ABSTRACT
Understanding how functional assignment, and more broadly decentralization, reforms tend to unfold is crucial to practitioners and advocates who are concerned with a rational assignment. Bureaucrats and elected officials can find reasons to support or resist decentralization reforms. It is rather rare to find all political forces aligned in favour. Inter-governmental relations centred on functional assignment reveal a wide range of situations, from a complete lack of SNG voice to a discussion or contestation that reveals roughly equal power between the central state and SNG. The functional assignment process adopted by the Indonesian government reflected the long conflict, the 2005 Helsinki Peace Accord that ended it, and the 2006 Law on the government of Aceh that gave more direction to national government-Aceh intergovernmental relations. Aceh did not get all that it sought, but on the whole it was able to press home its arguments, and to use existing framework to its advantage.
