Regionalism in Post-Suharto Indonesia.

• Author: Federspiel, Howard M.
• Position: Book Review

Regionalism in Post-Suharto Indonesia. Edited by Maribeth Erb, Priyambudi Sulistiyanto, and Carole Faucher. London and New York: RoutledgeCurzon, 2005. Hardcover: 234pp.

Indonesia is currently attempting to redistribute political power away from the unitary republic for a more decentralized system in which decisions would increasingly be made at the provincial and local levels. Progress towards that goal was the subject of a seminar in Singapore in May 2002 attended by a number of social scientists at universities and special research centres in Europe and Southeast Asia. Many of the papers presented at that seminar have been included in this anthology, with a third of the authors coming from Indonesia. Significantly, there are no weak articles in the anthology and they come together as a whole to give a good portrait of the Indonesian nation, which is unique among recent books describing the structure and policy formulations of that country.

Maribeth Erb, the lead editor of this anthology, sets the political tone of the anthology in the opening article, severely judging the New Order government for its authoritarianism, its paternalism, and its corruption. She notes that efforts at reform in the post-Suharto government have been slow, accompanied by considerable inefficiency, outright stalling, and attempts by some groups to bring the emerging decentralized system under the control of self-serving interests. She is particularly concerned about the manipulators whom she claims are closely associated with the New Order, who are portrayed as promoters of corruption and who thwart the growth of democracy in Indonesia. She makes clear that she sides with the reformers who are interested in devolution of power within the political system and she infers that the other authors of the various articles are in agreement with her viewpoint. This may well be so, but their presentations usually avoid such unequivocal judgements.

The articles fall into three general categories. The first category deals with decentralization, usually the dynamics of the process. The strongest of these articles, by Muriel Charras, analyses the criteria used for restructuring the district (kebupaten) level of political administration and its meaning to the populations affected by those changes. She assesses that in most cases the new districts have been created to accommodate particular ethnic groups, but that such reconfiguration often have as many drawbacks as benefits in...