Partnership for governance reform in Indonesia

Abstract

This article responds to a critical examination by Gordon Crawford of the concept of ‘partnership’ in contemporary development aid discourse, using the Partnership for Governance Reform in Indonesia (the Partnership) as an example. The article contends that Crawford's deconstruction of the Partnership is highly questionable, as it is based on a selective inclusion of information which challenges many of his observations, up to a point where his conclusions become untenable. Power relationships and processes of opinion making and decision making are increasingly located in complex and transnational settings, characterised by shifting alliances among international as well as domestic stakeholders. Crawford approaches the power relationship between donors and Indonesians as if it were locked up in the Partnership, which makes a mockery of his case study. There is no empirical evidence suggesting that Indonesians are easily ‘mystified’ by their donors. Instead, the short three‐year history of the Partnership shows a process in which Indonesians have increasingly taken control of both day‐to‐day leadership as well as the development of longer‐term strategy. It is suggested that, instead of a focus on structure and agency, a more promising approach to grasping shifts in power between donors and local stakeholders would be to analyse the discourse in a partnership following a concept of organisational culture.

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