Beyond imitation: Adaptive policy transfer in Indonesia’s Conditional Cash Transfer

Abstract

Conditional Cash Transfers (CCTs) are a prominent social policy in the Global South. Indonesia’s Program Keluarga Harapan (PKH), introduced in 2007. The paper reconceptualizes policy transfer by treating adoption and adaptation as mutually constitutive mechanisms. We specify two mechanism bundles. Using a qualitative case study with 15 semi-structured interviews and document analysis of government and international reports, we show that adoption without adaptation would have lacked local fit, while adaptation without adoption would have lacked legitimacy and financial support. Their interaction produced a recognizably global yet distinctly Indonesian PKH that weathered administrative fragmentation and infrastructural constraints. Our main contribution is to specify four testable interaction mechanisms linking adoption and adaptation: (1) targeting and the DTKS working with facilitators, (2) conditionalities working with Family Development Sessions and phased sanctions, (3) bank transfers working with staged digitalization, and (4) a maternal and child focus working with coverage expansion; we show that their joint operation accounts for PKH’s survival and concrete design. Theoretically, this advances a tractable framework of hybridization as a transfer outcome, moving beyond coercion versus adaptation dichotomies and yielding observable implications for program survival and design. Future work should test these mechanisms comparatively and quantify the effects of Family Development Sessions and digitalization on compliance and inclusion.