Reshaping Cultural Policies for the Promotion of Fundamental Freedoms and the Diversity of Cultural Expressions in Indonesia
Indonesia has collaborated with UNESCO through the first cycle of the capacity-building programme on participatory policy monitoring, funded by Sweden (2014-2018). Indonesia’s collaboration resulted in the submission of the country’s Quadrennial Periodic Report (QPR) in 2016. Through this exercise, Indonesia has been committed to enhancing and establishing sustainable participatory monitoring mechanisms. With this established methodology, Indonesia is now embarking to elaborate its new QPR building on the 2017 Law regarding the advancement of culture as well as Culture White Papers, the Culture Strategy and new national statistic framework on culture and development. Based on the results of the first cycle, media diversity has been identified as one of the areas of monitoring needing further capacity building. Activities through this cycle (2018-2021) will hence focus specifically on monitoring media diversity to support Indonesia in drafting the dedicated section of the QPR and to establish sustainable mechanisms to monitor media diversity. This includes monitoring issues relating to diversity of content, media ownership, editorial independence and media freedom.
A training workshop on media diversity and the diversity of cultural expressions was organised from 17 to 19 September 2019 in Jakarta, Indonesia. Fifty-three persons, primarily working on Indonesian media sector, participated in this training, including central government departments, private media companies, universities, civil society organisations and individual experts. All the speakers underlined the importance of media diversity as a fundamental component of an inclusive and democratic society, reflecting the voice of all groups and in particular, those marginalized.
The purpose of this workshop is to assist the Department of Culture in preparing the section related to media diversity in the quadrennial periodic report, notably by creating a platform of exchange between the Department of Culture and media professionals for enhancing cooperation between the different stakeholders. The long-term objective is to develop a regular mechanism of monitoring media diversity as well as to equip media professionals with the tools to advocate for the promotion of diverse cultural expressions in the media.
The participants discussed digital transformation, regional balance in accessing local content, lack of data, lack of funds and infrastructure and media ownership during the training. Group discussions took place to identify measures to strengthen diversity for the media and the film sectors as well as gender equality in media.