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Abstract
In January 2014, the government of Indonesia issued Law 6/2014 on Villages, primarily to address weaknesses in the decentralisation paradigm by improving governance arrangements and shifting resources to a level of government less captured by special interests. Using longitudinal data from 40 Indonesian villages in the three Local Level Institutions studies, fielded in 1996, 2001, and 2012, we investigate the effects that prior policy has had on village life and identify the likely implications of the 2014 law on village governance. We focus on shifts in the capacities of and opportunities for local governments to increase their responsiveness to community needs, as well as consider the constraints on these governments. We suggest that there is potential for the law to increase government responsiveness—through a combination of strong financial management systems, new national institutional arrangements, and empowered citizens who can apply pressure on village governments to work in the interests of communities—but that substantial risks and obstacles remain.
Pada Januari 2014, pemerintah Indonesia mengeluarkan Undang-undang Nomor 6 Tahun 2014 tentang desa, dengan tujuan utama menangani kelemahan-kelemahan paradigma desentralisasi melalui penambahan alokasi anggaran untuk memperbaiki pengaturan pemerintahan. Menggunakan data longitudinal dari 40 desa di Indonesia dalam tiga studi terhadap institusi setingkat lokal di Indonesia yang dilakukan pada 1996, 2001, dan 2012, kami menelaah dampak yang dihasilkan kebijakan sebelumnya terhadap kehidupan desa dan mengidentifikasi kemungkinan dampak dari UU 2014 tentang Pemerintahan Desa. Kami berfokus pada pergeseran kapasitas dari pemerintah lokal serta kesempatan bagi pemerintah lokal untuk memperbaiki daya tanggap mereka terhadap kebutuhan komunitas, serta melihat kendala-kendala yang ada pada pemerintahan. Kami melihat bahwa ada potensi bagi UU 2014 tentang desa untuk meningkatkan daya tanggap pemerintah—melalui kombinasi sistem manajemen keuangan yang kuat, pengaturan institusional nasional yang baru, dan penduduk yang lebih diberdayakan yang dapat memberikan tekanan pada pemerintah desa untuk bekerja sesuai dengan kepentingan masyarakat—meski sejumlah risiko substansial dan berbagai kendala tetap ada.
Notes
1 For the complete findings and a fuller description of the methodology, see Wetterberg, Jellema, and Dharmawan’s (2014) report.
2 LLI2 also incorporated ethnographies.
3 By looking at information gathered through interviews with village heads, community members, and local leaders (as well as through a focus-group discussion on local government, projects, and elections), the research team was able to rate each community’s level of satisfaction with the village government. The team also rated each village head on the basis of three indicators (working in villagers’ interests, maintaining transparency and participatory norms, and being able to implement decisions). This is in line with the findings of Martinez-Bravo (Citation2014), who found that appointed local officials (heads of urban neighbourhoods) have stronger incentives than elected local officials (village heads) to signal their alignment with upper levels of government.
4 That there were fewer protests against corruption does not necessarily mean that there was less frequent misuse of funds; villagers may have become more apathetic, misappropriations better hidden, or intimidation more effective. However, there were reports of more responsible funds management by development projects. In 2013, the nationwide PNPM Rural program had a corruption rate of less than 1% (PSF 2014).
5 The PNPM Mandiri portfolio of programs transfers funds to subdistricts to encourage the participation of a broad swath of villagers. By doing so, it seeks to identify development priorities and to allocate program resources equitably across villages. Originally operating in only a handful of subdistricts (as the Kecamatan Development Project), PNPM Rural—the largest of the programs—has grown to cover all rural subdistricts in Indonesia, supporting service delivery, small-scale infrastructure improvement, and other priority investments (for evaluations, see, among others, Voss Citation2008; Syukri et al. 2013; and Barron, Diprose, and Woolcock Citation2011).
7 The law did indeed become a political commodity during the 2014 parliamentary and presidential election campaigns: most parties and both presidential candidates endorsed the law, highlighting the strong political support it enjoys.
8 The first interpretation is based on article 18(1) of the Constitution: ‘The Unitary State of the Republic of Indonesia shall be divided into provinces and those provinces shall be divided into regencies (kabupaten) and municipalities (kota), each of which shall have regional authorities which shall be regulated by Law’. In this view, villages are the lowest part of state administration, under the authority and supervision of the district government, as in Laws 5/1979, 22/1999, and 32/2004. The second interpretation is in article 18B(2): ‘The State recognises and respects traditional communities along with their traditional customary rights as long as these remain in existence and are in accordance with the societal development and the principles of the Unitary State of the Republic of Indonesia, and shall be regulated by law’. In an example of the latter, in March 2013 the Minister of Home Affairs introduced the idea that villages need not remain part of the public administration and could return to their origins as self-regulating communities. Public administration would end at the subdistrict level, and villages would regulate themselves as ‘self-local communities’ (Kompas, 14 Mar. 2013).
9 ‘Combining the functions of self-governing community with local self government’ (italics represent English in the original) (Law 6/2014, elucidation, section 1:1).
10 On several occasions in 2011 and 2012, thousands of village officials demonstrated in front of the DPR building, demanding to become civil servants. In the end, the promise of extra funds eliminated this demand. In addition to the increased grants, village heads were given the possibility of a third term. They can now be in power for 18 years.
11 ‘The village head holds the power of village financial management’ (article 75[1]).
12 The international success of community-driven development efforts brings together a set of not very surprising conditions to avoid elite capture, such as high community capacity, low poverty levels, and well-functioning government (Mansuri and Rao Citation2013, 68).
13 Article 56(1) states that ‘BPD members shall be representatives of village residents based on territorial representation, the filling of which shall be done democratically’. The ambivalence towards direct elections mirrors the debate that took place in the DPR in September 2014 on direct or indirect elections of heads of local government, with all parties presenting ‘democratic’ choices.
14 See chapter 7 of Wetterberg, Jellema, and Dharmawan’s (2014) report.
15 In Olken’s study, the National Development Audit Agency carried out audits.
16 For a background on the leadership required for successful institutional change, see the work of Barma, Huybens, and Viñuela (Citation2014) and Andrews (Citation2013).
17 In one World Bank survey, only 20% of a sampled 366 districts complied with the requirement (Menko PMK and the World Bank Citation2016).
18 However, owing to continued uncertainty about the use of World Bank loan funds, the ex-PNPM facilitators were again out of contract in April 2016.
19 An evaluation of capacity-building calculates that, at the present scale, the government would need almost 700 years to provide training to all villages in Indonesia (International Projects Group Citation2011).