Reconstruction of Opposition Norms and Social Inclusion in Indonesian Urban Poor: A Study of Street Vendors Restructuring in Jakarta

The study discusses the implementation of policy on the street vendors restructuring in some strategic traditional markets in Jakarta.  The implementation applies a new different approach which attempts to involve strategic stakeholders in planning of arrangement. The approach encourages stakeholders’ participation in the whole stages of process. The approach creates debates of pros and cons among the stakeholders in the area of the market.  The debates reflect a hidden structure of the market.  The existence of actors such as thugs (preman) in various level forms an opposition norms which regulates the urban economic activities.   The Jakarta local government, through the policy, has forced and reconstructed the existing opposition norms.  Consequently, the policy results in resistances.  The local government accommodates the actors of the hidden structure into the restructuring process. The consistency of local government has reconstructed successfully the integration of hidden structure and opposition norms into the structure of state formal policies.  The direct impact of such policy is the social inclusion of small scale urban economic actors who are also the urban poor groups. The pro-poor policy becomes a contrasting policy amidst the neo-liberal economic policy that tends to benefit the large scale capital. The study applies qualitative method by interviewing the economic actors and the policy makers.  It is also supported by the secondary data collected from the Indonesia printed news media. The context of the study is Tanah Abang Market as one of the largest Southeast Asian Traditional Market.