Govt reform: Chicken or egg?

Govt reform: Chicken or egg?

By Meuthia Ganie-Rochman

JAKARTA (JP): The keyword under post-Soeharto Indonesia has
been "good governance," charming words since they were expressed
with great expectations. Anyone or any party -- NGO activists,
foreign agencies, bureaucrats, legislators, and now the business
community -- who wanted to be recognized as taking part in making
the new Indonesia must not forget to mention it. The bandwagon of
good governance is getting longer. But will the "train" go in the
right direction?

The international community has put much effort into
supporting the country in renewing many parts of its system. The
World Bank and the United Nations Development Program has
established a forum called Partnership for Governance Reform to
coordinate and encourage initiatives in governance reform. The
forum focuses on the justice sector, regional autonomy,
legislative empowerment, electoral reform, civil service reform,
corporate governance, and civil society. "Partnership" here
refers to common initiatives between the government, foreign
agencies and civil society organizations.

Foreign governments are also developing their own programs.
The United States Agency for International Development, for
example, is assisting the government and civil organizations in
drafting some laws in the economics, environmental law, local
resource management and anticorruption fields. The equivalent
Australian body, AusAID, has just started its Legal Reform
Program, which gives technical assistance and supports various
public institutions and private groups focusing on improving the
legal institutions.

The Asia Foundation, an international NGO, has secured huge
funds to facilitate the institutional reform of the National Law
Commission and National Ombudsman Commission. This is apart from
its other programs supporting private groups in line with a more
political-aware environment, such as its support for a survey on
the public perception of court administration; for a drafting of
an amendment to the law on the judiciary, aiming for its
independence, and its support for a private group seeking
corruption patterns in public services.

Foreign agencies have clearly helped many organizations and
bodies in developing better governance. Many lack resources and
technical capability. In the latter area, sharing experiences
with other countries is particularly crucial, as technical
assistance from donors are mostly relevant for orderly and fluent
societies.

In spite of tremendous efforts by many foreign and local
bodies in good governance, its impact for Indonesia remains to be
seen. This country embodies most of the illnesses of bad
governance. The fate of good governance depends much on the
short-term efforts. That is why it is important to select the
right strategies.

But what should be included in these strategies? In the past
couple of years domestic and foreign bodies working in governance
reform have been struggling to implement the "generic" content of
good governance -- the principles of transparency and
accountability in public sectors. These in turn can only be
assured by democracy as well as the rule of law.

Related programs include strengthening private groups in their
efforts to monitor and restructure judicial systems, drawing up
drafts of laws, making regulations in the economy more
consistent, and strengthening law enforcement bodies.

Cooperation between foreign agencies and civil organizations
has been taking shape for quite a while. Growing participation
from civil groups in monitoring public resources have encouraged
foreign agencies to support their initiatives. Initially, the
approach adopted in most programs treated these civil
organizations as the opponents of the state. But recent
developments show some initiatives that encourage partnership
between elements of state institutions and civil organizations.
There are pilot projects, for instance, where a local government
develops a public service scheme together with a private group.

At the national level, foreign agencies and civil
organizations have focused on some institutions, such as the
Supreme Court, the police, and the Ministry of Justice and Human
Rights. But targeting "the right institutions" is considered
insufficient. Both foreign agencies and civil organizations
increasingly feel the need to involve the wider public in their
efforts, particularly in combating corruption.

Given the degree of corruption here, the issue needs extensive
effort involving many schemes. For the foreign agencies, more
involvement of local elements will pose a lesser risk for them
being accused of imposing their agenda.

There remains, however, potential problems that must be
overcome to make such cooperation succeed in government reform
efforts.

Focusing on the "generic" content of good governance needs a
settled concept of authority among different public institutions.
For example, who is going to monitor the Supreme Court and at
what level? The idea of placing its supervision under the
legislature is not very promising. The last example of selecting
the Supreme Court judges by legislators was criticized given its
lack of transparency and its subjective considerations.

There are suggestions to make decisions in the Supreme Court
accessible for the public through a publication and a website.
This seems a good idea although it will need much pressure to
overcome the Court's likely resistance.

Given that public institutions are rather loose in terms of
authority, there is a tendency to rely on public participation in
governance reform. And here comes the next problem: How ready are
the civic bodies to assume this role and what kind of public do
we have?

Although countless new civic bodies have been set up since the
onset of reform, few are professionally managed or have experts
to work at the design and conceptual level. These organizations
are under pressure to tackle different issues from one another
and many lack focus. Moreover, those that are professionally
managed may know well how to deal with other professional groups
but they sometimes lack capacity to deal with the community. They
need other organizations to inform them on what is happening at
the level of formal structures and in the community.

On the other hand, civic bodies with many activities among the
community are still learning to encourage wider public
participation. They used to work with community groups in what is
called a "close circuit" approach, only defending the needs of
whom they represent in a fairly narrow way. The principle of
social responsibility that potentially connects different groups
is not well developed. For instance, non-governmental
organizations supporting workers would be expected to be more
capable of drawing up strategies taking into account the
different interests of workers and employers.

Developing social responsibility is clearly an important part
of creating a public more prepared to press on with governance
reform at the formal level. Indonesians have been distracted by
previous systems which accept personal ways of solving conflicts
and resource allocation. Public institutions are considered
corrupt and ineffective.

Hence a chicken-and-egg situation develops where people are
not enthusiastic in pressing for governance reform; while
governance reform can hardly be successful without public
participation. Strategies to create public enthusiasm in
governance reform therefore become crucial.

People may indeed not care much about legal reform, but they
would surely be interested in a better public service. The next
step is to develop simple methods to enable wider participation.
We could learn from developing countries with longer histories of
public movements, like India and Brazil.

Then there is the need of capacity building for civic
organizations. Experience shows that more training is needed. New
forms of collaboration between different organizations will
increase the energy of governance reform programs. For this
purpose, a new system of recording human resources and other
kinds of capacities of each local organizations may be needed.

The writer is a sociologist and governance specialist at an
international development agency in Jakarta.