TheJakartaPost
Please Update your browser
Your browser is out of date, and may not be compatible with our website. A list of the most popular web browsers can be found below.
Just click on the icons to get to the download page.
Making government work
The coordination of government is a difficult problem in every country, but in Indonesia today it is especially fraught
Change Size
T
he coordination of government is a difficult problem in every country, but in Indonesia today it is especially fraught. Everyone has complaints about the impossibility of achieving coordinated government action.
The old model of governance involved strong central command, implemented through three channels: the army, the Big Man's 'cronies' and the national planning agency. It was an arrangement that allowed a few people to control the nation.
Other countries have followed similar models. Some form of national-planning model was used almost everywhere in the years after World War II, when many countries first gained their independence. Initially this approach to governance helped to kick-start a more modern economy, through direct project interventions.
However, over time the problems of the economy, society, and government gradually become too complicated to be solved this way. Politics evolved, and the national-planning approach became less effective in handling development complexity. About 40 years ago some countries began moving towards different ways to coordinate development, and since then the shift away from 'the plan' as a tool of governance has gathered pace.
With the arrival of democracy 20 years ago, Indonesia began its own journey in this direction. So now the question arises, where is that going and how is Indonesia doing?
When we look across the range of countries that have abandoned the national-planning approach we see they have generally evolved towards what we might call a national policy management model, to replace the old national plan. Clearly something of that nature is also under way in Indonesia, but so far it is only happening in small steps. The country seems to be caught in mid-channel between two islands, one island that it cannot return to and one island it cannot quite reach.
In fact many countries have found the process of transition tricky and confusing. Part of the confusion arises because planning as an activity continues even as the plan itself declines in practical
importance.
__________________
An open architecture of the policy process supports participation, contest of ideas, accountability and transparency.
Out of habit countries often continue to prepare official plans even though they have moved away from using them in practice. They may instead prepare 'perspective' plans, or non-binding 'indicative' plans. For many countries there is clearly still a need to prepare investment programs to ensure that the national infrastructure is developed.
But while some planning activity continues the real emphasis has to be placed on an adaptive, exploratory process for implementing a variety of different plans. Eventually, 'policies and programs' replace conventional 'projects' in the thinking of senior officials, and the 'planners' find they need to become 'policy managers'. It becomes clear that the new processes of policy management do not need a national plan as a foundation, even though some planning still has to happen within the policy management process.
In the best cases, countries put in place (i) a design process for generating the flow of new policies and new programs, (ii) a strategy process that economizes on scarce resources for implementing policies and (iii) a delivery process for overseeing the implementation, and for holding different agents properly accountable for results.
Those processes manage the three critical stages in the 'life cycle' of policies. But they require an apparatus at the centre of government to manage them in a holistic way.
So what does this policy management model look like in practice? The answer varies.
Unlike the old national plan, which had a clear and logical simplicity, and was therefore relatively easy to set up and manage, there is no single dominant model for central policy management. But there are important features that are commonly found across many countries. A sort of 'genotype' can be discerned, which may provide a template for Indonesia to use as a guide in deliberations about system design.
One of the insights of the better national policy management systems is that policies, like projects, have a life cycle that needs to be managed. It is not enough just to design polices and launch them.
Some policies may last a long time but in the modern world a national policy may only have effective duration of five and ten years before it begins to degenerate, and needs to be fixed or replaced. Its decay contains the seeds and the lessons with which to devise its successor. But this will only happen efficiently when there is a management apparatus in place that 'sees' the whole cycle in a strategic and holistic way.
Here are a few other important features of the policy management systems used in a number of well-run states:
* The political leadership is brought into play at key points in the policy cycle, especially in regard to (a) the collective decision regarding policy choice and which policy design to implement, and (b) the immediate oversight of how policies are actually implemented.
* Enormous importance is placed upon implementation or 'delivery' as the true test of good policy making, with corresponding emphasis on accountability for performance and results.
* Great care is taken to build an information architecture for evidence-based policy making.
* More generally, an open architecture of the policy process supports participation, contest of ideas, accountability and transparency - but without loss of central control.
* There is institutional learning to make continuous improvements in policy making, as well as improvements in individual policies.
Can Indonesia really achieve this, and if so how? In fact most of the key organizational pieces are already here, and waiting to be connected up. There are no fixed blueprints for this, but it is clear enough what would have to be done. Every country develops by using the pieces it has available to it, and Indonesia is no different.
Indonesian agencies and outfits like the National Development Planning Board (Bappenas), National Team for Alleviating Poverty (TNP2K) and Presidential Working Unit for Supervision and Management of Development (UKP4) have roles and functions appropriate to the task outlined. Together they pretty well cover the range of activities required.
But adjusting them and getting them to work together is a complicated collective action problem for the leadership ' and there should be no doubt this change calls for leadership.
A leader must demand it, champions will be needed to unleash the change, and a network of motivated and clever technicians will be required to carry it through. Given that, there is no fundamental reason why the center of government cannot be constituted to deliver that the modern state needs.
______________
The author is a change management advisor working with TNP2K and funded by Australian Aid.
