“Good Governance” (GG) is a new manifesto of politics of development avowed both by developed and developing countries. GG is a framework of development management that has been evolving since the early 1990s.

In Indonesia, this framework has been run through various institutional reform programs which were mostly geared and supported by donor countries. Indonesia’s GG  programs have had three main goals: strengthening law enforcement, improving state legitimacy and elected government, and improving the efficiency of economic allocations.

Each objective has been applied in specific programs. The objective of law enforcement, for example, has been applied in legal reforms and police reforms. The objective of state institution legitimacy, has been applied in areas of legislative reform, election reform and local government reform. The third objective has been applied in the areas of tax institution reform, one-roof licensing and budgeting institution reform.

Those programs have been intensified in the last 10 years. Many donor agencies have poured funding and skills in attempting to improve Indonesian governance. So why have the improvements seemed so slow? Why is corruption still rampant – even more   so in law enforcement institutions? Why can we see hardly any effective and efficient resource allocations? Why have the Indonesian people developed an apathy toward public officials?

We can analyze the reasons behind these unsatisfactory results from various angles. From the aspect of scope, it can be imagined that problems ingrained within the state institutions are huge and complex. No matter how much funding is poured into fixing them, it will make no difference to the embedded institutional problems. Certainly we can make the argument that if resources are used strategically, the results would be much better. There have been significant issues related to the weakness in donor coordination in aiming to achieve integrative programs.

We can also see a problem of a lack of coherence between funding programs and the real condition of target institutions. For instance, a program aiming to achieve budget transparency where the material basis of its legal resources is too narrow to run its function, untouched organizational culture, or the uncritical attitude of social groups it served.  

There is also problem of leadership and ownership in state organizations to make these programs sustainable. It is not uncommon that leaders are not truly committed to undertaking reform programs within their organizations. Most of them passively wait for initiatives from donors.

But apart from weakness in the areas of implementation, reform programs based on GG preserve conceptual weaknesses. First of all, in the meaning of governance itself. Governance is a new way to see how authority relations are managed. In the past, the government is the center in the establishment of authority. “Governance”, in contrast, sees a wider range of interaction between the state and the people (as a composite of different groups).  Even though the discussion is focused on the state as the holder of the highest level of authority, the formation and implementation of authority are seen from the perspective of its relations with societal groups.

With a focus on interaction, change and implementation of public policy can be seen in the interaction of state institutions with various groups. This basic principle is often overlooked in reform programs. Many donors, for example, that support programs to improve transparency and accountability, seem to assume that a change can be attained without systematic attention being paid to aspects of interaction between public officials and societal groups. Of course it could be found that a reform program is successful more because of factors of leadership or perfect management frameworks.

However, many well-intended programs need to pay attention to the capacity and orientation of the societal groups to be engaged. As an example, a mechanism in a public organization that is meant to provide information should be in line with the civil groups that count on and use it. Otherwise, this information will be meaningless or gradually twisted.

The second basic conceptual weakness is that the GG framework is based on what is expected about interaction between elements in the system.

There is already a predisposition in understandings of composites of elements, characters of elements, and patterns of interaction, and backgrounds of these elements are  not systematically addressed.

However, in a country in transition, the principles of public institutions need to be reformulated. Depictions of interactions between civil society and public organizations, for example, often rely on the model of a Western democracy with its own version of rationality and competency.

All these incorrect assumptions have shaped the view about how to control the process of change in applying GG principles in Indonesia.

There are some aspects that can be revised. First, rethink the meaning of concepts relating to GG, such as transparency and accountability, in an  Indonesian context. Everybody can talk about “transparency”, but how many understand its form, scope, risks and impacts within a public organization?

Furthermore, improve understanding about the relations between public organizations with various social groups, and between public organizations themselves.

It is also important we differentiate between actors who use public organizations and the organization itself. The influence and capacity of each actor or organization should be understood because change often requires the engagement of many societal groups.

The writer is sociologist in various organizations at the University of Indonesia.

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