ABSTRACT
Corruption in Indonesia Hardly anyone in Indonesia today would deny that corruption is widespread and that trying to bring it under control has been an uphill journey. Indonesia has long lingered in the lower percentiles of the “control of corruption” indicator of the World Governance Index (1996-2013). Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index, which rst covered Indonesia in 1998, scored it best towards the end of President Yudhoyono’s rst term but even then the country was rated in the lowest third of the countries covered worldwide. Yet, while corruption remains pervasive, big steps have been made to prevent and punish it both by government and civil society since the end of the authoritarian Soeharto regime in 1998. This chapter traces the spread and institutionalisation of corruption in post-colonial Indonesia and the eorts undertaken by the state and civil society to bring corruption under control. As in other countries where corruption has become part of, if not a sustaining element in, the political system, anti-corruption reforms have been regularly undermined by vested interests, namely those who would lose out in a more transparent and accountable environment and who fear prosecution. This chapter describes important steps forward and backwards in Indonesia’s winding (anti-) corruption journey.
