In the past few years, government has conducted sustainable development. Essentially, however, the quality of social development cannot be measured by target or state funding amount.
“Social development enhancement cannot be done just by seeing at the how large social policy is administered by the state or how much the funding is,” said Prof. Dr. Susetiawan, SU, on Tuesday (23/10).
He touched upon the issue during the national seminar themed Strengthening Social Development to Achieve the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) to celebrate the 63rd anniversary of Faculty of Social and Political Sciences. In a keynote speech he delivered the thinking behind the effort to explore common sense knowledge as a source of shallowing emancipatory act.
Susetiawan explained empowerment has an emancipatory meaning, a release from unfriendly, discriminatory, and oppressive social structure into a just and humane social structure.
He saw common sense as an act that is always done on the basis of sensing, that is when something observable is captured as truth and emulated. This made empowerment lose its meaning so everyone may talk about empowerment without understanding the real essence.
“How SDGs can be achieved when there are acts of shallowing, society’s thought remaining in the common sense way of thinking. What if people doing development don’t actually achieve empowering results, but instead moving people away from humane behaviours?” he said.
He opined that it became the duty of people working in social development to untangle the problems in the way of thinking rather than just focus on the 17 indicators of SDGs as the main social development standard.
In the same place, Prof. Dr. Janianton Damanik, M.Si. revealed the challenges facing Indonesia related to social development acceleration. These include poverty reduction, welfare improvement or subjective satisfaction on daily life, and food security.
He also saw that health security is important to be resolved because good health security programme can support the achievement of qualified human resource. He further emphasised the private sector engagement in support of government development policy.
“Private sector has a crucial role in realising SDGs in the form of innovation, speed to respond to technology changes, efficiency and skill development,” said Anton.
The seminar also presented expert staff to Minister of National Development Planning, Rahma Iryanti, and Senior Officer for Membership and Partnership of INFID, Hamong Santono.
In conclusion, Dean of Faculty of Social and Political Sciences, Dr. Erwan Agus Purwanto, said “The theme of the seminar is very right to be discussed by the speakers that directly work with social development issues. Hopefully, of this seminar may arise views that can be adopted into government policy.”