In 2018, the Indonesian government scaled up its conditional cash transfer program called the Family Hope Program. Approximately 10 million poor women became entitled to social assistance programs. This reflects a trend across the global South: social assistance programs have increasingly provided women with new social entitlements. Despite significant achievements in the expansion of social assistance, issues of exclusion and gender inequality in Indonesia persist (OECD 2019).

Although public discourse has focused on issues of exclusion and inclusion errors due to mistargeting, the debate tends to overlook ‘exclusion by design’—omission of particular population groups due to their lack of legal entitlements (Leisering 2019). While in Indonesia social assistance or social insurance has extended considerably, it tends to overlook some vulnerable population groups such as the elderly, people with disability and those in the informal sector (Holmemo et al. 2020; OECD 2019; TNP2K 2018). This lack of coverage for these vulnerable populations also has a gender dimension.

While Indonesia’s approach parallels other social assistance policies that target women as the primary recipient, gender equality and women’s empowerment are not priority objectives of the country’s social protection strategy (Sabates-Wheeler and Kabeer 2003). While scholars have discussed how social assistance programs overlook the structural barriers faced by women (Bradshaw 2008; Holmes and Jones 2013), researchers also need to examine how different notions of deservingness shape and influence the pattern of exclusion and inclusion.

In this chapter, I examine how the notion of deservingness leads to a pattern of exclusion (Leisering 2019) in Indonesia’s social assistance. Notions of deservingness influence policy around social assistance, such as which groups to target and the rationale and framing that government uses to justify its policy choices. Historically, the idea of the ‘deserving poor’ emerged at the time of the English Poor laws, when overseers of the poor would differentiate between the deserving and the undeserving. This involved categorising those seeking assistance into different groups according to specific moral or ideological judgements (Alcock et al. 2002). The ‘deserving poor’ were those entitled to resources because they could not work due to no fault of their own (Watkins-Hayes and Kovalsky 2016). Overseers considered others as undeserving due to their lack of virtue, including their ‘unemployed’ status. As notions of deservingness change over time, different categories of vulnerable people can move in and out of social assistance programs (ibid.). Such notions of deservingness are also at work in Indonesia.