What Prompts Policy Change? Comparative Analyses of Efforts to Create Age-Friendly Cities in 14 Cities in Indonesia

Abstraksi

In 2007 the World Health Organisation (WHO) launched the Global Age-Friendly Cities (AFC) guide, intended to improve the health, participation and security of older adults and respond to dual global trends of urbanization and population ageing. A decade later, we examine efforts to create age-friendly cities in Indonesia, the world’s fourth most populous country, where the uptake and implementation of such initiatives has progressed at different rates. This analysis takes advantage of a 2013 AFC assessment of 14 cities, using the WHO index, and accompanying recommendations to governments on how they could become more age-friendly – the same ‘intervention’ intended to influence city-level policy, conducted at the same time within the same national context – to perform a comparative analysis of what changes have taken place in these cities over time and across which dimensions of the index. Four years after an age-friendly city (AFC) assessment across Indonesia, this paper presents a comparative analysis of policy changes that have taken place across different AFC dimensions, and factors associated with more and less change. Nine of 14 cities initiated changes, ranging from public declarations, regulations, and creation or expansion of services. Our findings suggest that the AFC assessment can offer a means to engage policymakers, which in turn may facilitate city-level change, particularly for larger cities with more substantive budgets and more consolidated rather than dispersed leadership; however, no single factor represented a sufficient or necessary condition for change.