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.