Pasar Papringan

In the two cases (PPK and PPN), Pasar Papringan used economic approaches through market activities but it did not neglect environmental, social, and cultural aspects. The economic approach is not addressing the economy of scale, and it is not concentrating solely on a single sector like farming, instead, on quite extensive sectors. Low productivity is not at the root of the problems that Pasar Papringan is addressing; rather, it is the low value of the village’s products that is responsible. Consequently, Pasar Papringan’s approach attempts to add value to local products through quality improvement and creativity. Instead of considering the village

163 issues as peripheral to the above problem, Pasar Papringan is positioning the village as a center by adopting the glocal (global-local) idea and attracting outsiders to come. Therefore, Pasar Papringan’s missions do not represent the key principles and typical rural problems that are salient in the exogenous model.

The need to utilize specific local resources (human, natural, cultural resources), as rendered explicit in the endogenous model, is absolute in Pasar Papringan. There are two main principles; (1) That the village can solve its own problems; and (2) the preservation of local culture. The two main principles of Pasar Papringan also highlight the types of rural problems that are targeted by the organization. The two Pasar Papringan cases have similar concerns for major rural problems, namely the villages’ forgotten potential and their backward images. The village potential is related to its human, natural, and cultural resources. The human resource problem is related to the brain drain and the limitations of living and working in villages—in other words, participating in economic and developmental activity. In addition, the cultural resources issues emphasize revitalizing the hidden potential of local culture that people have usually considered backward, hence forgotten.

The SLOC concept that strongly influences the village revitalization in Pasar Papringan is closely related to the general principles of promoting relationships between the local and the extra-local and exploiting networks and access to the external capital. Even though it is not emphasized as the main mission of the organization, Pasar Papringan has attempted to attract urban citizens to the village to inspire them about living and working there. Such an attempt represents a key principle of the neo-endogenous model. Moreover, one of Pasar Papringan’s main objectives focuses on the placemaking that is accompanied by attempts to conserve nature and seeks to address more significant issues like climate change and sustainability.

164 b. Antecedents: Opportunity Identification, Multiple Stakeholder and Access to

Capital

The influence of the urban center and the state control to drive the activities is absent in both cases of Pasar Papringan. However, PPK was driven by Spedagi, which is still an external organization. In contrast, the locals initiated the collaboration with Spedagi in the case of PPN.

Therefore, the two cases of Pasar Papringan highlight different dynamic force models through their opportunity identification processes: PPK represents the typical exogenous model while PPN represents the endogenous model. Even so, the stakeholders – and the capital – that are necessary for developing both of the opportunities at Pasar Papringan have come from both internal and external sources. Spedagi, its team of volunteers, the government, and the locals, have all contributed to the opportunity development process. The wealth of contributions, from a range of sources, foregrounds the significance of the neo-endogenous model in the process.

c. Process: Organization Governance

The governance of PPK is dominated by top-down approaches, in which decision-makers and program planners are the external actors who implement the exogenous model. Nonetheless, villagers may propose ideas of their own regarding the program. The governance of PPN is different at both the early and later stages of development. At an early stage, it is the volunteers who are the decision-makers; in this way, the governance style of PPN is rather similar to that of a top-down exogenous model of governance. However, the role of the founder – who is an internal actor – in designing the programs, together with the volunteer team, is also important to be noted. At a later stage, the assistance team withdraws their involvement from the structure and acts as a consultant partner of the organization. At this stage, villagers have full control of designing the programs and making decisions – which are reached through discussions – thereby indicating that an endogenous model is in use.

d. Process: Operational Model and Business Performance

Pasar Papringan’s operational model has demonstrated a type of rural function that is at the forefront of neo-endogenous models, combining both exogenous and endogenous

165 characteristics. The manager and some villagers mentioned improvement related to agriculture, but this is not being achieved through the typical Modernist method, such as the introduction of agricultural machinery from the outside. The method in these cases instead emphasizes the maintenance of local culture, while providing methods for sustainable utilization of resources by concerning nature conservation and encouraging habituation to this method. The Modernist approach usually focuses on single agricultural commodities such as the green revolution in Indonesia around the 1970s. Conversely, Pasar Papringan encourages plant specialization.

Pasar Papringan offers tourist activities, including homestays and retail sales of local products, thereby functioning as a consumption-based economy. However, Pasar Papringan’s business model targets customers beyond the families of the A and B class economy – who are mainly visitors from outside the rural area – and visitors from the C class economy, who tend to reside in the surrounding area. I met many visitors who were from other villages around the market site as well. Indeed, Pasar Papringan Management admitted that those who may contribute a lot to the generation of revenue are those who are from non-rural residences.

However, the tourist activities at the market, provided by Pasar Papingan, are for visitors from all economic backgrounds.

e. Outcome: Social Value Creation

The economic improvement is still dominant for most villagers. Economic development is one of the most substantial impacts recognized by the villagers in both cases. However, Pasar Papringan did not achieve it by scaling the production, but by focusing on adding value to the products and services by improving quality and using creative approaches.

Capacity building is one of the main targets of Pasar Papringan activities. For example, villagers learned new skills through several programs, such as training for managing the market, English training, or other related workshops and seminar. Pasar Papringan’s capacity building was achieved through contextual education—suitable and directly related to villagers’

166 lives—rather than a formal institution. Pasar Papringan’s activities also serve to increase villagers’ levels of participation in development activities, thereby strengthening the social cohesion among villagers. The resilient issue of rural place can have a further impact on achieving a sustainable and independent village vision. Locals’ abilities of improvement by developing village potential and utilizing local natural and cultural resources implies increasingly independent and sustainable villages.

The creation of the Pasar Papringan area is very much related to placemaking. It is not only about the market’s physical infrastructure, but also a creation of public space that promotes people’s health, happiness, well-being, and interaction between the locals and extra-local actors. The outcome of Pasar Papringan’s attempt to cope with geographical exclusion is also related to the placemaking issue, where villages are promoting interaction and connection between locals and outsiders. Pasar Papringan aim to encourage villagers to stay and work in the village, although the capacity building programs often require villagers to join activities outside their villages. The institutionalization of the social entrepreneurship (SE) approach in PPN has proven that the output of Pasar Papringan has realized and validated an alternative approach to rural development. Instead of the decrease in the public budget issue, the Indonesian government has increased the rural development fund by issuing the Dana Desa59

policy since 2015. However, Pasar Papringan has been minimizing its dependency on government budget by generating sustainable income through selling products and services, while accessing capital and funding from various sources. Entrepreneurial activity might be closely related to neoliberalism, but Pasar Papringan promotes fair trade (e.g., business

59 Dana Desa refers to funds that have been sourced from the state budget and are intended to facilitate the development of village autonomy, including government administration, infrastructural development, and community development.

167 transparency and environmentally-friendly market principles) and it returns the profits to the villagers as beneficiaries.

The aims of improving levels of local participation, building their capacity to manage their local resource, and promoting both the use and the potential of local resources necessitate a significant endogenous model in the context of Pasar Papringan’s plans for, and focus upon, rural development. However, the effort to develop placemaking as one of the intended outcomes, and to build connections between rural residences and urban visitors or collaborators, implies a deliberate combination of a rural development focus with a neo-endogenous model by Pasar Papringan.