Decentralization of Forest Administration in Indonesia, Implications ...

John McCarthy, Christopher Barr, Ida Aju Pradnja Resosudarmo, and Ahmad Dermawan 39
Minister of Home Affairs. Moreover, regional government offices reporting to the
heads of Level I Regions (the Governor) and Level II Regions (the Bupati or Mayor)
often existed in parallel to “two levels of regional branches of the central government,
the so-called administrative territories” (Niessen 1999). Through such arrangements,
the central government during the New Order period was able to exert far-reaching
control over the decisions and activities of governments at both the provincial and
district levels.
Under Law 22/1999, the districts and municipalities are no longer to be
considered ‘administrative territories’, and in most respects, their subordinate
relationship to the central government has effectively been severed. 14 However, the
provinces continue to be considered both ‘autonomous regions’ and ‘administrative
territories’; and in their latter capacity, governors continue to act as representatives
of the central government in the regions. In this way, the provinces are vested with
only limited autonomy, as well as whatever authority the central government chooses
to delegate to them. Many observers have noted that the regional autonomy law’s
emphasis on transferring authority to the districts and not to the provinces “was
designed to avoid encouraging separatist tendencies which might be more prominent
at [the] provincial level” (Down to Earth [DTE] 2000a).
In promulgating wide-ranging decentralization of authority, Law 22/1999
also greatly expanded the role of the Regional House of Representative (Dewan
Perwakilan Rakyat Daerah, DPRD) at the provincial, district, and municipality.
Under the New Order regime, the DPRD was something of a toothless tiger – largely
functioning, according to one newspaper editorial, as a “mouthpiece of the regional
government” (corong dari pemerintah daerah) (Suara Pembaruan, November 2,
1999). Law 22/1999 vested the DPRD with a series of new powers by assigning to
it the authority to elect the regional executive (i.e. the Governor, Bupati, or Mayor,
depending on the level) and to play a more active role in determining the policy of the
executive branch of provincial, district, or municipal governments.
Ostensibly, the new legislation aimed to empower regional and local stakeholders
and thereby to ensure that the district governments functioned in accordance with
the aspirations of the people in their jurisdictions (Suara Pembaruan, November 2,
1999). 15 In this way, district governments would be accountable downwards through
elections, rather than upwards through the provincial government to the Ministry
of Home Affairs. As noted in Chapter 1, the transfer of authority to downwardly
accountable local or district governments is a critical element of democratic
decentralization, as opposed to administrative decentralization or deconcentration
(Larson 2005; Ribot 2001).
With these changes, Law 22/1999 significantly altered the structure of regional
government and institutional power relations at each level. The New Order regime’s
laws on regional governance – most notably Law 5/1974 – had defined regional
governments as being composed of the DPRD and the regional executive. At the
district level, power was concentrated into the hands of the Bupati, who as Head of
the Region (Kepala Daerah) was responsible to the President through the Minister
of Home Affairs. The Bupati was also designated as sole authority (penguasa
tunggal) in the district, meaning that he was “in charge of general government