Abstract

Poverty manifests a complicated and multifaceted issue in Indonesia. A subset of the poor in Indonesia cannot benefit from the increased welfare. One of the reasons is because of the creation of plantation sacrifices the forest, trees and wood, making the ones who depends on natural resources more vulnerable. Thus, the absence of a tool that can monitor policy and aligns with sustainability concerns causes the environment to be a blind spot for policymakers. This study investigates whether accounting for sustainability in measuring poverty yields a different landscape of poverty in Indonesia and how it relates to the current policy priorities. the Alkire-Foster method of multidimensional poverty is adopted and modified to construct the poverty measure that aligns with the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). For the data, Indonesian Socioeconomic Survey and Village Potential Data is merged to provide the necessary variables, ensuring the poverty measures consider both environmental and sustainability factors. This new measure is compared to current poverty measures, while Indonesia’s Village Fund (one of the largest community development programs in the world) is used as a reflection of Indonesia’s multi-sectoral development policy. The results find contrasting patterns for the various poverty measures, in particular for the provinces on Kalimantan Island, where low apparent monetary poverty ignores the poor’s substantial exposure to environmental threats and degradation. In addition, the allocation of the Village Funds does not align with sustainable development goals since the proposed measured that incorporate sustainability provides different allocation of Village funds. Finally, the measure proposed in this study can contribute to improving the monitoring and targeting of policies with SDGs priorities.