Seminar Series: Abstract

The Political Origins of Decentralization: Indonesian Evidence, International Comparisons, and Alternative Pathways
Dr Michael S. Malley

Since the 1980s, more countries have decentralized than democratized, and promotion of this trend continues to feature prominently in international development policy. Yet in contrast to democratization, which spawned a vast literature on “transitions to democracy,” the pathways from centralization to decentralization remain largely unexamined. Previous efforts to explain decentralization have relied on cases drawn mainly from Latin America and almost wholly from the last quarter of the twentieth century. And they have converged—too quickly—on a set of explanations that reflect the narrow range of experience that those cases represent. In this seminar, I identify the leading hypotheses and examine them against evidence drawn from Indonesia. That country's experience with vastly different levels of de/centralization over a long period of time and under different political regimes provide a useful context in which to reconsider the conventional wisdom about the causes of decentralization. Evidence drawn from Indonesia suggests that decentralization may come about in ways that have been downplayed or dismissed by scholars who focused mainly on Latin America. In particular, it calls attention to the powerful impact of regime change and to the contingency of institutional explanations (favored by Latin Americanists) on underlying patterns of state formation.