ABSTRACT
Indonesia has been the target of development aid and cooperation for several decades. Especially after the collapse of Suharto’s authoritarian regime in 1998, the ‘Reformasi’ movement and the governments that followed were, and are, heavily supported by international donor organizations. One of the central pillars in this regard is the ‘good governance’ approach, which encompasses democratization and decentralization reforms, the latter implemented at such a pace that they were named the ‘Big Bang’. Since then, Indonesia has been regarded as a model country for adminis-
trative decentralization and as such has been evaluated as a successful case of international development cooperation. In recent years, this euphoric narrative has been put into question (see Bünte 2011). Scholars argue that decentralization should not be misunderstood as an end in itself but was rather intended ‘to bring the government closer to the people’ (World Bank 2001). For such a goal, political participation beyond voting is of central concern to donor agencies. The latter have been very active in promoting civil society participation on all government levels (local, regional, national) and in all stages of policymaking. NGOs receive special attention in this regard. They are used by donors as representatives of ‘civil society’ and targeted with programmes and funds. Despite all the programmes, over ten years after the ‘Big Bang’ the vibrant
civil society to which the development agencies aspired is not evident in Indonesia. What does this tell us about the potential of norm diffusion in the context of development cooperation? In this chapter, participation will be analysed as a norm, the implementa-
tion of which was attempted in Indonesia through good governance projects initiated by development agencies from Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries and the United Nations (UN) level.2 In addressing the ambivalent evaluations with regard to the success or failure of this norm transport, I argue that the mainstream constructivist concept of norm diffusion is too narrow to adequately grasp what has happened. Rather, the norm has been localized and hence mingled with existing
structures, preferences and norms which are summarized as Cognitive Prior (Acharya 2009). The theory of localization by Amitav Acharya (2004, 2009) therefore
informs this case study. Building on interviews with staff members of the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) and nongovernmental organization (NGO) representatives from Java with whom they cooperated, I analyse how the norm has been framed, pruned and grafted by Indonesian actors, facilitating a process of hybridization during which the participation norm meets an existing normative framework represented by the integral state and Pancasila, as well as Adat practices.3 I hold that this process did indeed bring change, but not necessarily that which was aimed for by the development agencies (norm entrepreneurs). If localization holds in this context, it explains why donor concepts such as decentralization can lead to paternalistic practices in the provinces, which, by making use of the localized norm, can be legitimized to the global Other by local rent seekers or traditional leaders. In order to check for this, I first outline the theory of localization as a constructivist norms research framework, before outlining the civil society participation norm and its relevance to development cooperation. The cognitive prior with which this international norm is confronted is outlined in a third section. Subsequently, I illustrate how this cognitive prior constitutes Indonesian ideas about how the state should be organized. In a last section, I trace the localization process to which the participation norm has been subject since Reformasi.
