Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 2014. xxvii, 536 pp. (Illustrations, maps.) US$39.90, paper. ISBN 978-981-4459-84-6.
When the prodemocratic movement had successfully forced Soeharto to step down and ended the New Order regime (1967–1998) in 1998, Indonesians soon faced a daunting challenge: to come to terms with the violent legacy of the regime and to institute post-New Order political, economic, and legal reforms. Thirty-two years of an authoritarian and militaristic regime left unresolved cases of gross human rights violations and established a hegemonic, inefficient, and centralized state system. Structural reforms carried out by post-New Order governments have addressed these legacies with various degrees of success, from total failure to partial success. Among the efforts, bringing human rights violators to court has been the most difficult initiative to realize. On the other hand, reforming the governance sector has been more or less successful and has led to the creation of various state commissions and institutions to anticipate the diminishing power of the state and the emerging aspirations for more political openness and financial accountability.
This book discusses the different dynamics of institutional reform and how the reform needs to manage a shift in political authority, from a tightly controlled bureaucratic structure to a more democratic form of state governance and less influence of the military in national and local politics. Drawing on the long-term engagement by the Australian National University to study Indonesian politics and economy, the book presents a very detailed picture of the opportunities and problems encountered when Indonesia launched a broad initiative to decentralize its political system, financial accountability, legal structure and norms, and social policies. In examining the process that the Indonesian state has followed to reform the political, economic, and legal sectors, the essays in this book identify the centralized system of state governance as the main target of institutional reform in post-New Order Indonesia. In so doing, they locate the threshold that separates the authoritarian from the decentralized form of political, social, and economic control in the 1998 political crisis and the ensuing collapse of the New Order regime. As Anne Booth indicates in her contribution to the edited volume, the 1998 crisis is a political “big bang” that has released a plethora of productive and unproductive responses. The essays in this book analyze the tensions and interminglings of the productive and unproductive forces that have framed the discourses and practices of decentralization in the national and local contexts since the New Order regime collapsed.
Apart from Anne Booth’s essay, which traces the historical development of the decentralization debate prior to 1999, the essays in this volume focus more attention on the period after the 1998 political reform. The topics covered in this volume are diverse: the relationship of central and local government, fiscal decentralization, urban planning, special autonomy region (Papua and Aceh), public service, migration and urbanization, human rights politics and environmental management. Hal Hill in his introduction correctly emphasizes that the complex decentralization process has touched upon almost every dimension of state governance and sociocultural life that the edited volume wants to address.
Such a diverse topic has made this edited book an indispensable and important reference to the study of decentralization in Indonesia. In fact the book’s important contribution goes beyond the study of Indonesian politics and economy. It stands as a critical comparative contribution to the literatures on similar processes of decentralization and centre-local relationships taking place in other countries in Asia, such as in the Philippines, Malaysia, Thailand, or India. While some of the features of the social and political dynamics of migration, election, regional development, human rights trials, or forestry policy may exhibit local concerns and specific power negotiations among local actors, some features also demonstrate similar trends and tendencies that have emerged from related colonial policies on the regional level.
Despite the important contribution it makes in terms of mapping out and analyzing the complexity of decentralization, the book lacks a long-term historical framework that could explain the emergence of a specific economic or political pattern or the interactions among stakeholders. However, Anne Booth’s essay and a few scattered remarks in Blane D. Lewis’s essay and in the essay by Cillian Nolan, Sidney Jones, and Solahudin provide all-too-rare examples of the contributors’ attempts to touch upon the historical development of the dynamics of decentralization. For a book dedicated to the late Thee Kian Wie, a leading Indonesian economic historian, the lack of such historical analysis that goes back to the period before the New Order is regrettable.
When this book was published in 2014, sixteen years after the New Order regime collapsed, four presidents had appeared on the Indonesian political stage. A very different political climate has emerged, in contrast to the thirty-two years of New Order rule, when Soeharto was re-elected every five years as president. Despite the change, the essays in the book also demonstrate that almost two decades of democratic government has hardly brought the legacy of the New Order to rest. Even though the decentralization initiative introduced in the early 2000s was expected to replace the New Order’s system of centralized government, it has failed to escape the legacy of proliferated corruption, political brokerage, and extrajudicial violence. The creation of new state bodies to fight corruption has not discouraged corrupt bureaucrats, and the establishment of a human rights commission has not resolved past human rights violations. Therefore, reading between the lines, the essays in this edited volume highlight a less optimistic, albeit realistic, fact: that no political transformation can offer a radical break with the past. What will take place after the political “big bang” is instead a complex dynamics of power negotiation which incorporate and at the same time abandon the structural elements or normative values of the previous political regime. This book has done a good job of portraying and examining this process in post-New Order Indonesia.
Fadjar I. Thufail
Indonesian Institute of Sciences, Jakarta, Indonesia