Red tape bottleneck matter of bureaucratic pathology

Red tape bottleneck matter of bureaucratic pathology

Improving productivity and efficiency of the bureaucracy has
been the government's obsession for a long time. The work week
which will be tried out soon is seen as to achieve that goal.
Sociologist Kastorius Sinaga argues that bureaucratic reform is
imperative in this globalization era.

JAKARTA (JP): The World Bank recently discussed the red tape
of Indonesian bureaucracy in its latest annual report.

The Indonesian bureaucracy was assessed as one the main
bottlenecks with the major potential to inhibit Indonesia's
economic growth. This report has been drawing public attention
ever since its release.

According to the Bank's assessment, if Indonesia wants to
sustain a high economic growth of eight percent per year,
bureaucratic reform is an absolute must as a follow-up step to
market deregulation.

To some extent, the Bank has heralded the already classic
problem in a new fashion. By the early 1970s, this problem was
widely recognized. For the first time, the Bank announced the
inability of highly bureaucratic political and administrative
systems to stimulate development processes in developing
countries.

This awareness has accordingly led to the shift of the Bank's
development aid emphasis from state-controlled "modernization" to
the concept of "people-centered development".

Now, in the 1990s, the Bank's critique of the limitations of
public bureaucracy is reconsidered. This is done, however, in
line with the program of private sector promotion which
consequently means a further strategy is required to cut off
structural bottlenecks.

The aim is to enable the capitalist system to be rooted more
deeply in the Indonesian economy, which in this case has
potential, either as the source of natural resources, or as a
potential market for industrial products.

"Traditional"

In line with this context, the focus on the problem will
revolve around the chronic bureaucratic red tape and the future
agenda for treating and eradicating the pathology.

As frequently pointed out by many intellectuals, the function
and the problems of Indonesia's bureaucracy, like those in other
developing countries, reflects the chronic topology of the
"traditional" notion of bureaucracy.

In the Weberian sense, it typifies "a patrimonial bureaucracy"
in which the civil service symbolizes the "arena of unequal power
relationship" between the "patron and client". In this context,
the bureaucracy represents the state's hegemony over the society.

And last but not least, the state bureaucracy presents itself
as political vehicle for the self-interest-oriented relationship
between the existing around-power strategic groups which are
struggling for the appropriation of political and economic
assets.

With such notions of performance, the bureaucracy means
neither a "rational organization" accepting the necessity of
rules and regulations, nor a social instrument recognizing
competence, fair competition and standards of excellence in
public service.

In contrast to the ideal, the pathological dysfunctions of a
bureaucracy appear: low self-esteem, graft and corruption,
inefficiency and lack of professionalism.

In relation to this pathology, the misconception of what
public service actually constitutes is widespread in most of our
bureaucrats' minds. There is a casual relationship between the
lack of acceptance of public duty and the concept of civil
service with deviant behavior in government, which generally
results in inefficiency.

This manifests itself, for instance, in the fact that civil
servants tend to make and want to maintain a public office and
public facilities as their individual preserve, instead of
viewing them as a public trust. This can constitute a strong
temptation among those who are in the state bureaucracy and in
the corridors of power in any nation.

Feudalistic society

This tendency is manifestly acute in a feudalistic society
like that of Indonesia where standards of recruitment are
strongly influenced by deep-seated, although grossly out-dated,
values and where the mechanism of bureaucratic and social control
is still relatively weak.

We have witnessed that while several feats have been achieved
in the arts, science and technology, our state bureaucracy, as
the engine of development, has retained its old style: sluggish
and centralized.

Hence, the future of the bureaucracy will largely depend on
what hard decisions the Indonesian government will make. If it
continues to treat the existing pathology within the bureaucracy
as a bundle of problems of secondary priority, then the
deterioration of the bureaucracy will continue unabated.

This is potentially dangerous in terms of the reality that the
pressure of global economic dynamics will be tremendously
challenging to the Indonesian bureaucracy in the coming decade.

Apart from this, the increasing population, greater demands
for services, dwindling resources, coupled with archaic
administrative systems, and the traditional bureaucratic
mentality will not allow the bureaucracy, with its continued
pathology, to be productive.

Any call for bureaucratic reform from any source is,
therefore, an urgent demand at this present time.

And one of the most important entry points for such reform is
the "depoliticizing" of the bureaucracy. This consequently means
liberating our bureaucracy from the political domain of specific
groups or parties, thus enabling it to develop as the
professional agent of the nation's development.

The writer holds a doctorate degree from the University of
Bielefeld, Germany, and now works as visiting lecturer for the
Post-graduate Program in Social and Political Sciences at the
University of Indonesia.