization tries to facilitate the conditions for such quantum changes in the way cities are run and it does so by collecting evidence like in a recent publication, “Uplifting Urban Lives”, of some of the best practices being implemented by civil society across Indonesia.

In 2022, I wrote “how Kota Kita’s vision and mission are as simple to grasp as they are daunting to achieve: Believing that citizens should be at the heart of decision-making in their cities”.

It is reassuring that despite both the perceived and real decline of democracy in such a strategic nation like Indonesia, there are still activists who are convinced that civic engagement through real, genuine people’s participation, is not just a far-fetched chimera.

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The author writes about development, human rights and regional integration in the Asia Pacific.