Local Autonomy and Inter-Sector Performance-Based-Governance in Lampung Province

Abstract

The dramatic shift in the management of local government
in Indonesia, from the centralised, authoritarian
New Order Era to the more democratic Reformation
Era since 1996, met public demands for,
among other things, more accountability.
Decentralised local government requires a system
that allows the Central Government to supervise and,
at the same time, gives local governments the capacity
to carry out their duties. This paper compares
the institutional capacity of three regencies in
Lampung using a ten-part inter-sector performance
evaluation method developed by the Sustainable
Capacity Building for Decentralization , project
funded by the Indonesian Ministry of Home Affairs.
Three separate surveys between 2007-2011 used the
data from a 10% sample of all civil servants in
each rank. We show that local government institutional
capacities in Lampung Province differ not only
regionally, but also within inter-sectors functions. All
three regencies performed poorly in the inter-sector
function of information and communication, and
all three performed best in procurement of goods
and services. In terms of local autonomy, the single
recipe of symmetric decentralization which applies
similarly all over Indonesia, needs to be replaced,
we suggest, with asymmetric decentralization, which
is more suited to the local governments’ varied institutional
needs.
Keywords: local autonomy, inter-sector performance
based governance