Dancing with Legitimacy: Globalisation, Educational Decentralisation, and the State in Indonesia

Abstract

Decentralisation has become a global norm that has changed the face of education governance in many countries since the late 1970s. Indonesia was completely swept up by this movement in 2001 after the severe legitimacy crisis ended the three-decade-reigning centralist regime of the New Order. This thesis aims to analyse the way educational decentralisation helped to save the nation from the crisis, but was then faced with challenges from the local district governments because the central government endeavoured to restore its control. Using the analytical concepts of the new institutional theory and drawing upon data from documents and 38 interviews with strategic informants, the thesis investigates how the institutional legitimacy of educational decentralisation was garnered, manipulated, and then contested. Like other newly decentralised nations have experienced, the narrative of educational decentralisation in Indonesia was initially scripted by multilateral actors with the neoliberal spirit of market supremacy. However, against the arguments that suggest the weakening of the central state or the rise of market institutions, the findings show a rather contrasting reality. Decentralisation has facilitated the proliferation of states in the local district arenas, which equally claim institutional legitimacy for governing the local educational system in their respective ways. The presentation of the findings is organised into three main parts. In the first part, the thesis analyses the global and local processes of the delegitimation of the centralist regime, and the way decentralisation becomes a strategy for garnering compensatory legitimation for the central state. In this case, decentralisation was part of the loan condition imposed externally by multilateral institutions and also became the magic word to settle down the internal secessionist aspirations. In the second part, the thesis also discusses the institutional mechanism that enabled the central government to restore its power after decentralisation, while keeping itself legitimate. In this sense, the decentralised structure remained, but the central government employed the discourse of local incompetence to introduce other means of centralisation. Lastly, in the third part, from the comparative studies of two local district governments, the thesis shows how the legitimacy of the central government authority continues to be challenged in the localities. Despite the central government’s pressures for national standards and their enforcement measures, local educational governance survives with different models and practices. In conclusion, I argue that the different local governance types do reflect an ideal practice of decentralisation. However, in Indonesia this ideal is not the case because decentralisation has created different and illegitimate local practices. They are illegitimate because these practices are not based on the solid consensus of the regulatory structure and norms which exist between the central and the local states. Thus, rather than becoming a local basis for reinforcing the legitimating capacity of educational decentralisation as a global institution, the different practices might become the local source of delegitimation. Some national states would rethink their conformity to the international pressure of decentralisation if they were aware that the policy would potentially lead them to another crisis of legitimacy. Show more