ABSTRACT
The transnational move towards decentralization has made democratic decentralization somewhat of a sine qua non of State public sector reform (Edmiston, 2002). In administering to this move, the donor agency and development administration literature considers the types of decentralization, the dynamics leading governments to embark on decentralization programmes, the set of programmatic objectives that these reforms seek to address, and the associated problems that emerge as state administrations attempt to implement decentralization programmes.1 By taking such a global comparative perspective and attempting to locate patterns among diverse variables, development agencies and practitioners have developed a broad set
of explanatory narratives concerning decentralization policy design and implementation (Roe, 1991). In contrast, a social scientist attempting to understand how decentralization is affecting a specific local context is likely to come across a muddled and rather chaotic state of affairs that hardly seems to resemble the scenario described in the development administration and donor-led discourse. One problem is that, as decentralization is just one element in wider processes of socio-economic and political transformation, it is difficult to isolate this process from wider changes. Moreover, at least in the case of Indonesia, decentralization is a dynamic and highly uneven process of change that is generating quite specific local socio-legal configurations.2
