vietnam war begins


This gap usually translates into a lack of trust, apathy and a low-quality dialogue about development. Externally induced development models that do not recognize the core problem of the local governance divide limit their own likelihood of success.

  1. vietnam war begins
evidence of this root problem can be seen in the universally reported problem of poor public infrastructure construction standards and poorer maintenance in indonesian villages, clear signs of little local ownership. as a result, social and economic resources are not as well used as they could be, particularly with respect to rural poverty reduction. despite formal definitions and descriptions, villages are collections of often highly independent neighborhoods, hamlets and sub-villages, sometimes far apart, with their own economic and social structures.
voluntary cooperation among these sub-units is by no means the standard and 'village government' is often a distant, abstract notion. > information does not flow freely. indonesia's new order government concentrated access to development information within the executive branch. civil society organizations and media that could provide alternative channels of information flow were banned from entering villages. even private banks were usually required to obtain counter-signatures from village heads before they could advance loans. furthermore, the executive also became the main channel for redress.

vietnam war begins

as a result, information flows upwards also withered away. > local government lacks downward accountability. village and subdistrict heads, when not directly appointed by the district head, could be replaced by him at will. all reporting was from the local government upwards, never to local constituents. with no institutional mechanisms to provide checks and balances between local leadership and constituencies, communities as well as leaders came to view local government as the extension of the central government into the village, not as their own mechanism for relaying local concerns to higher levels of government. > villages do not control their own developmentfunds. government projects for communities are typically decided in district capitals, with little or no planning information given to the villagers themselves.
a tabulation of a sample of 45 village planning requests found that only 8 percent of village requests were met by government projects. the small public funds given for village development were nearly entirely earmarked for government officers. regulations passed in the 1 990s went so far as to prohibit villagers from supervising or maintaining works constructed through public funds, and functions which instead were done through contractors. > community attitudes do not change quickly. after forty years of tight security and demands for unquestioned loyalty and obedience, villagers are still uncertain how to oppose corruption and poor leadership. there is usually a preference to reduce contact with formal leaders to a minimum.
under 'decentralization', villages still do not have a direct voice in district-level development planning. instead, villagers are expected to implement regulations and projects decided elsewhere. nevertheless, there are a number of encouraging signs that opportunities exist to change this situation. gol itself launched the current generation of community development programs through a flawed but innovative "project for left behind villages (idt)," which for the first time, provided direct transfers to village governments. both of the lli studies and the first kdp argued that there are operational ways to return control of low level decision making to village users without requiring wholesale changes to the indonesian administrative system. the key to this first round lay in decentralizing community fuinds to preexisting representative decision-making bodies, and by adopting an active program to disseminate project financial information. in most cases, making local governance bodies more representative, however, required some additional tinkering with operational rules to ensure more broad-based representation and participation in decision meetings.
other sectors pursuing the route of direct transfers to user groups, most notably irrigation and school committees, also found large increases in the quality of construction and the satisfaction of communities. one of its most interesting findings was that leadership had undergone a significant change in nearly half of the villages studied. however, the study also showed that most of these new leaders lacked the necessary skills and, even more importantly, did not have effective ties to the district administration or parliament. both sets of findings have since been confirmed by reviews carried out by the ford foundation and the partnership for local governance. they form the basis for the village governance proposals that will be supported through the proposed project.
decentralization and village empowerment. indonesia's decentralization program has been extensively reviewed in a number of bank reports. the two laws ensured that district governments will eventually control over 40 percent of total government spending. over 100 implementing instructions, regulations, and guidelines were prepared to accompany the new laws, but most of these had not been adequately discussed in the newly empowered parliament and relatively few have been issued. as a result, the administrative "state of play", while clearly favoring decentralization, remains very much in flux, with struggles back and forth over responsibilities, reporting requirements, dispute resolution mechanisms and the like. development projects have also faced a broad range of implementation problems because of this lack of institutional clarity, and one purpose of the proposed kdp-3 is to help local governments implement law 22/1999 in operational ways.
with administrations that lack both governance experience and clear assignments of responsibilities, political struggles within the different branches of district governments have also led to institutional turmoil over the powers newly released by the national government, and the emergence of local private interests seeking to capture public decision-making. nevertheless, in many areas decentralization has moved forward well, and local governments have started to work out their own modus vivendi between their different branches. one element of law 22 that has received much less attention was the broadening of village autonomy. villages can now own assets, borrow money (although this authority is now on hold), establish village-owned businesses, and, in certain cases, reject government action in their village, although the language of the law remains somewhat vague on these issues.
but law 22 also reinforced the dependence of villages on district government decisions. the dominant position of district government was more or less formalized by one of the implementing regulations of law 22, the "general guidelines on regulating villages", a document that leaves most of the details to the district government. some major points of this regulation include: > the decree assigns legislative authority to local governments to up 13 regulations on such vital issues as village head elections, the 'formation' of the bpds, and the status of village regulations in relation to interest' (allowing the district to almost any village regulation), and inter-village cooperation. > the decree undermines its own authority by that is a ' ( pedoman), for governments to when drawing up district regulations (perda 's).. ..