Introduction
In mid-2021, Indonesia experienced one of the most severe phases of the COVID-19 pandemic (WHO 2021). Healthcare systems in densely urbanised areas faced particularly extreme pressures (Olivia, Gibson, and Nasrudin Reference Olivia, Gibson and Nasrudin2020). Within this context, community-driven mutual aid initiatives emerged as forms of solidarity (Nurhadi et al. Reference Nurhadi, Yuda, Kafaa and Pratiyudha2023). But in Java, it was the ethos of gotong royong, cooperation rooted in Javanese cultural values of harmony (Bowen Reference Bowen1986) together with its digitally connected civil society, which provided fertile ground for the formation of such collectives (Lim Reference Lim2012). An example was SONJO (Sambatan Jogja), which emerged on WhatsApp via the Resilient SONJO-1 (SONJO Tangguh-1) group.
SONJO demonstrates how self-governing digital communities mobilised the resources they had access to fill the gap left by the healthcare and social service system (Carstensen, Mudhar, and Munksgaard Reference Carstensen, Mudhar and Munksgaard2021). By primarily utilising digital media, SONJO mediated the delivery of basic services from donor and government agencies to vulnerable citizens (Permana and Rakhmani Reference Permana and Rakhmani2023). In two years, what began as an emergency pandemic response evolved into a multi-platform community-driven aid that collaborated with the likes of the Family Welfare Programme of Yogyakarta (PKK DIY) – a community-based family empowerment national movement whose members are women – to establish additional messenger groups that brought together diverse institutional actors to tackle emerging urban challenges (Pradiptyo, Chrisdiana, and Handayani Reference Pradiptyo, Chrisdiana and Handayani2021).
SONJO’s creation reflects a typical pattern observed across the “Global North” and “South” where digital media was mobilised to facilitate solidarity during a crisis (Carstensen, Mudhar, and Munksgaard Reference Carstensen, Mudhar and Munksgaard2021; Mould et al. Reference Mould, Cole, Badger and Brown2022; Solnit Reference Solnit2020). In Indonesia, digital platforms supported “Jogja Free Rice Place” and “Bali Care Community”, which distributed free rice to vulnerable populations (Detik 2021). In Jakarta, women-led informal networks used social media to organise the redistribution of food and essential goods for their households and the communities (Rakhmani et al. Reference Rakhmani, Utomo, Phillips and Setyonaluri2020). Beyond Indonesia, in the Philippines, social media-assisted community pantries mobilised Filipino values, such as kagandahang-loob (kindness) and hiya (self-restraint in prioritising individual needs over others), to sustain food redistribution (Del Castillo Reference Castillo2022).
In Malaysia and Indonesia, both majority-Muslim countries, digital platforms have amplified the reach of Islamic-based zakat—as a mechanism of resource redistribution—to mobilise community-based financial assistance for those in need during the pandemic (Jamaludin Reference Jamaludin2021; Oikawa Reference Oikawa2022). In Singapore, digitally mediated mutual aid initiatives emerged in 2020, at the height of the pandemic, to facilitate community-based financial assistance for vulnerable populations (Noor Reference Noor2021). Despite the Singaporean government’s efforts, administrative issues challenged the timely delivery of financial support to those who need it most.
These localised reactions that emerged in broader Southeast Asia show how digital platforms are widely used to activate community-based mechanisms, often grounded in traditional or religious values, in response to crises. They show how bottom-up mechanisms, often intertwined—though not always—with top-down ones, address an array of issues from food and income insecurity to the securitisation of segments of the population (Phan, Quah, and To Reference Phan, Quah and Minh Son2023), some of whom are considered threats (Distler Reference Distler2021). Through a Foucauldian governmentality (Foucault Reference Foucault, Burchell, Gordon and Miller1991) analytical lens, we situate SONJO and other self-organised digital communities emerging during the pandemic, within contradictions of neoliberal statecraft.
Neoliberalism is broadly conceived as a process of political-economic restructuring that promotes market supremacy, entailing, among other things, the state’s withdrawal from the provision of basic social services (Harvey Reference Harvey2005), while fostering citizens’ self-management of welfare through market competition (Card and Hepburn Reference Card and Hepburn2023). It has further exacerbated vulnerabilities and deepened social inequalities (Shulla et al. Reference Shulla, Voigt, Cibian, Scandone, Martinez, Nelkovski and Salehi2021; Sparke and Williams Reference Sparke and Williams2022), intensifying during the pandemic (Ihsan and Munabari Reference Ihsan and Munabari2023). But neoliberal principles have been taken up in policy-making and everyday life in historically specific and contested ways. Contrary to the widely accepted assumption that neoliberal thinkers oppose the state and praise individualism, under neoliberalism, legal and institutional frameworks have been redesigned to insulate private property and capital mobility from democratic interference (Slobodian Reference Slobodian2018). Social risks have also been displaced into households (and communities), which are positioned as sites of welfare provision (Cooper Reference Cooper2017).
Against the background of this discussion, we argue that there are contradictions in how self-governing digitally mediated communities, like SONJO, enable citizens to support themselves and one another in meeting their welfare and well-being needs. The communities’ activation of localised practices of gotong royong (cooperation) has enabled more dynamic power redistribution at the grassroots level, thus promoting more equitable access to social services. At the same time, however, such practices normalise the transfer of public responsibilities and decision-making over basic services to citizens, thereby naturalising a mode of governance in which the state governs at a distance through communities’ self-organisation and unpaid labour.
These contradictions are conditioned by the coupling of neoliberal principles, which emphasise self-reliance, particularly in times of crisis, with Javanese ideas of harmony, which foreground social togetherness and communality. In Indonesia, these primordial notions have evolved throughout the authoritarian New Order state as family, where conflict was moderated by social harmony (Bourchier Reference Bourchier2014). In a context where precarity in work and in life has been the norm, marked by pervasive job insecurity and underdeveloped social security programmes (Yasih Reference Yasih2025a), they have served as cultural mediations between communities and rapidly changing social worlds increasingly governed by neoliberal principles (Permana and Rakhmani Reference Permana and Rakhmani2023). Within such material conditions, citizens have learned to depend on informal safety networks grounded in mutual aid (Ford and Honan Reference Ford and Honan2019). In Yogyakarta, as a volcanic region centred on Mount Merapi (Lavigne et al. Reference Lavigne, De Coster, Juvin, Flohic, Gaillard, Texier, Morin and Sartohadi2008) and subject to recurrent natural disasters that regularly disrupt livelihoods, geography has further intensified collective practices for survival and crisis response
This article problematises neoliberalisation, its operation within culturally specific contexts, and its effects on community self-organisation. The first, neoliberalism, is understood here as a code of conduct for citizens (Ganti Reference Ganti2014) across both the “Global North” (Cruikshank Reference Cruikshank1999; Ogawa Reference Ogawa2009) and “Global South” (Cörüt and Cörüt Reference Cörüt and Cörüt2022; Li Reference Li2007a) to think and act as self-reliant actors in improving their own welfare. Scholars have criticised the tendencies of neoliberal development interventions to produce simplified narratives of community empowerment that gloss over political questions about unequal resource distribution (Hawksley and Georgeou Reference Hawksley and Georgeou2019; Newberry Reference Newberry2007) and rising precarity (Yasih Reference Yasih2025b). Development programmes and interventions have also been widely interpreted as neoliberal instruments to promote “empowerment” (Hawksley and Georgeou Reference Hawksley and Georgeou2019), as communities learn to fend for themselves within these political-economic conditions. Throughout these processes, grassroots demands are redirected into programmatic interventions, moderating grievances by reframing them as matters of technical governance to be addressed through community-based solutions (Li Reference Li2007a).
Second, scholars have examined how neoliberalism becomes intertwined with the cultural dimensions of local articulations. Throughout Indonesia’s authoritarian period (1966 to 1998), the cultural features of Islam and Javanese values were co-opted into state ideology (Bourchier Reference Bourchier2014). Today, certain Islamic-based interpretations of entrepreneurial piety (Hadiz Reference Hadiz2025; Rudnyckyj Reference Rudnyckyj2009; Yasih and Hadiz Reference Yasih and Hadiz2023), and Javanese-rooted values of harmony are reworked to mask the neoliberal state’s broken promises to improve work and welfare (Beta Reference Beta2020). The internalisation of these ideational formations within specific, historically shaped material conditions involves collective negotiation with existing power structures. Individuals’ understandings of their position within the social world, mediated through their engagements within communities, shape how grievances are articulated. Where overt collective resistance was violently sanctioned under authoritarianism, grievances tend to be channelled instead through everyday coping practices embedded in local relations (Yasih and Rakhmani Reference Yasih and Rakhmani2024; Yasih Reference Yasih2025b), even after the unravelling of the authoritarian structure.
Third, scholars have situated neoliberal governance within historically shaped political and economic contexts (Li 2007; Liow Reference Liow2012; Yasih Reference Yasih2025a). In Indonesia, this means looking at cultural practices of solidarity more critically. After all, neoliberal governance is a contradictory terrain within which an array of actors and institutions (Li Reference Li2007b) internalise and put into practice its logics (Barry, Osborne, and Rose Reference Barry, Osborne, Rose, Barry, Osborne and Rose1996) in ways that can be more affective than rational. Understood this way, a critical understanding of neoliberal governance involves unpacking the contradictory ways in which it facilitates the coming together of individuals and communities, where solidarity emerges not as an aberration but as a social effect of a lack of security. With this understanding, community capabilities to mobilise resources to survive and cope with crises unfold amid a weak state’s institutional capacity in basic service provision.
This article expands upon the above three interrelated themes: the influence of neoliberal governmentality on individuals and communities’ practices of self-reliance; the intertwining of neoliberal ideals with cultural dimensions of localised articulation; and the contradictory terrains through which neoliberal governance operates, often generating paradoxical consequences. It uses the SONJO case to reveal the operation of neoliberal governmentality at the community level, how idioms shape it, and its embeddedness in Indonesia’s and Yogyakarta’s historically uneven political–economic developments. By demonstrating how SONJO’s practices exemplify the contradictory nature of neoliberal governance, this article contributes to a more nuanced understanding of how neoliberalism is localised and contested, all the while being reproduced through everyday acts of solidarity.
In what follows, we discuss digital ethnography as a methodology for data collection and analysis. We then discuss the article’s use of the Foucauldian governmentality lens to examine the historically shaped and contradictory terrain in which neoliberal governance has operated in Indonesia more broadly and in Yogyakarta more specifically. These historical insights are used to analyse the contradictory ways in which SONJO facilitated the provision of health, education, and livelihood support during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Methods
Through preliminary, unstructured interviews with experts active in government and civil society policymaking during the COVID-19 pandemic, we identified SONJO as one of the communities that operate based on mutual-aid logic. As such, SONJO could help to illuminate the theoretical problems advanced in this article: the contradictions in everyday practices of solidarity during crises. While acts of solidarity expanded, albeit in limited ways, grassroots redistribution of resources, especially to those most in need, they also risk normalising the transfer of social responsibility from the state to communities.
Moreover, digital platforms played an important role in activating and mobilising communities such as SONJO. Given their active use of digital media in resource mobilisation, employing digital ethnography(Pink et al. Reference Pink, Horts, Postill, Hjorth, Lewis and Tacchi2016) enabled us to analyse SONJO’s online and offline interactions in meaningful ways. We followed with semi-structured interviews and participatory digital observations. We interpreted this against secondary data, in the form of academic literature, that shed light on how various informal groups and networks have historically intervened in welfare provision amid the state’s relative incapacity to deliver basic care.
Semi-structured interviews were conducted between August 2022 and April 2023 with thirty informants who represented SONJO’s diverse network. The research subjects comprised individuals from higher education institutions (i.e., those who initiated and coordinated the community), local governments (i.e., those who channelled vaccine distribution and shelter), religious welfare organisations (i.e., those who managed funeral services), volunteer groups (i.e., those who addressed rights and disaster response), healthcare professionals, and small-scale economic actors. This composition and division of responsibilities illustrate SONJO’s boundary-transgression practices, putting state and non-state actors into assemblages in what Li (Reference Li2007b) describes as governance expertise. Through this assemblage, neoliberal governmentality operated across multiple spaces in shaping citizens’ code of conduct during the pandemic.
Complementing the interviews, the first author conducted participatory digital observation of SONJO’s WhatsApp groups. From its inception, SONJO utilised WhatsApp as its primary coordination platform across specialised groups (i.e., SONJO Pangan [food security], SONJO Tangguh [emergency response], and SONJO Headquarters [general coordination]), enabling almost real-time resource mobilisation based on the division of responsibilities. Data analysis employed iterative thematic coding guided by a Foucauldian governmentality analytical lens, through which we examined how gotong royong meaningfully operated in digital spaces and how it contributed to organising the division of labour among community members.
Re-reading Self-Reliant Communities
Foucauldian governmentality offers a lens for unpacking the technology of self-making (Foucault Reference Foucault, Burchell, Gordon and Miller1991), helping to understand how power works through various forms of knowledge that refashion individuals’ subjectivities in alignment with neoliberal tenets. Critical to the analysis is the assemblage of trans-boundary actors (in this case, state agencies, NGOs, and communities) involved in attempts to regulate the condition of our lives under neoliberal pressures (Li Reference Li2007b). Along these lines, we understand community self-organisation as a way for the government to encourage citizens’ active participation through voluntaristic activities to carry out the responsibilities of working for the community’s well-being (Hawksley and Georgeou Reference Hawksley and Georgeou2019).
The governmentality framework (Rolfe Reference Rolfe2018) problematises society’s self-governance and understands this as the state positioning individuals and/or communities as responsible for social problems. As such, this article presents community self-organisation as a matter of power (Smallwood et al. Reference Smallwood, Delabre, Vergara and Rowhani2023), which involves the transfer of state duties and responsibilities to private, non-governmental institutions (Sökefeld Reference Sökefeld2012; Walters Reference Walters2012; Jessop Reference Jessop2007) and to communities. While neoliberal governance ultimately seeks to safeguard the competitive order and expose citizens to market disciplines, its modes of operation are historically and contextually specific (Mirowski, Plehwe, and Slobodian Reference Mirowski, Plehwe and Slobodian2020).
Likewise, neoliberalism is constituted through global interconnected processes, in which dynamics in specific countries, whether in the “Global North” or the “South”, actively shape its application. Neoliberal principles necessitate flexible implementation. For instance, they are articulated in ways that reframe community solidarity as a moral obligation to respond to market pressures. With this in mind, we turn our attention to community solidarity as a localised response to the uneven protection afforded by the state during the pandemic, often at the expense of those already experiencing socio-economic marginalisation. In Yogyakarta, as elsewhere, this lack of protection prompted the mushrooming of organised and individual volunteer initiatives that leveraged digital technologies to facilitate self-organising practices (de Castro Reference Castro and Lemes2016; Rakhmani et al. Reference Rakhmani, Utomo, Phillips and Setyonaluri2020; Wallace et al. Reference Wallace, Mytna-Kurekova, Leon, O’Reilly, Blome, Bussi and Faith2023; Yasih Reference Yasih2023).
SONJO is one such community. Relying on volunteers’ unpaid labour in the delivery of social services (Stewart Reference Stewart2000), it assumes roles typically associated with the welfare state by providing basic services, working with local governments, and, at times, performing government functions more efficiently. SONJO was formed spontaneously by Rim (interview on 17 March 2023) and other local university academics who shared concerns about the government’s slow response towards managing the pandemic. Initially, they were concerned about budget approval delays that caused equipment shortages for healthcare workers. To manage their concerns, they began mobilising resources and connections via WhatsApp to ensure equipment was delivered on time. Such an act of resource mobilisation, and many others that would follow, was achieved by connecting donors with recipients through freely accessible platforms, and by fundraising on digital platforms such as YouTube and Instagram. These initiatives helped provide medical supplies and livelihood assistance with virtually no financial aid or compensation for those who contributed their labour.
The name SONJO (Sambatan Jogja) itself is derived from the rural Javanese value and practice of sambatan, or the mobilisation of community resources. Importantly, both sambatan and gotong royong refer to practices of mutual aid (Bowen Reference Bowen1986). But gotong royong has historically served as a cultural tool of governance. It has served to govern the kampung (local neighbourhoods) as extensions of the kraton (palace), since the 18th century, making them manageable by palace authorities and later colonial administrators (Sullivan Reference Sullivan1992). During authoritarian rule, gotong royong was incorporated into the state apparatus through gendered divisions of unpaid labour among community members. Adult men were legally required to take night watch shifts or pay fines into the kampung funds if they were unable to participate (Sullivan Reference Sullivan1992). Meanwhile, women’s unpaid labour was institutionalised through state-mandated activities such as family-planning programmes and work in local health centres (Newberry Reference Newberry2014).
As such, SONJO complicates the reading of community self-organisation as forms of resistance to state domination (Scott Reference Scott2009). Rather than evading the state, the mutual aid and non-hierarchical logic of community self-governance can condition citizens’ absorption of welfare provision responsibilities. The institutionalisation of gotong royong as a governmental instrument persists beyond authoritarianism. Initiatives like SONJO revive community-based volunteerism as basic services are increasingly marketised, and responsibility for their delivery is displaced onto communities. Grounded in Javanese cultural values of cooperation, harmony, and familial spirit, frameworks like gotong royong and sambatan function as technologies of self-governance, conditioning the mobilisation of communities’ own resources to secure access to essential services. SONJO thus represents both a form of agential response to crisis and a symptom of a more profound structural abandonment. Care and welfare provision devolves to citizens and community members, who bear the material burden of unpaid labour, ensuring that they reach other citizens.
As Yogyakarta has among Indonesia’s lowest minimum wages (Idris Reference Idris2024a, Reference Idris2024b), this devolution emerges within local economic insecurity. As such, the province’s health service costs, estimated at USD 15 per capita annually, are among the lowest in Indonesia. So despite Yogyakarta’s relatively high health coverage, access remains uneven (Pratiwi et al. Reference Pratiwi, Setiyaningsih, Kok, Hoekstra, Mukti and Pisani2021). This fact reveals the uneven terrain of universal coverage under Indonesia’s neoliberal model (Rosser, Van Diermen, and Choi Reference Rosser, Van Diermen, Choi, Lim and Pieterse2018), where formal inclusion in health schemes does not translate to effective access to care. This particularity is a feature of structural inequality that would become more pronounced during the pandemic, where high universal care registration coexists with persistent reliance on community networks for healthcare.
Governing Health through Community Assemblages
The pandemic made more visible how communities had long compensated for systematic healthcare gaps (Olivia, Gibson, and Nasrudin Reference Olivia, Gibson and Nasrudin2020). In early 2020, amid the immediate danger faced by frontline healthcare workers due to a shortage of Personal Protective Equipment (PPE), SONJO mobilised digital mutual aid networks and strategically recruited local tailors to craft PPE from health-grade materials. Universitas Gadjah Mada (UGM), a public university in Yogyakarta, subsequently standardised the materials for medical use. By organising a virtual PPE fashion show on Zoom, SONJO addressed PPE shortages. It provided income for precarious and self-employed workers in the small and medium enterprise sector.
SONJO’s vaccination distribution efforts also demonstrate how governmental technologies operate through community self-organisation, addressing multiple layers of inequalities. Uneven internet access prevented digital vaccination registration; inadequate public transportation left rural residents unable to reach health centres; and health centres’ office hours restricted access to those who could not afford to lose wages. To help increase vaccination rates, SONJO actors leveraged their personal networks to the military, Ministry contacts, and the National COVID-19 Response Team, to address the gap between available doses and residents excluded from formal channels of vaccine distribution. Their direct engagement with national authorities, often without routing through provincial bureaucracy, illustrates strategic navigation of formal state channels. Digital media enabled after-hours vaccination delivery to villages and to workers unable to afford the cost of lost wages. In the process, WhatsApp groups became governmental instruments through which citizens learned to govern themselves and others, assuming responsibility for public health provision.
Among SONJO’s volunteers were local state officials, including village heads and health care centre directors in various sub-districts. SONJO managed the increasingly entangled relationship between state and non-state actors and collaborated to ensure vaccination is delivered at the village level. This assemblage creatively covered the operational costs of vaccination delivery as state budgets fail to fund essential infrastructure in a timely manner. Through these practices, the state-maintained authority over vaccine supply and distribution protocols, while operational costs and labour for their delivery at the local level were delegated to citizens.
SONJO members also exemplified entrepreneurial subjectivity (Scharff Reference Scharff2016). For instance, a SONJO member who worked as a doctor organised YouTube music concerts to raise funds to fill the gaps left by the state. Importantly, entrepreneurial subjectivity is shaped by neoliberal governmentality, a code of conduct for citizens that habituates them to the idea that they not only help the state deliver public services but must also creatively find ways to finance them. In various cases, funds and resources mobilised through SONJO networks covered tents, chairs, meals for healthcare workers, and wages for support staff. As such, what appears to be effective community solidarity is actually a social response to the uneven and selective character of state intervention, which exacerbates existing patterns of socio-economic marginalisation.
This transfer of responsibilities extended to encompass a wide array of pandemic healthcare needs. For example, during hospital overcapacity and ambulance shortages, SONJO mobilised networks of free ambulance providers. Collaborating local officials created a makeshift healthcare infrastructure. In the Bambanglipuro sub-district, for example, an unused building was repurposed into a field hospital. Similarly, unused spaces in the Sumbermulyo village were converted into COVID-19 shelters. Significantly, the establishment of both makeshift healthcare facilities depended on SONJO fundraising to provide for beds, protective equipment, and basic supplies.
Likewise, although the national government announced the 3M policy (washing hands, wearing masks, maintaining safe physical distance), it did so without ensuring the necessary resources for compliance at the local level. As supply chains were disrupted during lockdown, mask and sanitiser shortages occurred, exposing how markets failed to meet the demand for preventive supplies. In response, communities produced cloth masks and homemade sanitisers through collaboration between SONJO and UGM’s DERU team (Figure 1). The DERU team facilitated a pivot for batik producers facing a pandemic-induced market collapse, enabling them to produce masks. At the same time, SONJO fundraised to purchase and organise their distribution to vulnerable communities. The pandemic brought weaknesses in government, and market-based service provision to the surface; economic survival, public health, and social protection converged into community responsibility, coordinated through WhatsApp groups that framed systematic state failures as opportunities to practise sambatan.
SONJO and Deru distribute masks, hand sanitiser and personal protective equipment to the community.
These assemblages demonstrate how communities actively participate in normalising the transfer of welfare responsibilities from the state to citizens through cultural frameworks articulated as sambatan. Informants worked after hours to deliver vaccines with their personal vehicles for ambulance services, and spent weekends fundraising for hospital equipment. Throughout these arrays of health self-governance, informants described their unpaid labour through the frame of Javanese values of cooperation (gotong royong). Rather than explicitly critiquing state failure, they considered the roles they played of “moral obligations to the public” (Kar, interview on 20 December 2022).
It is worth noting, nonetheless, that the assemblages did not passively internalise governmental rationalities. They instead negotiated with and reshaped the governmental process. For instance, SONJO presented alternative field-based casualty data that challenged official health statistics. At the early onset of the pandemic, the Yogyakarta Governor, along with other local leaders, contested SONJO’s data and their casualty projections, which exceeded official health statistics. The Governor later announced the decision to expand burial sites in Prambanan Subdistrict, thereby indirectly confirming SONJO’s data.
In what Foucault (Reference Foucault, Burchell, Gordon and Miller1991) identifies as the productivity of power, community health self-governance operates through subjects who actively assume responsibility for providing basic services and collaborate to deliver them through assemblages. Digital platforms amplified this dynamic by making volunteer labour more efficient and visible, operating as a form of “technologies of the self” (Rose Reference Rose2001) mechanisms through which citizens learn to govern themselves according to neoliberal rationalities, and affect. SONJO’s effective mobilisation of affect through invoking sambatan reached vulnerable populations, pointing to a critical question: why must citizens work without compensation to ensure basic access? This question is revisited through the next sections, which focus on education and economic services.
Communities Self-Governance of Education
The pandemic severely disrupted the delivery of education services, exacerbating existing patterns of educational inequality. In this context, Indonesia’s remote learning policy was virtually unachievable in rural and remote areas, and among the working classes, due to unequal internet access and device availability (Norman et al. Reference Norman, Adnan, Nordin, Ally and Tsinakos2022). When schools shifted online in early 2020, the already neoliberalising landscape of education provision (Salim, Manubey, and Kuswandi Reference Salim, Manubey and Kuswandi2024) meant that schools no longer had the resources to ensure education access was affordable, if not free. Under the circumstances, communities again assumed state responsibilities, this time for ensuring students’ continued schooling
To manage the unexpected situation, SONJO facilitated a Zoom conference (figure 2) at the early onset of the pandemic, involving school officials, the local education office, and parents. These practices show how SONJO operated by conditioning collaborative assemblages of state and non-state actors to ensure education remained accessible to the most vulnerable, rather than directly contesting the government’s uneven provision of educational support during the crises. Communities’ participation in attempts to equalise education indicates how entrepreneurial subjectivity (Scharff Reference Scharff2016) is nurtured in a collective situation.
Online discussion and sharing character education challenges in online learning.
The online discussion exposed critical issues in Gunung Kidul, the region with the highest poverty rate in Yogyakarta. Participants in the online discussion reported limited internet access and financial constraints in the region. They noted that students, parents, and teachers frequently lacked the technical skills required to navigate online learning applications effectively. A discussant, specifically, expressed his frustration, pinpointing how existing pedagogical frameworks remained ill-prepared for the demands of the online learning environment, as conveyed in the following quotes.“I have served as a teacher since 1979, yet I have never encountered nor studied a system of this nature. We must now suddenly implement this mode of learning. When considering how the head of department evaluates home-based learning and whether it achieves its aims, I contend that it certainly does not. In Gunung Kidul, only 30% of primary schools and 50% of junior schools currently operate online.” (source: participants’ Zoom conference held by SONJO https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ETH6ATolW4)
Despite the frustration, discussion participants agreed they needed to collaborate to address challenges in the delivery of primary, secondary, and tertiary education, and to find mutually beneficial strategies to address shared problems. With that spirit in mind, SONJO initiated at least nine other online discussions between August 2020 and April 2021. The discussions covered an array of topics, from the socio-economic pressures shaping learning during the pandemic to pedagogical adaptation in digital contexts, the transition between online and offline learning, and digital literacy (source: @SONJOjogja Youtube Channel).
Moreover, SONJO facilitated the consolidation of governmental assemblages to support students who could not afford personal devices, internet connectivity, or parental support (as many parents could not afford to lose wages and assist with home schooling), thus facing immediate exclusion from the learning process. As such, SONJO created WhatsApp discussion groups to crowdsource solutions, where volunteers identified the students in need of personal devices, organised smartphone lending programmes, and established community WiFi points using personal routers. Teachers within SONJO’s network conducted after-hours tutoring via video calls, while university student volunteers created simplified learning materials for distribution through messaging apps.
The volunteerism practices show how entrepreneurial subjectivity, viewed through a Foucauldian governmentality lens, is nurtured amid the failures of governmental interventions, which deepened reliance on community self-organisation in the delivery of educational services. The Ministry of Education and Culture actually allocated substantial resources for data packages. Still, these budget allocations for internet quotas were meaningless for students without devices or access to internet infrastructure. The ministry budgeted IDR 405 billion (approximately USD 24.4 million) for internet quotas and monthly data subsidies of 35 to 50 gigabytes. Yet, illustratively, 13 villages in Yogyakarta’s Gunung Kidul Regency lack internet infrastructure (Wibowo Reference Wibowo2022). These policies ignore how marketised telecommunications and privatised education have compounded educational barriers for the poor and working classes (Hadiyat Reference Hadiyat2014), providing only partial solutions that necessitate community supplementation. When the state limits its capacity to respond to crises situation, as highlighted during the pandemic, citizens have few options other than to rely on community-driven grassroots efforts for survival. Volunteering practices, facilitated by SONJO, provided basic community educational infrastructure, including after-hours tutoring, learning materials, and WiFi facilities, all of which were needed to survive the crisis.
In short, SONJO brought together assemblages of state and non-state education actors into community-based governance arrangements operating beyond formal bureaucratic structures. Through these assemblages, communities assumed responsibility for sustaining educational provision during lockdown. These practices, framed as sambatan, ensured that communities mediated between the students’ needs for devices and internet connection and the resources to meet them (see Fig. 2). From a Foucauldian governmentality perspective, such processes illuminate the cultural frameworks through which communities embed themselves in broader processes of the systematic transfer of educational costs from the state to citizens. As such, government officials’ participation in SONJO Zoom meetings (and other activities) conditioned their incorporation into the assemblage of governing education through the community. State actors actively engaged in their own partial withdrawal by actively participating in community solutions, which normalise educational continuity dependent on communities’ capacity to self-organise their neighbourhood solidarity through digital media.
In addition to the examples provided earlier, this dynamic is demonstrated in the individual case of Fau, the head of one of the sub-districts in Yogyakarta (interview on 17 March 2023). Using his own money, Fau provided free public internet access points in his district. Fau and others who know him perceived the voluntary action as showing keteladanan (setting a good example) for village heads under his jurisdiction. Some of the village heads subsequently installed WiFi hotspots in public village spaces. Nonetheless, Fau expressed doubt that free internet would be sustained in the long term, as the subdistrict government had no allocated budget for its provision. This case reveals the dependence of educational infrastructure provision on individual moral commitment. It specifically illustrates how state actors actively participate in community self-organisation initiatives, rather than demanding accountability from state institutions, whose response to the crisis reflected longstanding patterns of inadequate social protections.
Communities Self-Governance of Precarious Livelihoods
Lockdowns and supply chain disruptions severely affected Indonesia’s informal sector (Sudarmo Reference Sudarmo2021). Even more so in Yogyakarta, where the informal sector comprises more than half of its workforce (Satriawan Reference Satriawan2023), who already lack unemployment insurance (Ford and Honan Reference Ford and Honan2019) before the pandemic. In this condition, communities assumed responsibility for economic survival through digital self-organisation and the establishment of SONJO Pangan (focusing on food security), three weeks after the formation of Sonjo (24 March 2020). The formation of Sonjo Pangan was a response to, on the one hand, mounting concerns among self-employed precarious workers in small and medium enterprises experiencing severe income losses; and on the other hand, households facing difficulties accessing food due to unstable market operations and mobility limitations.
The WhatsApp Groups SONJO, consisting of two groups with 250 members each, connected small and medium enterprises directly with potential buyers. They operated as a community self-organised virtual marketplace, in which all members acted as group administrators and were therefore free to invite others. The groups coordinated product demand from buyers with the supply and availability of goods from sellers, including fruit, pastries, gift hampers, fresh fish, and ready-to-eat meals. While information was shared within the group, transactions were conducted privately between buyers and sellers. From the Foucauldian governmentality lens, SONJO Pangan enabled the operation of the technology of market governance under crisis conditions (Özgün, Dholakia, and Atik Reference Özgün, Dholakia and Atik2017). It can be understood as a digitally mediated, solidarity-based response to the uneven nature of state pandemic governance, exemplifying citizens’ active participation in ensuring their own well-being amid disruption to market operations during lockdown. Facilitated by WhatsApp groups, sellers and buyers exchanged information and negotiated transactions, thereby substituting for physical markets that were closed during the pandemic.
Among the self-employed precarious workers who participated in SONJO Pangan were Den, a coffee farmer; Lis, a beef trader; and Nun, a tempeh producer Nun, whose business model collapsed during mobility restrictions. Den, Lis, and Nun reflect a broader pattern of informal economic actors who navigated the pandemic-induced market disruption by using digital platforms – through their connection to SONJO - to restructure their livelihoods.
“…Through SONJO, many people got to know my business. Because of the COVID-19 pandemic, I closed the coffee shop outlet and laid off 80 employees. We had no income at all. Through the SONJO WhatsApp Group network, slowly some people bought coffee and even people outside SONJO got to know my coffee through promotions from SONJO people…” (Den, interview on 18 March 2023)
“…well before the pandemic, the turnover was 1 ton a week …. She has five workers. She complained. I sell 20 kilos a week. At that time, Ramadan is approaching, May/June 2020. She reported ..sir Alhamdulillah, the first week with SONJO, I got 60 kg ..the second week, it increased to 180 kg ..the third week, it increased to 240 kg ..approaching Eid, She said; Alhamdulillah, I was able to pay holiday allowance to my five employees ..and he did not fire his employees even though the situation was difficult at that time …” (Rim, interview on 17 March 2023)
Illustratively, before the lockdown, Den supplied bulk coffee to the food industry, Lis provided beef on a wholesale basis, and Nun marketed up to 1,000 tempeh packages per month to supermarkets. SONJO assisted Den’s transition to sell coffee by the cup, Lis’ by the kilogram, and Nun repurposes unsold inventory into tempeh-based meals. This reorganisation of livelihoods helped Lis, Nun, and Den survive the pandemic, all the while accelerating their transition into micro-retailers. Digitally mediated market governance, such as SONJO Pangan, facilitated informal economic actors’ access to consumers, but left underlying structural precarity intact.
In addition to connecting sellers to customers, SONJO’s WhatsApp groups provided a space for self-employed workers in small and medium enterprises to learn from one another about digital marketing strategies. Nonetheless, this form of “empowerment” operates within unchanged structures of insecurity. For Den, Lisa, and Nun, SONJO’s assemblage facilitated their shift from bulk distribution to direct micro-transactions with individual customers. thereby sustaining income during the pandemic, but without fundamentally transforming their vulnerable position in the market.
These arrangements show how crisis situations, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, legitimise a mode of governance that places responsibility for sustaining livelihoods on informal economic actors and self-employed workers themselves, thereby reiterating and deepening entrepreneurial subjectivities. SONJO’s facilitation of a virtual marketplace enabled the coordination of unpaid labour by precarious and self-employed workers to sustain an alternative market during lockdown. Amid disrupted livelihoods, SONJO helped ensure that these workers assume the responsibility for their own survival. These also show how livelihoods and local food security increasingly depend not on public provision, but on citizens’ capacity to coordinate their own survival through unpaid digital community labour.
On the one hand, SONJO’s assemblages provided much-needed health, education, and economic interventions during the crisis by appropriating the logic of sambatan to facilitate resource redistribution. On the other hand, these assemblages operate in ways that reiterate the logic of responsibilisation (Wakefield and Fleming Reference Wakefield and Fleming2009), in which governmental roles in providing basic services are displaced into self-governing communities. Structural inequalities became more visible during the pandemic and were not addressed through strengthened social protections against market forces, but through community moral obligations, activated through the local articulation of a Javanese cultural framework, which mobilised collective responsibility to sustain livelihoods. Broadly speaking, those who are ill remain inadequately protected by health insurance, students and parents continue to bear the cost of education, and precarious informal economic actors and self-employed workers remain outside the scope of unemployment protection.
The cultural frameworks of sambatan help normalise the community’s absorption of responsibility for service provision. Yet, such frameworks, and how they are practised, contribute little to equipping the community with the power to regulate or intervene in market mechanisms, or to demand state protection effectively. These practices show how digitally mediated community solidarity works not by resisting market pressures, but by enabling individuals to survive within them – through community governance, as practised by SONJO. While digital sambatan ensures citizens’ immediate survival, it normalises their survivability within existing structural inequalities. In this sense, citizens serve as non-state actors who extend the reach of neoliberal governance through their unpaid labour.
Conclusion
This article unpacked the contradictory nature of neoliberal governance in Indonesia, showing how digital aid networks mediated the further displacement of welfare responsibilities from the state onto communities within an already fragmented and uneven social protection landscape. The article examined the case of SONJO, in the localised context of Yogyakarta, and found that they deploy the cultural frameworks of gotong royong and sambatan, rooted in Javanese values, which have long served as tools of governance for rulers throughout history. Through the mobilisation of the cultural frameworks, SONJO’s assemblage of actors’ practices community self-organising interventions that make the reality of structural inequalities more bearable. Using a Foucauldian governmentality lens, this article problematised how SONJO facilitated technologies of community self-governance during the COVID-19 pandemic, across healthcare, education, and the economic domains. It showed how SONJO reframed and transformed localised practices of mutual aid into governmental technologies that normalise citizens’ unpaid labour.
The assemblage that SONJO gathered shows that neoliberal governance does not simply create atomised individuals, but can also operate through collective formations, rendering collective cultural practices efficient technologies of responsibilisation. In Yogyakarta, instead of the supremacy of individualised neoliberal values, it is their localised rearticulation through communal frameworks that work. Within the processes, digitally mediated informal networks pooled resources for redistribution, scaling these practices into localised governance mechanisms. Community members, including individual state actors themselves, practised solidarity with those unable to access basic services, without fundamentally questioning, let alone confronting, the state’s inability to provide them.
Importantly, the analysis showed how sambatan’s operation, as a cultural framework, is conditioned by, and in return, reiterates entrepreneurial subjectivity. This operation normalises a condition in which basic services increasingly depend on communities’ self-governance. The local rearticulation of neoliberal principles occurs through the appropriation of primordial values that hold communities responsible for their own welfare. Such patterns highlight the central role of informal social networks in Indonesia’s welfare provision and everyday distribution of resources. While these networks facilitate more dynamic forms of grassroots redistribution, they can also contribute to depoliticisation by conditioning citizens to unconditionally accept responsibility for improving their own well-being, often through unpaid labour (Newberry Reference Newberry2007) rather than demanding state provision. As the state failed to deliver swift life-saving responses, while market solutions inadequately mitigated the pandemic’s broader social effects (Crouch Reference Crouch2022), SONJO exemplifies how informal, self-organised digital communities stepped in to fill the gap. It demonstrates how resource redistribution can emerge through community participation when both the state and the market fail to address multidimensional crises triggered by the pandemic. Spontaneous grassroots community solidarity movements, as demonstrated by SONJO’s work, offer alternative mechanisms for addressing micro-level situations that government programmes often overlook during crises.
The movements gain significance when government programs intended to provide stable, sustainable essential services in health, education, and the economy prove inadequate. Yet, they also risk normalising the transfer of risk from the state to citizens who labour freely in the name of solidarity. In everyday practice, it is easy to mask the political nature of the decision about who gets to live well (or at all) behind the market, privatisation, and individual and community responsibilities. It makes us forget that there is another, more humanistic way to face the issues of life and death before our eyes.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Acknowledgement
This article is part of a research project titled “Precarity and Social Resilience: Understanding Mediatised Politics,” funded by a Research Grant Assignment from the Ministry of Education, Culture, Research, and Technology (KEMDIKBUDRISTEK) of Indonesia in 2022.
