On Thursday 25 April, Minister Kuntoro Mangkusubroto visited the Blavatnik School of Government to give a master class to MPP students entitled 'Challenges of Indonesian government: Delivery in an emerging democracy'.
Minister Kuntoro described the difficulty of making the Indonesian state more efficient and responsive in a country where geography means that communication and implementation can be very challenging.
The Minister explained that simultaneous democratisation and decentralisation can create many problems, such as the proliferation of agencies which are still operating according to old structures. Modern challenges, he said, can seldom be overcome by these old structures. Government agencies operating as silos should instead embrace joined-up thinking and clear, standardised procedures.
He used the Sarulla geothermal project to illustrate the effects of old structures and outdated ways of thinking. Even though the project is hugely important to Indonesia as a renewable energy source, stakeholders took more than twenty years to reach an agreement on development because of bureaucratic bottlenecks and a lack of legal certainty around the process.
After the 2004 tsunami hit Aceh, Minister Kuntoro was put in charge of the reconstruction project. He described to the audience how he asked for, and received, full legal authority to accomplish all that needed to be done on the devastated peninsula, without interference from the capital. To avoid the spectre of post-natural disaster redevelopment corruption, he paid the members of his organisation good salaries and purposely designed the process to be as short as possible (it took four years from start to finish). He advised that it is wise to bring in change quickly before political will is lost.
Minister Kuntoro described how his team in Aceh communicated their progress to the local community and the wider world. After damaging accusations were made about the pace of rebuilding, they began photographing rebuilt houses and posting the pictures and GPS coordinates on a dedicated website. This built trust and goodwill among the local population, and showed that the team were delivering real results.
Since the end of the Aceh reconstruction project, Minister Kuntoro has continued his bid to modernise the Indonesian government as the head of a new Delivery Unit. Working with a core team and drawing on specialists, generalists and a data support team for expertise and ideas, the Unit seeks to respond quickly to problems and queries raised by the Indonesian public, using crowdsourcing and a social media-based complaints system. Successfully resolved complaints are shared on the internet to build trust within the wider community. Treated with suspicion at first, the Unit is now the first port of call for many people seeking help and advice.
