Effective poverty alleviation requires serious commitment and concerted action on the part of political leaders. Unfortunately, poverty alleviation has had few real champions among the Indonesian bureaucratic and political elites. Beyond the rhetoric of election campaigns, many prominent figures soon go missing in action – or their voices and their efforts are drowned out when more immediate and pressing political problems emerge. Programs and policies that might contribute to alleviating poverty now also require cooperation from political leaders and officials at many levels – and this is difficult to achieve in decentralised Indonesia where power and political authority are so diffuse and the capacity of central government agencies is limited.

Despite the political openness that has prevailed since the collapse of Suharto's New Order regime in 1998, serious debate about poverty alleviation policy has been rare in Indonesia and has not received the attention it deserves in a country where the majority of the population is either poor or at risk of becoming poor. Many other major political issues – constitutional change and the creation of a new national electoral system, the place of the military in politics, decentralisation, resolving the Aceh problem, dealing with outbreaks of communal violence – have taken precedence, dominating debate among politicians and party leaders.

In practice, poverty alleviation has largely been left to technical specialists and planners within agencies such as the National Development Planning Agency (Badan Perencanaan Pembangunan Nasional, or Bappenas), where particular directorates have assumed responsibility for designing and planning most of the programs that have thus far been implemented. Research institutions and some universities have also been involved in assisting the government to design and evaluate programs, and donor organisations have given strong support to anti-poverty programs.

In sharp contrast, until the most recent elections, poverty has not been a high-priority topic for discussion and debate among the major political parties. Parties have been slow to formulate and release carefully considered public policies in this area, and party leaders have demonstrated little understanding of the dimensions and the root causes of entrenched poverty or the complexities involved in attempting to arrive at appropriate strategies that might lead to sustained progress. As a result, many opposition politicians and party leaders in particular have fallen back on populist slogans and empty rhetoric during election campaigns.