ABSTRACT
As previous chapters have made clear, the World Bank has been extensively engaged in a range of decentralization initiatives in Indonesia. What this and the next three chapters seek to do is unpack the operation in practice of those current and recent decentralization and school-based management (SBM) reforms that have been promoted by the World Bank and adopted by the Government of Indonesia (GOI). The idea is to go beyond the claims made by either the World Bank or the GOI to critically investigate what is known about decentralization and SBM reforms in the education sector. This is done by drawing on realist evaluation, systems theory, and anthropological sensibilities, which, as explained in Chapter 2, emphasize the social circumstances, institutional context, political drivers, cultural norms, and wider infrastructural constraints in which the reforms were implemented. Given this purpose, the discussion in this and subsequent chapters around the operation in practice of decentralization reforms focuses on (a) how the reforms were supposed to work, (b) how they worked in implementation, and (c) the reasons for the differences between expectations and the experience of these reforms as reported in existing studies.
