Democratizing Village for Better Services

Abstraksi

Since 2014, Indonesia has expanded democratic decentralization further to the village level. With the increasing authorities and budgets, village governments have significant roles in achieving higher development outcomes on the ground. However, early analyses on village capacity to manage their governance has mostly been pessimistic on the effectiveness of the village governments to pursue the outcomes. In addition to some reports on the misuse of village budgets, village governments heavily orientated their programs and budgets to fund village administration and infrastructure development. This may be caused by limited democratic village governance to political accountability, while voice and interests of the poor and marginalized have not been accommodated in between the village elections. This study argues that villages need supports to clarify the regulatory framework and, more importantly, to create democratic and interactive relations among village government, communities and various groups within the village to promote improvement of basic services. Based on case studies in ten villages, we found three social accountability instruments– participatory planning and budgeting, collaborative monitoring of frontline service units, and citizen journalism – are effective to allow communities to interact with the government officials and basic service providers, and to improve basic services. These three instruments are complementing each other and provide strong incentives for stakeholders to promote social accountability by allocating village budgets to enhance basic services and/or directly improving the quality of services. The social accountability performance, in turn, positively affected political accountability through village elections.