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Managing Global and Local Institutional Pressures: Decentralisation and the Legitimacy Project in Indonesia

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The Politics of Educational Decentralisation in Indonesia

Abstract

The chapter argues that educational decentralisation is politically constructed for the sake of rejuvenating the central state’s legitimacy. Under the New Order regime (1966–1998), Indonesia became one of the most centralised nations in the world. Indonesia’s resilient economy and powerful military control had been successful in securing political stability and (real or perceived) mass loyalty despite the increasing external and internal demands for change. However, the economic crisis and political democratisation in the late 1990s caused the regime’s loss of confidence from international and local communities. Decentralisation was then embraced to accommodate the external pressure of global institutionalisation as well as to compensate for the internal crisis of legitimacy. This chapter discusses the institutional mechanism that makes educational decentralisation a global norm, its pressure to Indonesia’s centralist governance, and the internal response to such pressure.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    To retrieve the hit counts, I use common keywords associated with educational decentralisation: ‘educational decentralization’, ‘school decentralization’, ‘school autonomy’, ‘school-based management’, ‘school choice’ and ‘charter school’. I have to acknowledge the different searching methods these three engines have, which affected the method I used to retrieve the hit counts. The Web of Science and Ebscohost are equipped with one-time multiple searching and filters to elimate the repetition, whereas the Google Scholar does not. Hence, for Google Scholar, the retrieval only used two keywords: ‘education decentralization’ and its British spelling ‘education decentralisation’ and ‘educational decentralization’ along with its British spelling ‘educational decentralisation’.

  2. 2.

    As education came to be decentralised, in 1999, the Wahid government changed the department’s name from the Ministry of Education and Culture (MoEC) to the Ministry of National Education (MoNE). This was to differentiate the central education department from the regional education offices. Another reason for the change was President Wahid’s own philosophical position; he understood that culture is too universal to be technically administered by a particular bureaucratic organisation. After this change, the Directorate General of Culture was then removed from the Ministry of Education and, later, under the Megawati government, was subsumed under the Ministry of Tourism. However, in 2011, President Yudhoyono restored the Directorate General of Culture to be part of the central Education Department and the Ministry was officially renamed its old label: the Ministry of Education and Culture (MoEC). The book uses MoEC in all contexts because the study was conducted after 2011.

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  1. Centre for Policy Research, Ministry of Education and Culture, the Republic of Indonesia, Jakarta, Indonesia

    Irsyad Zamjani

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Zamjani, I. (2022). Managing Global and Local Institutional Pressures: Decentralisation and the Legitimacy Project in Indonesia. In: The Politics of Educational Decentralisation in Indonesia. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-6901-9_4

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