Regions know what to do to develop themselves

Regions know what to do to develop themselves

The following is the second of two articles on management,
written by Owen Podger, a management consultant who for the past
year has been team leader for an ADB-grant technical assistance
to support decentralization.

JAKARTA (JP): Every region this writer visited over the past
year is unique in its approach to decentralization, all
experiencing excruciating frustration because of the lack of
guidance from the centre.

But governments, representatives and fledgling civil society
institutions in every region are actively creating concepts of
"region" from scratch, carving out for themselves the respective
roles of government, legislature, community, activitists,
parties, and society as a whole.

We may not agree with the style of leadership in regions, and
be deeply disturbed by the small number of "little kings", but
most regions would appear to have more effective leadership than
the center at the moment.

Vriens claims "worse, the President has abolished the ministry
of regional autonomy that was responsible for introducing it".
The year and ministry are wrong. Vriens refers to the August 2000
abolishment of the State Ministry of Regional Autonomy. This
ministry took six months to establish its own program, and in its
10 months produced only two of the vast number of required
government regulations.

During the year before, implementation of decentralization was
being led by a coordinating minister who was also responsible for
government administrative reform.

A coordinating minister is a more senior position than a state
minister. In October 1999, Gus Dur abolished this senior
position, undermining the coordination between implementation of
regional autonomy and the central reform that is just as
essential for the success of decentralization.

Creation of the office of the ministry of regional autonomy
was the mistake, and abolition of this ministry last August only
half corrected it.

Was regional autonomy introduced to avoid break-up of the
nation, as Vriens suggests? This seems to be a myth. Ten years
before the new law was introduced, former home affairs minister
Rudini conducted his famous Golkar campaign trail throughout the
country "listening to the grass roots", and discovered that
central government policy and program, time and time again, did
not match local needs.

At that time, the fear was not so much the break-up of the
nation, for that was not even contemplated, but the internal
threats to the power of the centre. Thus Rudini and his academic
advisers from Yogyakarta's Gadjah Mada University and elsewhere
proposed the elimination of autonomy at the provincial level
altogether.

A series of seminars around the nation in the early 1990's
illustrated just how enthusiastic regional administrations and
educated elites were for great autonomy at the local level,
though the abolition of provincial autonomy was somewhat
sidelined in the debate.

After all, regional government was enshrined in the
constitution, and had been widely discussed throughout the Old
Order, culminating in a decentralization act in September 1965,
that was even more liberal than the Law 22/99.

It was introduced just weeks before the Sept. 30 incident that
introduced the centralistic New Order, and was never implemented.
It was replaced by Law 5/1974, which still maintained the
intention of managing most government affairs locally, but this
law was never effectively implemented.

While the Rudini initiative ran out of steam, regional
autonomy remained a central policy in the State Guidelines from
the MPR for the following decade. Thus Law 22/1999 is more a
breakthrough of an old agenda, than an effort to hold the country
together.

But the weakness of the provinces in the Law remained, as an
attempt to prevent too much power at a level which, the elite
considered, could challenge the state.

It was the old principle of divide and rule. Irian Jaya was to
be divided into three provinces, without consultation with the
people.

Law 22/99 was prepared with reference to the draft World
Charter of Local Self Government, which calls for popular vote on
changes to boundaries. At the time Indonesia even participated in
conferences debating the draft.

It is interesting to note that Law 22/99 does allow for the
views of the people to be taken into account in the definition of
village government, complying with the draft Word Charter at that
level, but not in the definition of regions. This indeed would
appear to have been a deliberate policy.

This long history of the development of regional autonomy, and
the highly exposed dramas surrounding the former state ministry
of regional autonomy and the ministry of home affairs, can hardly
be called introduction of "change of Indonesia's government
structure by stealth", as Vriens claims.

If it was not "introduction by stealth", then what was it? It
was introduction with unreasonable haste, without a clear plan,
with doubtful support in the huge central bureaucracy (which is
understandable but not honorable), and with an unfortunately low
quality of the little implementing regulation that has been
developed so far.

These are all signs of chaos in the center, not chaos in the
regions, though the impact of that chaos cannot help but be
manifest in the regions.

What is encouraging in the regions, in both government and
civil society, is the level of hope that they will manage their
own destinies through the confusion, and the level of debate and
expression of aspirations -- and thus conflicts -- despite the
enormous odds generated by the haste, and the lack of plan or
central support or legal framework.