ABSTRACT
This chapter turns in the direction of cultural explanations in order to make sense of the governance challenges that documented Indonesia in previous chapters. In so doing, the chapter emphasizes what, in Chapter 2, was termed the anthropological perspective. Over the course of several sections, this chapter goes beyond surface-level statements of culture to explore its deeper foundations, rooted not only in the governance practices of the New Order regime but also in the extractive and profit-oriented logics that were central to the colonial period. In these sections, the state ideology of Pancasila is discussed along with the “ethos of privatization” that is at the heart of the Indonesian bureaucracy as a semi-peripheral state in the world system. This chapter also advances the concept of “ritual governance,” first, in order to characterize the dynamics that have been witnessed in previous chapters, second, in order to connect back to the notion of mechanisms from the analytic framework in Chapter 2, and, third, in order to highlight the impossibility of technical solutions. Explicitly, it is ritual governance and not the other mechanisms espoused by proponents of decentralization (e.g., accountability, participation) that connects with the logics of the Indonesian state and explains the way that the government operates—and to what ends. Through the concept of ritual governance, it is seen that the shortcomings of decentralization are not shortcomings at all; they are essential features of a system that operates according to a particular logic.
