Before 2015, several CDD programs were implemented in municipalities such as the Program
Penanggulangan Kemiskinan di Perkotaan(P2KP) or the Urban Poverty Reduction Program. Such
programs provided opportunities for urban populations to participate in a participatory mechanism to plan, implement and monitor projects to address their needs. Both Parepare and Palopo has received NUSP for several years, but NUSP did not cover all wards in the municipality, as only wards that met certain criteria could receive the program. As discussed in Chapter , since 2015,
desahas received significant amounts of grant money that is managed using the CDD framework.
thekotaor municipalities, which do not havedesaor villages, to allocate at least five per cent of their budgets minus DAK for ward infrastructure and community empowerment. The law mandates the fund be used under community-driven development schemes, which will begin to be implemented in 2019. Nevertheless, several municipalities have also allocated grants directly
toKelurahansimilar to that in Parepare, such as Solo, Yogyakarta and Bandung (Rifai, Asterina,
and Hidayani ).
As shown in the Parepare case, if such a program is designed to target marginalised groups, they will likely need to get involved in order to secure their demands, at least at neighbourhood level discussions. Whereas, without such a program, citizens in the city, particularly the poor, would remain disenfranchised and separated from decision-making processes, which is exemplified by the Palopo case. Although citizens could signal their demands through Musrenbang in Palopo, they had to lobby politicians and local agencies in order to get their particular demands realised. As one of the FGD participants noted “if we only wait for the Musrenbang results to be accommodated, we would have lagged behind”, and “[…] if we do not do that [lobbying], there will be no projects that come to our ward” (FGD, February 4, 2016).
However, if the purpose PIK is to improve citizen participation, it should be designed to allow any citizens, including marginalised groups, to participate formally in ward and subdistrict Musrenbang. The Parepare case provides an example showing that without specific mechanisms, it is unlikely that the poor would participate in the formal Musrenbang. Evidence from other community development projects in Indonesia also shows similar results as the marginalised groups only participated that in CDD program that specifically required their attendance, but not
in the regular Musrenbang (TNP2K ; Voss ).
Hence, the participatory design in Parepare could be an excellent model to replicate in the urban setting. However, it should encourage broader and more inclusive participation. Examples from the PNPM and P2KP programs, in which the participation of the poor and women was mandatory, needed to be explicitly required in the participatory design. Without a commitment from the local government to specifically reach the poor, the services are not likely to reach them. Similarly, without sufficient effort to get the poor involved in the participatory processes, the processes will remain dominated by local elites.
5.5 Concluding remarks
Through the implementation of PIK in Parepare, block grants have been provided for the ward community to address their immediate needs such as drainage channels, pathways and wells, and to provide direct assistance to improve their livelihoods. Without PIK, such activities might have been still undertaken to maintain clientelism practice. Furthermore, the implementation of PIK along with FDM—which allows community monitoring of budget formulation to ensure that the community’s proposals are funded and allocated to the targeted groups—has minimised the appropriation of such activities by local MPs to maintain their political positions.
Secondly, similar to the Sumedang cases, the adoption of PIK in Prepare did not change the characteristics of citizen participation in local planning and budgeting. The participatory institution in Parepare was not designed to allow all interested citizens to participate. Nonetheless, PIK and FDM in Parepare have provided a channel for the impoverished community to voice and mediate their needs with the municipality government. This is not only because only the poor are eligible for the government’s direct assistance but also because facilitators and neighbourhood leaders have helped them to ensure that the direct assistance provided suits their skills or their needs. Even though the poor did not attend the formal Musrenbang, in the Parepare case, at least their voice and needs have been well guarded by the Musrenbang delegates and FDM.
From the comparative perspective, the participatory institution in Parepare is more likely to produce local budgets that match with the community preference, hence more responsive.
Therefore, the implementation PIK inkelurahan, particularly in municipalities (kota)—that do
not have desa—have provided a mechanism for the urban community to better address their
needs, which would have been difficult without available grants. The example from Parepare could be replicated in other municipalities with more emphasis on formal participation of the poor in the ward and subdistrict Musrenbang, as well as more open and inclusive participation, without restriction to invited participants.
This chapter has discussed the findings from the South Sulawesi cases. The next chapter will present a comparison across all four cases and its theoretical and practical implications on participation, deliberation and local government responsiveness.
Understanding Participation, Deliberation,
Responsiveness and Resource Distribution
6.1 Introduction
Chapter and Chapter have illustrated the practice of participatory planning and budgeting in the four districts. These chapters have also presented empirical findings on how different institutional designs affect participatory processes and outcomes and have shown how participatory innovations emerged. These chapters argue that districts that incorporate PIK and FDM into their participatory institution design: have succeeded in regaining trust from the citizens in Musrenbang; have been more responsive to the community demands; and to some extent have improved transparency of the local government budgeting processes. These findings are consistent with participatory institution theory. However, the introduction of PIK and FDM has failed to attract broader and more inclusive participation, which is the immediate intended result of the institutions.
This chapter presents a cross-case comparison and theoretical explanations for these findings. Firstly, it argues that the role of Civil Society Organisations (CSOs) in initiating and sustaining a participatory innovation is indispensable. Secondly, the introduction of PIK and FDM has made the deliberation processes become more meaningful as the decisions made after the deliberations would determine the actual allocations of the budgets and locations of the projects. Thirdly, local leadership and commitment from the bureaucracy to enforce the participatory processes and to implement the results of Musrenbang are essential in improving the quality and the efficacy of Musrenbang. Fourthly, in order to achieve greater responsiveness towards the poor, participatory institutions have to specifically target the poor and involve them in the participatory mechanisms. Furthermore, the interactions between the planning approaches under the Indonesian planning regime ultimately shape resource distributions across the districts. Hence, this chapter further
argues that the implementation of PIK and the involvement of FDM in budget formulations have shifted resource allocations towards more programmatic distributions. However, this has not been sufficient to tackle clientelism in resource distributions in the local government budgeting.
The outline of this chapter is as follows. Following this introduction section, section presents
the key drivers and the problems faced in introducing a participatory reform. Section discusses
why participation remained stagnant in the four districts. Section discusses how institutional
designs affect deliberation processes and outputs. Section discusses the importance of a
coordinating agency in enforcing participatory mechanisms. Section discusses the strengths
and weaknesses of each institutional design in improving responsiveness. Section analyses
resource distributions in the PIK and non-PIK adopters before conclusions for the chapter are
drawn in section .