Solidarity and Participation: Women’s Experiences in Village Decision Making Exclusion

Women's interests should be accommodated in government decision-making practices, including at the village level. However, various studies have shown that the accommodation of women's interests in decision-making experiences various obstacles, both due to government actors and government mechanisms. This research focuses on looking at actors and government mechanisms based on politics and gender prespectives in Sidomulyo village, Batu city. Regarding to those focuses, they are elaborate into three objectives. First, identifying issues about women in Sidomulyo village. Second, identifying political actors in Sidomulyo village and observing the women’s position. However, active participation of women in the grassroots level is not linear with their involvement in practices of formal decision making in the village level. Women are generally excluded due to lack of access to participate, so that they do not have control over development priorities and budgets in the village. Political dynamics and decision making in Sidomulyo shows that the governance actors involved are CSOs and the village government, but both contribute to an asymmetrical relationship. From gender aspect, quantitatively women in government are categorized into underrepresented with descriptive representation in which policies and budgets are discussed in a gender-neutral way.