Local Institutional Innovation Under Decentralized Government: Indonesia, The Philippines and Vietnam

Organizer and Chair: Alasdair Bowie, George Washington University

Devolving authority from central to sub-national governments in Southeast Asia has both challenged and presented opportunities for institutional innovation among community organizations, intermediary groups and sub-national government entities. With more resources generated and spent at sub-national levels, community-driven advocacy and watchdog organizations have become more important as checks on official abuse and as sources of grass roots knowledge of on-the-ground conditions essential to the effectiveness of sub-national government programs. Intermediary non-government organizations, aggregating and transmitting the needs and information generated by community-based organization to national policymakers have also become more important. Finally, local government entities themselves often have had to innovate institutionally and in their policy orientations to attract new resources from the private sector.

The panel papers each report on aspects of these developments in one country from one social science disciplinary perspective: Wiley’s (Philippines; regional and urban planning) concerns innovative collaboration between local community organizations, the city government, and the central Department of Natural Resources for the management of the only fully-devolved Philippines national park, in Puerto Princesa; Reimer’s (Indonesia; communications) focuses on two intermediary organizations which have reinvented themselves to aggregate and transmit upwards to national-level decision makers innovations regarding local (usually district) governance generated from networks of community organizations; and Bowie’s (Vietnam; political science) explains variation across regions in the record of provincial governments’ innovations to attract private investment in the form of new industrial management/promotion boards and new province-based incentive packages.

Brian S Wiley, University of Wisconsin, Madison

Planners critical of top-down planning approaches that detach planners from local peoples argue that power should be devolved from central bureaucracies to locally-elected governments. They do so assuming that locally-elected officials are likely to be more sensitive to local demands. This paper examines how devolution may not encourage the bottom-up accountability often hoped for through a close examination of the case of the only devolved protected area in the Philippines, the Puerto Princesa Subterranean River National Park.

The park was devolved to the city government of Puerto Princesa, which chairs a management board that includes central and local government officials, NGOs, indigenous peoples and peoples’ organizations. Although this innovative structure facilitates formal community participation, the importance of the park as a tool for patronage politics for city leaders poses obstacles to both democratic decision-making and professional planning and management. Many representatives to planning meetings are either indebted to the mayor for their positions or depend on his access to resources for their livelihoods. While with this management board structure it is possible in theory to advance "local" interests, it is frequently the case that local interests mirror the priorities of the city government. Professional management is also hindered when positions in the park bureaucracy are coterminous with the incumbent elected regime.

Based on the analysis of key informant interviews and public documents, this paper concentrates on an examination of the management of the park after its devolution. The reality of Puerto Princesa Subterranean River National Park suggests that theories of devolution need to better address the role that patronage politics may play when planning functions are to be devolved to lower levels of government.

Teresa M Reimers, Ohio University

After more than three decades of treading lightly around the New Order government as a semi-opposition movement, Indonesian civil society groups are burgeoning, representing a variety of constituencies and interests. Many of these groups are community-based organizations at the district level, providing public services where the government has lapsed and monitoring the government performance. The ability of these organizations to effect change at the local level is limited by poor coordination with similar initiatives elsewhere in Indonesia and by a weak capacity to navigate new regional and central government laws and regulations that provide the framework for decentralized government.

This paper is among the first to report on intermediary organizations, such as policy advocacy groups, that are emerging to address the problems that civil society groups face when encountering the public policy sphere. Based upon six months of field research, this paper explains the strategic network-building role of intermediary organizations in strengthening both community organizations and local governments by aggregating policy innovations advocated by community organizations to "feed forward" those innovations to policy makers. This paper draws on theories of inter-organizational communication to illuminate the progress of two intermediary organizations, the Center for Inter-group Relations and Conflict Resolution, a think tank based at the University of Indonesia, and the Legal Aid Foundation Network of Indonesia (YLBHI), which promotes public policy. The main finding is that the influence of intermediary organizations in feed-forward policy innovations is growing significantly, but continues to struggle with limitations in penetrating the policy-making sphere.

Alasdair Bowie, George Washington University

With the increased autonomy Vietnam’s provincial governments have been granted to regulate and attract private investors, with the enactment of the Enterprise Law in 2000, a small number of (mostly southern) provinces have been identified as frontrunners in winning the lion’s share of Vietnam’s foreign investment. However, expectations of economic policy innovation and dynamism for most of Vietnam’s provinces, given the history of Hanoi’s highly centralized economic decision-making, have generally been quite low, especially for those provinces in the North and Center, where Hanoi’s influence remains strongest.

This paper compares regional--Northern, Central and Southern--experiences of provincial government innovation under the decentralized schema of the Enterprise Law. Drawing upon interviews, statistical data, and ethnographic observation conducted in 2003-2004, it reports on institutional and policy innovations that have had demonstrated effectiveness not only for new foreign but also with new domestic investment, even in provinces where you’d least expect departures from centrally-directed norms. The paper also analyzes the experiences of some provinces that have failed to develop institutions or approaches that might win private sector investment, despite having the advantage of conditions favorable to new investment. The paper analyzes characteristics of the history, institutions, culture and leadership that appear to be spawning innovation in some provinces but not in others. "Closeness" to Hanoi, in a number of different respects, has not proven the obstacle to innovation that a priori one might have expected.