Indonesia’s New Developmental State: Interrogating Participatory Village Governance

Monitoring, Evaluation and Learning
Policy Research

This article analyses the implementation of the New Developmental State in Indonesian politics and development as the realisation of the increasing authoritarianism of President Joko Widodo’s administration. Rather than focusing on the national level, as other studies do, this article focuses on subnational contexts, particularly at the village level, and the implementation, since 2014, of the world’s largest participatory village governance experiment. Data were collected during three years of longitudinal monitoring and additional ethnographic fieldwork in different parts of Indonesia. Framed in the New Developmental State perspective, this article characterises New Developmental governance in Joko Widodo’s regime as a pragmatic and hybrid approach to village development and governance with roots in New Order developmentalism. Of special importance is the transmission of authoritarian ways from the national to village level through village institutional arrangements. Notably, this new approach to village governance has failed to encourage creative and innovative village governments and has made village democracy vulnerable.

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Author 
Muhammad Syukri
Author(s)
Research Area 
Jambi
Central Java
East Nusa Tenggara
Keywords 
Indonesia
new developmentalism
authoritarianism
village
participation
Publication Type 
Journal Article
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