ABSTRACT
The past decade has witnessed first the rise and then the fall of market liberalism orthodoxy in development economics. In the early 1990s, development economics based upon market liberalism challenged the interventionist state as an impediment to growth and promoted privatization of service delivery and social welfare programs through non-governmental entities as the answer. Yet the market approach failed to acknowledge the necessity of civil and political institutions to counter the tendency of autocratic states to use privatization to enhance the control and power of entrenched interests. Privatization in regimes where power remained vested in the hands of a minority of economic elites further distorted the existing system. In those developing nations that were able to shake off autocratic regimes (most notably in Indonesia, South Africa, the Philippines and recently in Mexico), the following factors were present to some degree: a move to restructure governmental institutions through decentralization; strengthening and broadening political participation through the introduction of democratic practices; and encouraging non-governmental, civic institutions to sustain and consolidate political and governmental reforms (Pycroft 1994). Although democratization and decentralization have had relatively long gestation periods in several of these cases, what is distinctive about the successes is the focus on strengthening social capital as a complement to institutional change (Wunsch 1998). International organizations such as the World Bank and the Ford Foundation have made social capital formation programs a priority in their assistance to developing nations. The changing institutional forms of local planning tied to national political and administrative reform also have connections to social capital formation and represent a shift from state-dominated decision and planning processes to a locally focused participatory structure that promotes accountability. As Mohan and Stokke observe, civil society institutions can also be vehicles for participation in development programming and empowerment of target groups of poor people. In short, social capital formation has invigorated a planning approach that directly involves
in local planning processes, known widely as participatory planning, emerged from the decentralization movement in Indonesia following the fall of the New Order government in 1998. In Indonesia’s development efforts over the previous three decades, the rhetoric of participatory planning (typically referred to as planning from the bottom upward) and decentralization was advanced as an objective of the New Order government. In fact, local administrators and planners (supported by consultants) were not accountable to the communities that they served, but only to their superiors in central government in Jakarta. Local non-governmental stakeholders had little freedom to express political preferences and played a negligible role in the process of planning. The proliferation of participatory processes in Indonesian localities since 1998 transformed planning into a process to reach a collective agreement among a greater number of potential stakeholders and shifted the role of planners from that of technician to facilitator and mediator to reach collective agreement among the stakeholders. The proliferation of local stakeholder groups, generally referred to as “forums,” introduced a new community-focused institution into local government. Although varying in their effectiveness across Indonesia’s vast urban landscape, these forums constitute a key component of the participatory processes that are transforming planning at the local level. Antlov (2003: 77) argued that the citizen forum has provided an opportunity for disadvantaged groups to play a larger role in the decision-making process at the local level.
