The Politicized Schooling: Institutionalizing Educational Decentralization in Indonesia's New Democracy

The paper discusses the effect of new democratic environment on the implementation of a globalizing policy of educational decentralization in Indonesian municipalities. It identifies the new policy has created a new organizational arena in which different governance arrangements arise beyond the policy’s original will.

The Indonesian education decentralization policy was enacted in the early 2000s following one of the world’s most radical political decentralization projects. The central Education Ministry has transferred most of its authorities to municipal administrations whose leadership is established through a democratic election. This new policy also offers greater school autonomy as well as invites wider civil society participation. While much research on education policy heavily emphasizes the role of formal institutions, this paper highlights the involvement of non-formal sectors that nonetheless play more dominant function. Analyses are done through developing two neo-institutionalist’s concepts: “organizational field” and “governance and exchange relations.”

Using the former, this paper proposes that the new democratic field has left the reformed education system trapped in a democratic network of constraints, involving numerous organized interests like political parties, teacher unions, education corporates, and rent seeking entrepreneurs. New alliances between autonomous schools and private suppliers do enable schools to attain their immediate outputs. However, school principals cannot simply enjoy such autonomy for they have to maintain a patron-client relationship with the municipal officers who appoint them. 

Furthermore, employing the latter concept, the researcher goes beyond the boundaries between institutional and technical environments in analyzing the effect of those organizational relations. Such relations do to some extent reflect the technical aspect of mandated civil society participation and help educational organizations avoid a loosely coupled management. As they become routine, however, new institutionalized practices are established. And as a result, the effort for their fulfillments tends to overlook the substantive changes originally intended from the policy.