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VOL. 12, ISSUE 12 (2025)
From policy to practice: A case study of the informal caregiving gap in Jakarta
Authors
Dinni Agustin, Evelyn B. Valencia
Abstract
Jakarta, as the political and administrative
nucleus of Indonesia, embodies a profound contradiction in the nation’s
response to demographic aging. Despite hosting the central ministries
responsible for social welfare, labor, and health and benefiting from the
highest per capita fiscal capacity among Indonesian provinces the city lacks a
functional system to support the estimated 680,000 informal caregivers who
sustain elder care in the absence of formal services. Drawing on a sequential
explanatory mixed-methods design, this study investigates the
policy-to-practice gap in Jakarta through secondary analysis of the 2023
National Socioeconomic Survey (SUSENAS), encompassing 1,042 caregiving
households in the capital, complemented by in-depth interviews with thirty
informal caregivers and twelve frontline bureaucrats across North, South, and
East Jakarta. Quantitative findings reveal that 71 percent of households with
older adults rely exclusively on informal care, with women comprising 82
percent of primary caregivers’ 63 percent of whom are economically inactive.
High-intensity caregiving, defined as twenty or more hours per week, is
associated with a 2.1-fold increase in labor market withdrawal, translating to
an average annual opportunity cost of IDR 18.2 million, equivalent to 12
percent of median household income in the city. Despite this substantial
burden, none of Jakarta’s five major social assistance programs including the
flagship Program Keluarga Harapan (PKH) and Kartu Jakarta Pintar Plus (KJP+) contain
eldercare or caregiver-specific provisions. Qualitative analysis uncovers three
interlocking barriers to policy implementation: bureaucratic fragmentation
across twelve institutions with no caregiving mandate; the cultural
depoliticization of care through dominant narratives of bakti (filial piety);
and the systemic invisibility of caregivers in municipal data systems and
administrative routines. Grounded in Lipsky’s theory of street-level
bureaucracy and feminist political economy, this paper argues that Jakarta’s
governance architecture actively reproduces caregiver precarity by treating
care as a private moral duty rather than a public economic responsibility. The
study concludes with an integrated municipal policy roadmap: the establishment
of a Jakarta Informal Caregiver Registry, the introduction of local care
credits linked to BPJS Ketenagakerjaan, and the institutionalization of
Caregiver Impact Assessments for all social programs. By diagnosing the
structural roots of implementation failure in Indonesia’s policy capital, this
case study offers critical insights for urban aging governance across the
Global South.
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Pages:186-190
How to cite this article:
Dinni Agustin, Evelyn B. Valencia "From policy to practice: A case study of the informal caregiving gap in Jakarta". International Journal of Multidisciplinary Research and Development, Vol 12, Issue 12, 2025, Pages 186-190
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