Michael Buehler

The Islamization of politics in Indonesia after 1998 presents an underexplored puzzle: why has there been a rise in the number of shari'a laws despite the electoral decline of Islamist parties? Michael Buehler presents an analysis of the conditions under which Islamist activists situated outside formal party politics may capture and exert influence in Muslim-majority countries facing democratization. His analysis shows that introducing competitive elections creates new pressures for entrenched elites to mobilize and structure the electorate, thereby opening up new opportunities for Islamist activists to influence politics. Buehler's analysis of changing state-religion relations in formerly authoritarian Islamic countries illuminates broader theoretical debates on Islamization in the context of democratization. This timely text is essential reading for students, scholars, and government analysts.

Reviews & endorsements

Advance praise: 'Buehler's provocative study asks us to think twice before making facile assumptions about political parties, civil society and 'Islamisation' in post-Soeharto Indonesia. His conclusions will not go unchallenged, but the scholarship is superb, and the richness of the data, in terms of both geographic scope and historical depth, makes for a fascinating study about how old elites try to manipulate new sources of political legitimacy in a democratizing state. Buehler shows how a partnership of political opportunists and pious activists can produce Islamist outcomes without strong Islamic political parties. This is a book guaranteed to stimulate argument and debate.'

Sidney Jones, Director, Institute for Policy Analysis of Conflict, Jakarta

Advance praise: 'This is an excellent study of local politics and the dynamics of Islamisation in Indonesia in the years of post-authoritarian transition. Based on detailed case studies, Buehler provides a convincing explanation of the seeming paradox that Islamist political parties performed poorly in elections but the Islamisation of public life was in fact carried forward by secular local politicians, many of whom still belonged to the elite of the ancien régime. His observations on how democratisation enabled vocal (Islamist) pressure groups based outside the political system to have a greater impact on decision-making than Islamist parties within the system have relevance beyond the specific case of Indonesia.'

Martin van Bruinessen, Utrecht University

Advance praise: 'Michael Buehler has produced a fine piece of scholarship on contemporary Indonesian politics that engages several important literatures - religion and politics, democratic transitions, social movement theory, and questions of democratic representation and accountability. This book is excellently researched, focusing on historically grounded case studies across multiple regions. Buehler examines a curious puzzle: Islamic parties and candidates have not fared well in Indonesian elections since 1998, and yet there has been a surge in Islamic laws at the local level championed mostly by vote-hungry candidates from non-Islamic parties. He emphasizes the short-term strategizing and competition among political elites who do not intend Indonesia to become an Islamic state, even if the effect of their opportunistic electoral politics across several regions nudges the country increasingly in that direction. Buehler advances a bold thesis that is illuminating not only for Indonesia, but for other Islamic countries as well.'

Jeffrey Winters, Northwestern University

Advance praise: 'Who is pushing most for new shari'a regulations in Indonesia? To address this question Buehler has created a pioneering data set on 443 shari'a regulations which he adroitly analyses with a rich range of concepts. Buehler counterfactually shows that almost all of these shari'a regulations have been passed by secular bureaucrats who were looking to get some political, and often financial, gain. He also illustrates that one of the reasons for the decline of total vote of Islamic political parties is that they are ideologically multi-vocal and join many different competing party coalitions, often with secularist allies. Buehler's book, based on over fifty months of theoretically sensitive field research, has resulted in a wonderful conceptual and empirical enrichment to the literature on democracy and Islam.'

Alfred C. Stepan, Wallace S. Sayre Professor of Government, Founding Director of the Center for the Study of Democracy, Toleration and Religion, and Co-Director of the Institute for Religion, Culture and Public Life, Columbia University

This article assesses the impact of political context on procurement reform outcomes in Indonesia by analyzing the U.S.-Millennium Challenge
Corporation’s Procurement Modernization Project from 2013 to 2018 and
finds that higher political competition positively influences the adoption of
procurement innovations but also correlates with higher perceived corruption.

Government laws and regulations discriminating against religious minorities are on the rise worldwide. Scholars have debated whether or not society-based discrimination is a precondition for government-based discrimination. Examining an original dataset of regulations discriminating against the Ahmadiyah community in Indonesia, this article argues that calls from within society to restrict the freedom of religious minorities are neither a sufficient nor a necessary condition for the rise of discriminatory government regulations. Instead, governments may emulate other governments and adopt laws and regulations discriminating against religious minorities without any immediate societal pressure preceding it. Hence, future research needs to consider the interdependence between jurisdictions as an important driver of laws and regulations discriminating against religious minorities.

This document explains how we classified diasporans in Indonesia and the Philippines, and explains data collection pertaining to membership of the final national parliaments under authoritarian rule. In Indonesia, we identified the names of the 1,000 members of the 1997-1999 MPR through a list published by the Indonesian Department of Information (Departemen Penerangan). 1 We then traced the post-transition trajectory of all 864 members of the New Order authoritarian cohort by comparing it with the names of 34,061 candidates who participated in national legislative elections after 1998. We also compared the names of the authoritarian cohort with all 3,769 names of candidates who ran for a seat in the Regional Representative Council (DPD-Dewan Perwakilan Daerah) after this body replaced the appointed UD and UG seats in the MPR in 2004. Finally, we compared the names of the 864 members of the authoritarian cohort with the names of governors, vice-governors, district heads, deputy-district heads, mayors and deputy-mayors elected in Indonesia after 2005. 2 For the Philippines, we compared the names of the 112 KBL members with the 2,395 names of members sitting in the 8 th to 18 th Congresses of the Republic of the Philippines as well as the 156 members sitting in the Senate from 1987 to 2019. We also compared the 1 The Ministry has since been renamed Ministry of Communication and Information Technology. 2 We were able to compile the data for such posts only for the 2005-2019 period. Before direct elections for subnational executive heads were introduced in 2005, local parliaments elected candidates to these posts between 1999 and 2005. Unfortunately, the names of local executive heads are not readily available for that period. Hence, we compared the names of the authoritarian cohort with the names of all 1999-2005 subnational executive heads which were available to us.

The article compares the political trajectories of authoritarian diasporas in Indonesia and the Philippines, namely the subset of former regime officials that disperse across the electoral space after a regime transition. The main finding is that after the Suharto and Marcos dictatorships collapsed in 1998 and 1986 respectively, Indonesia's authoritarian successor party (ASP) fared better than the ASP in the Philippines. However, the authoritarian diaspora did better in the Philippines than in Indonesia. Engaging with existing scholarship on authoritarian successor parties and authoritarian diasporas, the article argues that the two variables shaping defection calculi are the prevailing levels of party institutionalization of both the authoritarian successor party and alternative parties as well as the type of reversionary clientelistic network available to elites in post-transition politics.

How to achieve sustainability in natural resource-based supply chains has become a pressing question in light of mounting global demands to address the economic and social consequences of natural resource extraction. A major obstacle to sustainability in such supply chains is corruption.

Various solutions to mitigate corruption in natural resource-based supply chains have been put forward. The most prominent are the creation of oversight agencies that are tasked with implementing and monitoring complex regulatory frameworks for the sector as well as relying on “focal companies”, big corporations and industry leaders, to self-regulate and transmit good corporate governance practices to their sector.

I argue that both approaches do little to curb corruption in natural resource-based supply chains as they ignore the broader political context. To exemplify this point, I will examine the regulatory framework for subcontracting in Indonesia’s upstream oil and gas sector. There the main regulatory agency for the country’s upstream oil and gas sector has been both a target and a perpetrator of corruption. Likewise, the capacity of “focal companies” to contain corruption within their supply chains, never strong to begin with due to various legal loopholes, is being greatly reduced as the country’s upstream sector moves from cost recovery Production Sharing Contracts (PSCs) to Gross-Split PSCs.

In this context, the opportunities to curb corruption in supply chains in Indonesia’s upstream oil and gas sector remain limited for the foreseeable future. The lesson Indonesia offers, however, is that local political conditions need to be taken into account when designing corruption eradication strategies, rather than administering off-the shelf corruption prevention measures. A potential new approach to combatting corruption based on an analysis of local political conditions will be discussed in the final part of the paper.

The democratization of politics has been accompanied by a rise of Islamic laws in many Muslim-majority countries. Despite a growing interest in the phenomenon, the Islamization of politics in democratizing Muslim-majority countries is rarely understood as a process that unfolds across space and time. Based on an original dataset established during years of field research in Indonesia, this article analyzes the spread of shari'a regulations across the world's largest Muslim-majority democracy since 1998. The article shows that shari'a regulations in Indonesia diffused unevenly across space and time. Explanations put forward in the literature on the diffusion of morality policies in other countries such as geographic proximity, institutions, intergovernmental relations and economic conditions did not explain the patterns in the diffusion of shari'a regulations in Indonesia well. Instead, shari'a regulations in Indonesia were most likely to spread across jurisdictions where local Islamist groups situated outside the party system had an established presence. In short, the Islamization of politics was highly contingent on local conditions. Future research will need to pay more attention to local Islamist activists and networks situated outside formal politics as potential causes for the diffusion of shari'a law in democratizing Muslim-majority countries.

... Planning Agency (Bappenas, Badan Perencanaan Pembangunan Nasional), then under the leadership of the reform-minded Sri Mulyani Indrawati, was ... fail to select and promote civil servants in a transparent, non-discriminatory and fair manner based on legal principles (art. ...

Islam and democracy are said
to be in a relationship fraught
with problems as the former,
allegedly, does not allow secular
law to be put above divine law or
accept the legitimacy of worldly
authorities. This relationship is
less problematic in Indonesia,
a democratic Muslim-majority
country, the argument goes, due
to the syncretic forms of Islam
practiced in the archipelago state
that are less dogmatic, and hence
more conducive to democratic
principles. While this is a valuable
point, various factors extraneous
to ‘moderate Indonesian Islam,’
such as a fragmented Islamic
authority in civil society, a weakly
institutionalized party system
as well as dynamics triggered
by recent institutional reforms
all play a role in the continuing
insignificance of political Islam in
the country.

... Full Text PDF (145kb). To cite this article: Buehler, Michael. Local Elite Reconfiguration in Post-new Order Indonesia: The 2005 Election of District Government Heads in South Sulawesi [online]. RIMA: Review of Indonesian and Malaysian Affairs, Vol. 41, No. 1, 2007: [119]-147. ...

The decentralization of political and fiscal authority in Indonesia in 1999 triggered a series of studies that predicted the rise of subnational strongmen who would subjugate the local state to their personal interests. However, almost 20 years after the devolution of power, Indonesian local politics are a lot more dynamic than earlier studies had assumed. While there are undoubtedly oligarchic and dynastic tendencies in Indonesian local politics, recent scholarship has emphasized the ephemeral nature of such power constellations. This chapter argues that a unique combination of institutional and structural conditions explains why local dynasties struggle to survive multiple election cycles in Indonesian local politics. The findings also speak to research on subnational authoritarian regimes in other parts of the world by showing that different constellations of institutional and socio-economic variables shape the rise and fall of local political monopolies.

Since the New Order collapsed in 1998, scholars have tried to characterize the
“deep architecture” of politics in Indonesia.2 This search for patterns in the
accumulation and exercise of power has centered around the question of whether
ancien régime figures continue to dominate politics or whether groups that were
marginalized during the dictatorship have gained influence. Vedi Hadiz, Richard
Robison, and Jeffrey Winters, who argue that a small group of wealthy individuals
rooted in the New Order regime continue to define politics in contemporary
Indonesia, have made an important contribution to this debate.3
This “oligarchy
thesis” has been influential for many scholars of Indonesian democracy, yet its focus
on wealth and material power has led it to neglect the fundamental role of the state
in Indonesian politics.

With more than 237 million inhabitants, Indonesia is the world’s third-largest democracy after
India and the United States. The implosion of the so-called New Order dictatorship in 1998
triggered a broad range of institutional reforms, such as the introduction of elections and various
constitutional changes. This improvement of formal institutions has made further progress since
2009. In reality, however, a lack of political will means that enforcement of reform laws is weak
and the quality of democracy remains low. In addition, there is no comprehensive agenda for
how to address Indonesia’s many political and socioeconomic challenges. Instead, most political
elites rely on vote-buying and other forms of political corruption to garner political support and
influence. The image in both domestic and foreign media of President Susilo Bambang
Yudhoyono as an honest broker and committed reformer is highly exaggerated. Recently,
there have been indications of a democratic roll-back.

Indonesia is both the world’s largest Muslim-majority country and one of its
most ethnically diverse. Home to approximately 230 million people, of whom
more than 85 percent follow Islam, there are almost as many Muslims living in
Indonesia as in the entire Arabic-speaking world. The Sunni branch of Islam predominates,
while approximately one million Indonesians adhere to the Shia variant.
A signifi cant number of Sufi communities also exist in the archipelago state.
Indonesia is also the world’s third largest democracy, after India and the
United States. President Suharto’s New Order regime, one of the most repressive
dictatorships in Southeast Asia, collapsed in May 1998 after controlling
Indonesian politics for more than 30 years. Since Suharto’s downfall, the most
dramatic reform initiative has been the introduction of an extensive regulatory
framework governing the conduct of executive and legislative elections.
Based on the new system, three national legislative and presidential elections, as
well as balloting in several hundred localities, have occurred throughout the last
decade. Overall, elections in Indonesia are considered free and fair.
The quality of democracy remains low, however.

Hashim Djojohadikusumo, brother to Indonesia’s president-elect Prabowo Subianto, is indebted to Swiss tax authorities for 139 million Swiss francs. Djojohadikusumo has claimed bankruptcy, attributing his financial woes to years of funding his brother’s political campaigns, leaving him unable to settle the tax debt. Last week, Swiss authorities have initiated foreclosure actions against two villas belonging to the family in Geneva.

How to achieve sustainability in natural resource-based supply chains has become a pressing question in light of mounting global demands to address the economic and social consequences of natural resource extraction. A major obstacle to sustainability in such supply chains is corruption. Various solutions to mitigate corruption in natural resource-based supply chains have been put forward. The most prominent are the creation of oversight agencies that are tasked with implementing and monitoring complex regulatory frameworks for the sector as well as relying on "focal companies", big corporations and industry leaders, to self-regulate and transmit good corporate governance practices to their sector. 

This short article for a special issue of Inside Indonesia on Energy Policy examines the challenges of fighting corruption in supply chains in Indonesia's upstream oil and gas sector.

On 27 June 2018 Indonesians were asked to elect governors, district heads and mayors in 17 provinces, 115 districts and 39 municipalities. Elections for local government heads in Indonesia are largely performative events that do not deliver much to ordinary citizens in terms of improved public services or genuinely progressive politicians. In fact, direct elections for local government heads have facilitated the rise of political dynasties. Yet despite their shortcomings, Indonesia’s local elections remain surprisingly dynamic affairs.

This essay is part of a series that examines the genesis, evolution, mobilization tools and processes, impacts and limitations of informal civil society in political transitions, that is, loose groupings of like-minded individuals—those that are unofficial, unregistered, or unregulated—in the MENA and Southeast Asia.

After the decentralisation of political and fiscal power in 2001, local government heads have become some of the most powerful political players in Indonesia. Studying how these people get elected therefore offers considerable insight into the state of Indonesia’s democracy. It’s equally revealing to look at who is competing for power, and who is getting elected. Though local government is highly varied across Indonesia, there are plenty of worrying signs. In particular, local dynasties are becoming even more entrenched in power, not less, as Indonesian democratisation progresses.

This week, Jakarta's new governor Joko Widodo approved a 44 percent hike in the province's minimum wage to 2.2 million rupiah, or about $229 U.S. dollars. Employer associations strongly criticized the salary hike. Trade union leaders have welcomed the increase but demand steeper increases in other provinces.

While government officials are championing the move, Joko Widodo's policy decision is unlikely to to help Indonesia's simmering labor problem. The move to raise wages to appease workers is emblematic of the government's lack of a cohesive strategy in addressing systemic problems that keep unions striking, 70 percent of Indonesian workers trapped in the "informal sector," and investors wary of disputes threatening to shutter hundreds of factories — both domestic and internationally-owned.

Why are some provinces in Argentina more democratic than others is the research question animating Carlo Gervasoni’s book. Borrowing from the literature on rentier states, he argues that fiscal rents have allowed incumbents in certain provinces to establish hybrid regimes that combine authoritarian and democratic elements. Concretely, provinces such as Formosa, La Rioja, San Luis, Santa Cruz, and Santiago del Estero are less democratic than Buenos Aires, Cordoba, Entre R  ıos, Mendoza, or Santa Fe because the former have access to large federal subsidies. These fiscal federalism rents not only free incumbents from taxing their local populations but also local governments are often the biggest player in the local economy as a result. Since a large part of the local electorate depends on public monies in such “provincias fiscales,” incumbents are much less exposed to democratic pressures from constituents.

Stories about growing religious intolerance in Indonesia have frequently made headlines around the world in recent years. The arrest and subsequent imprisonment of the Christian governor of Jakarta for blasphemy; Ahmadis being assaulted and murdered; the persecution of Shia communities; or a smartphone app released by the Indonesian government through which concerned citizens can report suspected cases of religious heresy, have all reinvigorated the debate about how tolerant the Muslim majority is vis-à-vis religious minorities in the archipelago state.

A more critical discussion of the role institutions may or may not play with regard to the emergence and collapse of dynasties around the world, while also taking the findings of the broader literature on the nexus between democratization and dynasties into account would have strengthened the explanatory power of the theoretical arguments put forward in the book.

Indonesian provinces, districts and municipalities have adopted over 700 shari’a laws since 1998. In his most recent monograph, David Kloos asks if, and if so, how, the religious practice of Indonesian Muslim is affected by this increasing formalization of religious norms and practices. The most interesting, and contrarian, finding of Kloos’ study is that, despite the growing number of jurisdictions that have adopted shari’a laws in Indonesia, ordinary Indonesians continue to enjoy considerable autonomy when it comes to practicing their religious believes and identifying the moral values on which to base their lives.

The 2018 documentary The China Hustle—a movie by Academy Award winning director Alex Gibney about US-banks inflating  the value of Asian companies to subsequently sell their worthless stocks to unsuspecting
US-investors—features an American banker who gloats about Asia as an investment destination: “The best place to be a criminal is someplace with no cops.”

While  Hadiz claims that economic conditions matter for our understanding of variance in Islamic populism, the evidence he presents throughout his book suggest that political factors determine why and how Islamic populism gains political salience and influence. Rather than relying on Marx to explain variance in Islamic activism in the context of neoliberal globalization, Hadiz’ argument seems to be closer to scholars such as Kimmeldorf, who, in his account of why labour unionists in the United States of America became fierce ideologues on the West Coast while labour unions on the East Coast became politically conservative rackets, has shown that the political environment explains for differences in social mobilization triggered by capitalist advancement.

While scholarship on subnational regimes in democracies has grown considerably over the past decade, its focus has remained somewhat narrow. Concretely, existing works predominantly focus on the conditions that facilitate the rise and fall of subnational authoritarian regimes in federal democracies. In other words, this literature does not take into account that a broad range of subnational regime types may exist, not all of them fully authoritarian. Furthermore, there is almost no scholarship that explicitly focuses on subnational regimes in decentralized unitary states. A new volume edited by Jacqueline Behrend and Laurence Whitehead addresses some of these gaps in the literature.

The implosion of the New Order in 1998 led to a more democratic political system in Indonesia with elections at all levels of government. A year later, Indonesia also embarked on an ambitious decentralization program that initiated a fundamental restructuring of the country's political institutions on a scale unprecedented since the 1960s. Yet, scholars are still trying to identify clear patterns in the accumulation and exercise of power in this new political environment.

... change published over the past two decades is an emphasis on democratic transition and ... an event of importance in both countries, the different impact the economic crisis had ... Social origins of dictatorship and democracy revisited: Colonial state and Chinese immigrant in the ...

Democracy has been in decline across Asia and the Pacific for more than 10 years. Information disorder, an environment in which distorted and manipulated information is ubiquitous, is believed to play an important role in affirming authoritarianism and destabilizing democracy across the region. To understand how distorted information is being used to gain and maintain unchecked and unaccountable power in Asia and the Pacific, USAID/Asia Bureau’s Technical Services requested, under the Asia Emerging Opportunities mechanism, an analysis of how information disorder affirms authoritarianism and destabilizes democracy in Asia and the Pacific. In discussing the scope of work with the USAID/Asia Bureau, the research team received guidance that
the analysis should present a series of in-depth country case studies that examine if and, if so, how information disorder affirms authoritarianism and destabilizes democracy in Asia and the Pacific. The team approached this question through a series of in-depth country case studies that concentrated on identifying supply- and demand-side factors that contribute to information disorder at the national and subnational levels in four countries in Asia and the Pacific. The case study countries are the Kyrgyz Republic, Nepal, Papua New Guinea, and Thailand. The countries represent regime types ranging from relatively democratic political systems to de facto military dictatorships.

The Procurement Modernization (PM) project of the Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC) was designed to transform the operation of the public procurement system in Indonesia by reducing existing resource inefficiency. The PM project’s objective was to strengthen the implementation of the procurement function within the Government of Indonesia. It aimed to build capacity and facilitate the institutionalization of Procurement Service Units (PSUs) so that they would be resourced with systems, structures, and skilled procurement professionals. It encouraged more systematic assessments of tenders to procure required goods and services with cost efficiency, higher quality, and reduced procurement and delivery time. MCC expected that the cost savings resulting from the project, if applied to other investments, would enhance economic growth.

The National Public Procurement Agency or Lembaga Kebijakan Pengadaan Barang/Jasa Pemerintah (LKPP), along with several other organizations, implemented the PM project from 2013 to 2018 through the Millennium Challenge Account-Indonesia (MCA-I). It had two main activities: (1) the Procurement Professionalization Activity and (2) the Policy and Procedure Activity. The first comprised human resource development activities (e.g., procurement skills training), institutional strengthening support (e.g., training and mentoring on organizational skills and performance measurement, establishing PSUs as centers of excellence), support for framework contracting, and strengthening the Procurement Management Information System (PMIS). The second comprised guidance for public-private partnerships (PPPs) and the development of a policy framework for sustainable procurement. The projected supported a total of 44 PSUs; Phase 1 (2013-2018) engaged 29 pilot PSUs, and Phase 2 (2016-2018) engaged 15 pilot PSUs. Abt evaluated the project using mixed methods. The qualitative approach used the 5-S framework (modified from McKinsey’s 7-S framework) to analyze organizational change within PSUs related to shared values (perception about corruption), structure (permanency of PSUs), systems (procurement processes adopted), skills (staff procurement skills), and staffing (staff preference for careers in procurement). To evaluate changes along the 5-Ss and several key procurement outcomes, the evaluation used a quasi-experimental weighted difference-in-difference design that compared outcomes for Phase 2 treatment PSUs with outcomes for comparison PSUs—or those that were shortlisted in Phase 2 but not selected to receive the program’s core services after weighting to look similar to the treatment PSUs. Through efforts that had nationwide reach and through PSUs that became centers of excellence (CoEs), it is possible that the comparison PSUs received some treatment at the same time, but less intensively. Data for the evaluation come from structured surveys with PSU and OPD staff at the baseline (2016) and endline (2019), semi-structured interviews with PSU staff at endline (2019), and semi-structured interviews with key stakeholders after the project ended (November 2018-January 2019). The quantitative analysis also used PMIS time series data on two tender-level final outcomes: time and cost efficiency.

Findings. The impact evaluation found evidence of positive impact of PM project’s intensive activities in only a few areas. The project improved staff skills (as measured by their quiz scores on procurement processes), but absolute quiz scores remained quite low. Also, more PSUs achieved permanency as a result of the PM project. The impact evaluation found that the relative odds that a PSU was permanent increased almost nineteen-fold because of the project. However, we did not find clear evidence that the project’s intensive activities increased the adoption of improved procurement processes, maturity model, e-catalogs, PMIS, or framework contracting in treatment versus comparison PSUs. Adoption of policies and procedures and PMIS increased over time, even in comparison PSUs. Some of these efforts were simultaneously promoted by nationwide policies, which can explain improved performance in the comparison PSUs. Conceivably, CoEs could have also helped improve the outcomes in comparison PSUs, but our data suggest that the majority of comparison PSUs did not receive CoE input. Overall, despite the small gains in staff skills and greater permanency of PSUs, we did not find evidence that the PM project’s intensive activities improved the quality, cost, or time efficiency of procurement. We did not find evidence that these outcomes improved in the comparison group.

Indonesia spends more than 30 percent of its national budget, and around 60 percent of foreign development assistance, on the procurement of goods and services on behalf of government agencies. Yet, the Indonesian regulatory framework is marred by legal inconsistencies, poorly drafted laws and a lack of clear accountability mechanisms within the bureaucracy. In addition, the Indonesian judiciary has been unable until present to develop clear procurement review
procedures. Add to this an incompetent and corrupt police force and a politicized anti-corruption commission and the results is an extremely dangerous environment for procurement officials to operate in. The country’s corrupt and inefficient procurement system has contributed to the country’s crumbling infrastructure, delayed government spending, and weak performance on a range of social indicators. Procurement reform has the potential to reduce resource inefficiency and save precious resources for other investments that can contribute to Indonesia’s economic growth.

As part of the DRG Assessment process, USAID commissions an independent expert on the democratic transition in the
subject country or region to undertake a peer review of the Final Report. The purpose of the peer review is to provide an external
commentary on how well the DRG Assessment captures the essential political dynamics of the subject country and the soundness
of its analysis and recommendations. The review offers an expert opinion on the overall quality of the report; it identifies any
innovative findings that may have emerged in the up-to-date DRG Assessment; it points out any key gaps in the analysis as well
as noting differences of political interpretation; it evaluates the extent to which the recommendations are logically derived from the
analysis; and provides an occasion for the reviewer to comment on the overall appropriateness of USAID’s DRG methodology for
elaborating a DRG strategic approach that is rooted in a clear and compelling understanding of a country’s political dynamic

The Eastern Indonesia Region Transport Project (EIRTP-I), funded by the World Bank from 2001-2006, supports efforts to stimulate economic growth and improve social welfare in the 15 provinces and about 130 kabupaten (districts) and kotamadya (municipalities) of Eastern Indonesia through improving access to road transport facilities, reducing road transport costs, and facilitating efficient use of resources. EIRTP-I, which is the subject of this case study, is the first of two complementary and closely related transport projects. This project focuses on the preservation and development of national and other strategic road assets. It has three distinct components: the improvement of the condition of national and other strategic arterial roads; facilitation of an effective and sustainable decentralization of planning and management responsibilities for works on all primary roads (national, provincial and kabupaten) to the provincial and kabupaten governments; and increasing the efficiency, quality and transparency in awarding works, thereby improving the use of scarce financial and natural resources. US$200 million were committed by the World Bank to this project, which is carried out by the Directorate General of Regional Infrastructure (DGRI) within the Indonesian Ministry of Settlement and Regional Infrastructure (MSRI). The Directorate of Technical Affairs (BINTEK) in the DGRI is the lead implementing agency and executes the project through a Project Management Unit (PMU). The regional agencies (provinces) implement the project in the regions in accordance with the Government of Indonesia's (GoI) regulations on decentralization. The World Bank's transport projects have been challenged by severe problems related to corruption, collusion and nepotism (KKN) in the past.

This resource guide offers a comprehensive manual for students on using Generative Artificial Intelligence (GAI) tools in academic research and writing. It covers the basics of GAI, its distinction from Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), and the functioning of Large Language Models (LLMs). The guide is structured around typical research project phases, including conceptualization, data collection, and analysis, highlighting tools for literature reviews, data visualization and writing. The Resource Guide also provides strategies for effective prompting and emphasizes the importance of critical engagement with GAI outputs to address issues like data bias and hallucinations. The guide aims to harness GAI's potential while acknowledging its limitations and ethical implications.