EDUCATION PLANNING, DECENTRALISATION AND SPECIAL AUTONOMY: INNOVATIONS AND CHALLENGES
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while development planning is supposed to be both ‘top-down’ and ‘bottom-up’, there have been serious problems in setting up participatory institutions designed to reinforce the ‘bottom-
up’ aspects of the procedures. The musrenbang musyawarah perencanaan pembangunan, or consultative development planning forums in particular is supposed to be institutionalised as
a central mechanism of participatory consultation and deliberation, but the evidence from the fieldwork for this report suggests this is rarely the case. In general, community leaders in the FGD
mentioned that lip service is paid to the musrenbang contribution to the formulation of district priorities, strategic plans and annual work-plans, but that effective incorporation of community
voices in the policy planning process is lacking - as has been found to be sometimes the case in the other case studies presented in this report. FGD participants perceived that line agencies
develop and set the plans to be proposed for inclusion in district budgets with little regard for community views:
“There is no budget for musrenbang in villages. The musrenbang conducted in sub-districts should be attended by representatives from musrenbang at the village level, but in reality,
those who attend in the sub-district musrenbang were only the village heads. This meant that a lot of programmes incorporated in the musrenbang are the result of line agency
priorities, while programmes and priorities emerging from the sub-districts are rejected.” FGD participant, Aceh Timur, 14 September 2009
At district level, similar mishandling of the musrenbang process was reported by FGD participants, indicating that education planning tends to be handed down based on provincial
level priorities:
“In the district musrenbang, we did not propose education programmes or activities because we were directed to concentrate on infrastructure, social and cultural affairs. Until now the
programmes and activities related to education have always been handled by the Provincial Office of Education.” Interview with staff of the Peureulak sub-district office, Aceh Timur, 14
September 2009
Further, the inclusion of women and children in discussions and decision-making has been weak. However, it is important to note that a number of alternative parallel or informal mechanisms
of consultation and participation have also emerged in Aceh over the past few years. As mentioned earlier, international organisations and NGOs have been prominent actors in the
wake of the tsunami and have played a positive role here in emphasising women’s and children’s participation. One example is the Child Forum initially set up by UNICEF and other NGOs in order
to provide space and channels for children’s voices and participation, which was later formalised though its adoption by the Ministry of Social Affairs. These distinct initiatives still fall short of a
comprehensive policy, but they represent a step in the right direction.
4.4.7.3 School-based management and communitypractitioner inputs into education practice
The political reforms provided for under Decentralisation Law No. 221999 have impacted on the decentralisation of public services, including on education. Law No. 202003 on the National
Education System states that management of early education, basic education, and secondary school education is to be implemented based on minimum service standards with the principle
of school-based management Article 51. Under this model, schools are given broader autonomy in the management of school affairs with the participation of stakeholders teachers,
students, education staff, and community members. This led to the creation of a number of new approaches and institutional arrangements. These include the Education Council Majelis
Pendidikan Daerah, which serves as an independent board, comprising community members
461 Minister of Education Decree No. 044U2002 on Education Councils and School Committees; Pollitt, C., Birchall, J. and Putman, K. 1998 Decentralising public service management, Macmillan Press Ltd: London, p7 - There are two types of formal authority under
decentralisation: 1. Administrative decentralisation, in which authority is given to a body that is appointed rather than elected, thus it is primarily
managerial, administrative or expert rather than political. 2. Political decentralisation, in which the principal recipients of the decentralised authority include elected politicians andor the
directly elected representatives of some relevant public. The formation of MPD represents the former, since the members are appointed by the governor, while enhancement of School
Committee, which includes a substantial proportion of governors who are elected by parents, represents the latter. 462 Pollitt, C., Birchall, J. and Putman, K. 1998 Decentralising public service management
concerned with improving the quality, equity and efficiency of education management at the districtmunicipality level, and school committees
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. The functions of the Education Council are:
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1. Promoting community concerns and commitment towards the implementation of quality education.
2. Promoting collaboration with civil society individualsorganization, government, and parliament to implement quality education.
3. Taking stock and assessing community aspirations, ideas and needs related to education. 4. Giving advice and recommendations to local governmentparliament regarding the formulation
of education policies and programmes, and setting performance criteria for the local government, education staff teacherstutors and school principals, education facilities, and
other related matters.
5. Promoting the participation of parents and communities in education management for increased education quality and more equitable distribution of resources.
6. Conducting evaluations and supervision of the implementation of policies, programmes, processes, and outcomes of education.
The school-based management system allows schools to manage their own funds and gives schools the ability to set up programmes that suit their needs and priorities, as identified with
the involvement of local stakeholders communities, teachers, principals. The participation of stakeholders is accommodated by the school committees - independent boards made up of
elected parent representatives, businesses, and community leaders. Schools officials principals and teachers serve as the executive and work together with the school committee - as the
legislative arm of the process - to design school programmes and budget allocation. School funds comprise the BOS fund received from the central government and other block grants from local
government, funds from donors and parents, and funds from other sources. Bottom-up planning in education begins with a proposal from the school administrator and school committee, and
then proceeds up to the district and provincial government levels.
While innovative and improving community participation in education, the school-based management system is facing a series of challenges. First, there are overall budget limitations,
which are set to become more problematic as oil and gas revenues, and ultimately Otsus funds, decrease. A number of operational issues have also emerged. On one hand, schools find it
difficult to bid for funds from the district government in the time they have been allocated and there are notable problems of communication between schools and the government. Although
school-based management is supposed to have been rolled out throughout Aceh, most schools have failed to have their budgets approved by district governments, as indicated by a primary
school teacher in Banda Aceh:
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“We have been trained by UNICEF to design programmes, but there is no response or follow-up from the [local] Office of Education. The money from the education cluster is
largely absorbed by the Office. A large proportion of the education funds are still used by the Office, whereas the programmes developed by schools remain underfunded.” FGD, 7
September 2009
Furthermore, difficult relations with local governments were a central preoccupation during the FGD with education practitioners. The participants concluded that overall local governments
failed to act in the best interests of the schools, as described by one junior secondary school teacher:
“School principal, teachers and school committees are working together to design programmes and school budgets which are then brought to the District Office of Education,
then from the Ofice to the District Head, and then to the district government, but the problem is the local council members do not engage with us. They just keep deleting our
proposals.” FGD, Banda Aceh, 17 September 2009
These issues were already identified in a 2006 World Bank report, which established that most local governments in Aceh approve their budgets very late, often up to six months into the fiscal
year, and the budgets rarely address the needs or priorities highlighted by the education sector.
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This creates huge obstacles to advance planning: “The fund from districtmunicipal budget is not allocated at the beginning of the year,
instead the provincial parliament holds a meeting in June and the routine budget arrives in August by which time the academic calendar has been going for six months. Some schools
have to take up loans to keep the school running, but some other schools just wait. When the fund finally arrives, they just use it for new programmes that were not planned before.”
interview with staff of the Regional Office of Religious Affairs, Banda Aceh, 7 September 2009
Schools that resort to loans are then charged interest, which further reduces the funds available to schools. The issue of delay is well known and has been discussed in meetings between
district governments and parliaments, but so far there has been no resolution, according to some interviewees.
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This relates to the general weak capacity of districts to handle budget and financial flows, which was recounted by FGD participants and has been identified as a problem
since 2006.
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4.4.7.4 Other challenges under Special Autonomy: Authority, coordination and budget allocations in Aceh
On the whole, the Special Autonomy status emphasises the duality of opportunities and challenges. As shown, the budgetary constraints and pressures are not as prominent in Aceh
as they are elsewhere in Indonesia, such as in NTT. However, as in Papua, the construction of the institutional architecture underpinning Special Autonomy is a vast, complex and lengthy
undertaking. Both provinces also deal with specific but acute challenges; ethnic diversity and cultural differences in Papua, and the post-conflict and post-tsunami context in Aceh. Further
findings from the field in Aceh not discussed at length here include a number of similarities with findings from Papua, as follows:
463 World Bank 2006 Aceh public expenditure 464 Interview with a teacher and junior secondary school evaluator, Aceh Timur 17 June 2010
465 World Bank 2006 Aceh public expenditure, p17
1. Difficulties in establishing clear divisions of power and authority between the varying levels of government as required for the implementation of decentralisation which emphasised
devolution of power to district levels, followed by the adoption of Special Autonomy status which strengthens provincial authority.
2. Difficulties of coordination among the different layers of governments. 3. Difficulties in setting up effective budget allocation and disbursements.
According to staff from the Provincial BAPPEDA, the central, provincial, and district layers of government should complement each other in policymaking, budgeting and programming. One
particular example they provided is that of the funding of the Nine Years Compulsory Education Programme. The provincial government allocates budget for increasing the quality and capacity
of teachers as well as to rehabilitate schools, while the central government provides supporting funds from the Special Allocation Fund DAK, and the district government funds teachers’
salaries.
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In practice, however, far from complementing each other, there have been a number of issues when it comes to attributing the specific responsibilities, authority, functions and attributes
of each distinct layer of government, and establishing the mechanisms through which they coordinate and function as a whole. There are still many areas of overlap between the central
government’s technical departments and provincial and district government line agencies. This is worsened by the fact that the devolution of public service management and service delivery to
local governments was not complemented with an effective supporting regulatory framework. As a result, each government tier struggles to define their roles and responsibilities. Staff from the
Provincial BAPPEDA describe these complexities in the context of planning budget allocations:
“Sometimes overlapping does happen. It is because there is a lack of coordination. For instance, this happens when a programme funded by the national budget is implemented
without our knowledge. Sometimes the programmes approved are different to what we proposed, but because we do not hear otherwise, but still put them in our budget. But then,
it turns out that the programme is in fact being budgeted by the central government and we have to revise our budget again.” interview with staff of the Provincial BAPPEDA, Banda
Aceh, 16 June 2010
To synchronize some of the various budget planning processes, the Aceh Provincial BAPPEDA organises a forum on the Special Autonomy and Oil- and Gas-Derived Funds. The forum takes
place once a year prior to the preparation and drafting of the local budget. This forum functions along similar lines to a musrenbang, in that it is a space for deliberation that aims to bring
together the development aspirations of provincial and district governments, relevant line agencies and the Development Planning Agencies at each level. In this forum, local governments
present their proposals, which have to be based on and refer to qanun regulations. One particular aspect of qanun that is emphasised in these forums is that Special Autonomy and oil- and
gas-derived funds cannot be used to finance the government apparatus. The financing of local government apparatus is problematic for new districts created since 2001, as they lack revenue to
set up and run new government institutions and they resort to tapping finances not designed for that purpose.
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According to the staff of the Provincial BAPPEDA, the forum has functioned well and the qanun regulations are now clear enough to form the agreed base upon which conflicts or
disagreements about budget proposals can be resolved.
468 466 Interview staff of the Provincial BAPPEDA, Banda Aceh 16 June 2010
467 World Bank 2006 Aceh public expenditure 468 Interview with staff of the Provincial BAPPEDA, Banda Aceh 16 June 2010
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The process of decentralisation and the granting of Special Autonomy status have led to a proliferation of new districts and local bureaucracies. The districts in Aceh are diverse
geographically and economically, each with its own complex political system and its own priorities. In theory, decentralisation should facilitate appropriate responses to local contexts
and issues. However, interviewees emphasised that this made the promotion of education policy and programmes that conform to the National and Provincial Medium-Term Development Plans
RPJMN and RPJMD extremely dificult, requiring a key coordinating role for the Provincial Governor between different layers of government and across a multitude of districts:
“Initially it was very difficult for the provincial government to monitor policy implementation or the development process at the local [districtmunicipality] level. After the law on local
autonomy was issued in 2004, which instituted the governor as the representative of the central government, it became easier to control districtsmunicipalities. According to the
2004 Law, local budgets that are proposed by districtsmunicipalities have to be approved by the governor. It didn’t happen before, the governor did not have this power and the local
[districtmunicipality] governments submitted their budgets directly to central government, so that the provincial government did not know anything at all.”
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Interview with staff from the Provincial BAPPEDA, Banda Aceh, 16 June 2010
As in other provincial case studies in this report, effective evidence-based planning is greatly hampered by unreliable and inaccurate data. In Aceh, each office, institution, and agency has
its own unit responsible for providing and managing data. Inevitably, some of the data are conflicting and this is particularly problematic for sensitive data on poverty, infrastructure and
the numbers of teachers. Because there is no agreement on data and the actual state of affairs across the province, decision-making processes are not based on sound evidence and this
weakens the likelihood of informed debates and consensus-building processes about particular aspects of policy. Instead, government actors or stakeholders tend to rely on data that suits their
interests and arguments and ultimately the decisions on policy become hugely contested. The debates surrounding schools and the number of schools in the province illustrate these tensions.
The position of the Provincial BAPPEDA is clearly that there are no issues with the number of schools in the province and that building school facilities is neither an appropriate nor a fiscally
responsible one:
“There is a case of a remote village that proposed to build a new school, and at the time we could not access the village…It turned out that there are only several households in the
village and the school was a waste. A school was built and then not used. In another case two elementary schools stand next to each other, and in another case yet, a school only had
four students. This is a waste. In Aceh the number of primary school buildings is 3,800, while the number of villages is 6,000, so the ratio is almost one school for two villages, schools are
everywhere, as a result, the net enrolment rate at the village level is high.” Interview with staff from the Provincial BAPPEDA, Banda Aceh, 10 September 2009
However the views from the FGDs are at odds with that of the staff from the Provincial BAPPEDA. The FGD participants agreed and complained about the lack of infrastructure and availability of
schools especially in rural areas FGD, 14 September 2009. As we have seen above, there are issues of distance and transport to schools in rural areas and, as with teachers, the problems
relate not so much to overall numbers of schools the data used by staff from the Provincial BAPPEDA staff to justify not building more schools but concern the effective and appropriate
distribution of facilities across districts.
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The lack of appropriate and consistent data in this
469 Ibid. 470 Phone interview with staff of the Provincial BAPPEDA 16 June 2010
case results in conflicting views and understanding of the issue. A member of the Education Task Force in Aceh reported that disagreement on reference data is problematic in education
policy and provokes tensions with stakeholders. To resolve this problem, the Education Task Force has undertaken consultancies, consultations, meetings and workshops with the concerned
stakeholders and worked on establishing data that can be agreed on and that can be used as a basis and reference for policymaking.
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