Open Government, Innovation, and Inclusive Development: Some Insights from Local Initiatives in Indonesia

Abstraksi

Open Government is believed to be the key to inclusive development, as it promotes transparency, enhancing citizen participation, and stimulating innovation in public service delivery. Through openness, the government will likely to achieve the basic inclusive development visions; end the extreme poverty, advance human prosperity and protect the planet for future generations. This is evident in the context of Indonesia, as the national government have shown a strong commitment in implementing Open Government. However, there is a clear challenge in translating this vision at the local level due to different understandings about the meaning of Open Government, which leads to a variety of its implementation across the nation. Therefore, acknowledging the adoption of Open Government at the local context in Indonesia is beneficial to understand the extent it encourages innovation and contributes to inclusive development. In response to this objective, this paper provides an overview of local initiatives in Open Government from three cities in Indonesia, namely Pontianak, Mojokerto, and Tangerang. Through in-depth interviews with key actors from local government and civil society in each cities, this paper revealed a variety of inclusiveness as a result of different Open Government implementations. This is driven by five key factors: leadership, infrastructure, government capacity, bureaucratic commitment, and partnerships. Hence, it is important for the local government to increase participations of non-government actors, such as citizen and private sectors, as well as introducing relevant policies in ensuring sustainability of open government initiatives so that it can contribute to inclusive development in Indonesia.