Organizer: Indonesia Project at Australian National University (ANU); Department of Economics, Faculty of Economics and Business at Universitas Gadjah Mada (FEB UGM)
Type/Location: Hybrid / Yogyakarta, Indonesia
Description:
The 10th Annual Mubyarto Public Policy Forum explores Indonesia’s shrinking middle class, lasting poverty, and vulnerability, featuring a keynote by Professor Sharon Bessell on child poverty.
About the 2026 Keynote Lecture: Rethinking Poverty to Ensure All Indonesian Children Thrive
Indonesia has achieved remarkable progress in reducing poverty, improving the lives and opportunities for millions of people. Yet major challenges remain and gains in poverty reduction appear precarious. Indonesia now faces a ‘middle class squeeze’, while almost a quarter of the population are identified as vulnerable to poverty. Moreover, rates of child malnutrition, particularly stunting and anaemia, remain very high.
Achievements in reducing rates of poverty at the population level, together with ongoing and emerging challenges, provide a foundation for a new vision with greater ambition: asking not only how poverty rates can be held steady or further reduced, but what is required for every child to live free from multidimensional poverty.
Professor Mubyarto’s vision of development placed people, social justice, and shared prosperity at the centre of economic and public policy. This lecture takes inspiration from that vision to consider what a similarly ambitious, people-centred approach to poverty requires when we begin from the experience of children themselves.
Based on research with children, families and communities in Indonesia through the Suara Anak project, and drawing on research from Australia, this lecture introduces the Material-Opportunity-Relational (MOR) Framework. The MOR Framework recognises the fundamental importance of material resources, while showing how poverty also constrains children’s opportunities now and into the future and places foundational relationships under pressure.
Indonesia’s achievements in poverty reduction create the possibility of raising the bar while current challenges require new ways of thinking. This lecture explores the need to move beyond minimum thresholds towards a child-centred, multi-dimensional understanding of poverty that is grounded in children’s own experiences, and centring what they need to develop, learn, participate and thrive.
About the Speakers:
Keynote Speaker:
Sharon Bessell is a Professor at the Crawford School of Public Policy at The Australian National University. She is the director of the Children’s Policy Centre and co-host of Policy Forum Pod.
Discussants:
Ririn Salwa Purnamasari is a Senior Economist at the World Bank, working on key development challenges in Indonesia, including poverty reduction, inequality, employment and gender disparities.
Ni Luh Agastya is the Director of the Center on Child Protection and Wellbeing at Universitas Indonesia (PUSKAPA UI), and a lecturer and researcher at the UI Department of Social Welfare.
Wisnu Setiadi Nugroho is an economist and researcher at the Department of Economics, FEB UGM, specialising in poverty, economic inequality and development economics.
Qisha Quarina (moderator) is an academic and researcher at the Department of Economics, FEB UGM, specialising in labour economics, education economics and social protection within the broader field of development economics.
About the Mubyarto Public Policy Forum:
The ANU Indonesia Project, in collaboration with the Department of Economics, Faculty of Economics and Business, Universitas Gadjah Mada (FEB UGM), is pleased to present the 2026 Mubyarto Public Policy Forum. This series is named in honour of Professor Mubyarto, a prominent economist at Gadjah Mada University, who was one of Indonesia’s most influential intellectuals. It aims to stimulate debate on development policy issues in Indonesia. Mubyarto Public Policy Forum 2026 is open to students, academics, researchers, policymakers, and the general public!
Registration:
To attend the event in person, please register here.
To attend the event virtually, please watch the livestream here.