A community empowerment and local enterprise development model for smoked Sardinella microenterprises has been developed to investigate their operation in coastal Southeast Sulawesi, Indonesia. Smoked fish processing is a household livelihood activity that preserves local knowledge and supports coastal income, but producers involved in the industry still face unstable supply of raw materials, traditional equipment, simple packaging, limited chances of certification, restricted market access, weak business organization, and fragmented institutional support. A qualitative case study was conducted from September to December 2025 in Laeya and South Palangga districts, South Konawe Regency. Data were collected through in-depth interviews, participatory observation, document review, and focus group discussions involving 102 informants, including 42 producers and 60 Pentahelix stakeholders from the community, government, academia, business, and media groups. The data were then analyzed using five approaches: the Input-Process-Output-Outcome-Impact framework; Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats (SWOT) analysis; the Internal Factor Analysis Summary (IFAS); the External Factor Analysis Summary (EFAS); and thematic interpretation. The internal score of 2.70 and external score of 2.65 placed the enterprises in a growth-oriented Strength-Opportunity position. The findings revealed that producers had strong traditional skills, local product identity, social trust, and regular local demand. However, their empowerment remained functional rather than transformative because production, market access, and institutional capacity were still weak. The novelty of the study lies in specifying how bonding social capital could be converted into bridging and linking mechanisms through a community-centered Pentahelix arrangement. The model offered policy guidance for shared processing facilities, certification pathways, group-based finance, and digital market linkage. These findings contribute to community development scholarship by clarifying the mechanism through which local enterprise assets could move from functional survival to transformative empowerment.
Participatory development has become a major paradigm in poverty alleviation. In Indonesia, however, the transition from the Urban Poverty Alleviation Program (Program Penanggulangan Kemiskinan di Perkotaan, P2KP) and the National Community Empowerment Program in Urban Areas (Program Nasional Pemberdayaan Masyarakat Mandiri Perkotaan, PNPM) to the National Slum Upgrading Program (Kotaku) shifted the orientation of urban development from community empowerment toward physical infrastructure delivery, raising concerns about the institutional foundations of participation. This study examines how program characteristics changed across this transition, how these changes affected facilitator capacity and community self-reliance, and how facilitators responded to the new program environment. Using an interpretive qualitative single-case study in Makassar, Indonesia, the research drew on in-depth interviews with 17 purposively selected informants from different program eras, supplemented by document analysis and field observations. The data were analyzed through deductive–inductive coding using NVivo 14, with source and method triangulation, member checking, and audit trails used to enhance credibility. The findings identify structural changes across six interrelated dimensions, with the shift from empowerment-oriented facilitation to project-oriented implementation emerging as the dominant theme. This shift contributed to the deinstitutionalization of empowerment infrastructure through the weakening of facilitator training, field-based learning, reflective practice, and intergenerational knowledge transfer. Consequently, facilitator capacity and community self-reliance declined, while participation became increasingly procedural rather than substantive. The study conceptualizes this process as an institutional form of the tyranny of participation, in which participation is hollowed out through the erosion of the conditions required for meaningful empowerment. It therefore highlights the need to restore facilitator training, reflective methods, and sustained learning cycles in future urban development programs. Program performance should be assessed not only through physical outputs and budget absorption but also through improvements in community capacity and self-reliance.
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