OTONOMI DAERAH: INDONESIA'S DECENTRALISATION EXPERIMENT

Abstract

In 1999 the central government of Indonesia designed a set of laws to promote Otonomi Daerah, literally ‘regional autonomy’. This paper discusses the potential for these Otonomi Daerah laws to be effective in promoting decentralisation in the current economic and political climate. To do this, we initially outline why decentralisation is often chosen by governments of developing countries, and then critique the benefits of a move towards decentralisation. Then, we draw on recent and ongoing experiences in Indonesia to examine in detail the processes underway there. After contextualising the Indonesian case, including a brief outline of the structure of the Otonomi Daerah laws passed in 1999, a critique of the laws is undertaken from which six key problems emerge. Given the complexity of these problems, the question we then address concerns how likely is it that Otonomi Daerah will succeed in promoting decentralisation in Indonesia?

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 76 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.