Decentralization of Forest Administration in Indonesia, Implications ...

John McCarthy, Christopher Barr, Ida Aju Pradnja Resosudarmo, and Ahmad Dermawan 51
(Art. 99). 22 Significantly, Regulation 34/2002 also explicitly revokes Regulation
6/1999 on Commercial Forestry and the Extraction of Forest Products in Production
Forest (Art. 100). As will be discussed in Chapter 5, Regulation 6/1999 was used by
district governments to issue large numbers of small-scale HPHH timber extraction
permits and forest conversion licenses. In this way, it has played an important role
in undermining the MoF’s control over commercial logging, and its revocation by
Regulation 34/2002 represents the clearing of a major legislative hurdle for the
national government in its efforts to recentralize authority in the forestry sector.
3.9 Revision of the 1999 Regional Autonomy Law
Among stakeholders at the national level, concerns about Indonesia’s decentralization
process have hardly been limited to policymakers in the MoF. Indeed through 2001,
as Regulation 25/2000 and other implementing regulations for the regional autonomy
law took effect, a growing chorus of officials within the central government – as
well as many civil society groups and private sector actors – expressed concerns
about the manner in which decentralization and regional autonomy were occurring
in Indonesia. Many of these actors complained about what they called the ‘excesses’
of district governments, many of which had issued regulations or adopted policies
that appeared to exceed the powers granted to them under the nation’s regional
autonomy law. In the view of many central government officials, Indonesia’s regional
autonomy process had resulted in a situation in which district governments were
operating with very little accountability, either ‘downward’ to local constituents
or ‘upward’ to ‘higher’ levels of government. Many also expressed concerns that
district governments frequently had very limited institutional capacity to carry out
the administrative responsibilities they had assumed.
Whatever the merits of these arguments may be, they inevitably led to calls
for revision of Law 22/1999. These calls gained momentum when Megawati
Soekarnoputri became President in July 2001. The daughter of Soekarno, Indonesia’s
first President, Megawati was widely known to favor a strong central government and
to be deeply suspicious of regional autonomy, tending to view it as potentially opening
the door to a process of national disintegration (Van Zorge Report 2002). By early
2002, the Megawati government had begun drafting a set of revisions to the regional
autonomy law (Kompas, January 30, 2002). In public statements about this process,
central government officials generally claimed that legal re-drafting was necessary to
resolve the many contradictions and inconsistencies that existed in Law 22/1999 and
its implementing regulations. They argued that Law 22 had been too heavily oriented
towards defining the rights of district governments under regional autonomy, without
adequately specifying their corresponding responsibilities. Moreover, it said little
about the rights of either municipal or provincial governments. In addition, they
called for a system of checks and balances to support more effective accountability
and better coordination among the various levels of government (Kompas, February
5, 2002).
As early drafts of a revised law on regional governance circulated during 2002
and 2003, there emerged a lively national dialogue on how the regional autonomy
process should be reformed. In August 2003, for instance, the Indonesian Association