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ItemThe political economy of teacher management reform in Indonesia(Elsevier, 2018-07-01)Indonesia faces serious problems in the number, cost, quality and distribution of teachers. In recent years, its central government has introduced a range of reforms to address these problems but they have produced modest results. This paper suggests that this outcome reflects the way in which predatory political and bureaucratic elites have used the school system for decades to accumulate resources, distribute patronage, mobilize political support, and exercise political control rather than promote improved learning outcomes. Efforts to reduce teacher numbers, enhance teacher quality, and improve teacher distribution have accordingly constituted an assault on the interests of these elites, provoking powerful, if often subterranean, resistance. Broadly, reform has only occurred where the central government has employed policy instruments that have disciplined local governments and maintained a commitment to these instruments in the face of resistance. The paper concludes by assessing the implications for Indonesian education.
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ItemNo Preview AvailableTransnational linkages, political dynamics, and the migration-development nexus: Towards a political settlements approach(Elsevier, 2020-10-01)This paper examines how transnational researchers have incorporated political dynamics into their analyses of transnational linkages and their impacts. It argues that they have done so in ways that have focused on conflict and contestation between migrant/diasporic communities and homeland states/communities rather than within them. At the same time, in construing transnational linkages as instruments of particular actors, they have presented a narrow conception of how transnational linkages interact with political dynamics. As an alternative, the paper proposes a political settlements approach which views transnational linkages as institutions embedded in power relationships between competing groups defined in class, racial, ethnic, religious and gender terms. This approach, it is argued, overcomes these two problems by presenting a more disaggregated view of the actors, interests and agendas involved and construing transnational linkages as simultaneously instruments and arenas of contestation.
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ItemIntroduction: Transnationalism, diaspora and the migration-development nexus in Asia and Australia(Asia Institute, University of Melbourne, 2021-11-10)The number of people living outside their country of birth has increased dramatically in recent decades. In 1970, according to estimates produced by the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs (UN DESA), there were 84 million people living abroad, representing 2.3 percent of the world’s population. By 2020, these numbers had increased to 281 million and 3.6 percent respectively.
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ItemFailing to Engage: The Politics of Diaspora Policy in Australia(Asia Institute, University of Melbourne, 2021)In 2003, the late Professor Graeme Hugo, one of the country’s top migration and population experts, and his collaborators published a major report for the Australian government on the Australian diaspora and associated policy issues. Still the most detailed study of this subject, it recommended that the government adopt a diaspora policy to harness ‘the potential of the diaspora to be a positive factor in national economic and social development’. One year later, Dr. Michael Fullilove and Chloë Flutter published another major report on the Australian diaspora, this time for the Lowy Institute, a prominent international affairs think tank. They also called on the government to adopt a diaspora policy to harness its potential for Australia’s development.
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ItemTransnational linkages, power relations and the migration-development nexus: China and its diaspora(WILEY, 2021-12)While accepting that the migration–development nexus is best understood from a transnational perspective, recent studies analyse this nexus in a partial way rather than holistically. We review the literature, then attempt an enriched account of the complex and rapidly evolving relationship between diaspora and development in China – a country undergoing profound demographic, economic and social changes. Using in‐depth interviews with a variety of key informants or stakeholders and a transnationally oriented framework, we analyse features across three core policy dimensions that incorporate both international and domestic dynamics: citizenship, top talent recruitment and soft power. Our findings contribute to the literature on Chinese‐state‐diaspora relations. They show that China's approach to its diaspora policy and development, practice and outcomes reaches with powerful new effects across national borders. The transnational–relational perspective gives an optimal paradigm for researchers and policymakers to understand changing strengths and complexities in interactions (contestation, conflict, negotiation, cooperation) between multi‐scalar and multi‐dimensional linkages, and to form diaspora policy and engagement programmes responsive to unprecedented global political, economic and social disruption.
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ItemConflict, contestation, and corruption reform: the political dynamics of the EITI in Indonesia(ROUTLEDGE JOURNALS, TAYLOR & FRANCIS LTD, 2020-03-14)1. We know little about the political dynamics shaping country responses to the EITI, despite their importance as a determinant of these responses and the fact that the EITI’s success hinges on its ability to attract country members. This paper seeks to enhance our understanding in this respect by examining the Indonesian case. Indonesia was slow to sign up to and implement the EITI but eventually did so. It has remained compliant with the initiative more or less ever since, although its commitment has waned in recent years. We argue that this response reflected the changing balance of power between four sets of actors – national politico-business elites, regional politico-business elites, controllers of mobile capital, and subordinate classes and their NGO allies – as affected by economic shocks, political mobilisation, and elites’ political strategies. We accordingly suggest that EITI proponents consider the nature of such dynamics in devising reform strategies.
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ItemLaw, democracy and the fulfilment of socioeconomic rights: insights from Indonesia(ROUTLEDGE JOURNALS, TAYLOR & FRANCIS LTD, 2016-02-01)In recent years a debate has emerged about the conditions under which justiciable legal frameworks facilitate the fulfilment of socioeconomic rights. This debate has pitted institutionalist perspectives that emphasise the progressive potential of democratisation against structuralist perspectives that emphasise the constraints imposed by relationships of power and interest. This paper considers the debate in light of Indonesia’s recent experience. It suggests that we need to examine how institutional and structural factors interact within particular contexts to shape socioeconomic rights fulfilment, not examine these factors in isolation. It also considers the strategic implications of this argument for rights proponents.
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ItemNeo-liberalism and the politics of higher education policy in Indonesia(ROUTLEDGE JOURNALS, TAYLOR & FRANCIS LTD, 2016-01-01)This paper examines Indonesia's experience with neo-liberal higher education reform. It argues that this agenda has encountered strong resistance from the dominant predatory political, military, and bureaucratic elements who occupy the state apparatus, their corporate clients, and popular forces, leading to continuation of the centralist and predatory system of higher education that was established under the New Order. The only areas in which neo-liberal reform has progressed have been those where the neo-liberal agenda has aligned well with that of popular forces and there has been little resistance from predatory elements. In presenting this argument, the paper illustrates the role of domestic configurations of power and interest in mediating global pressures for neo-liberal higher education reform. It accordingly suggests that Indonesia needs to construct a model of higher education that simultaneously fits with the reigning political settlement and produces better research and teaching outcomes than the present model.
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ItemAsia's rise and the politics of Australian aid policy(ROUTLEDGE JOURNALS, TAYLOR & FRANCIS LTD, 2016-01-01)
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ItemPandemics, politics and principles: business and human rights in Southeast Asia in a time of crisis.(Asia Institute, University of Melbourne, 2020)Business activity has been a key driver of economic dynamism in Southeast Asia and one of the main reasons for the region’s growing prosperity in recent decades. It has led to increases in investment and consumption, boosted exports and, in so doing, promoted economic growth. This has in turn created jobs, improved incomes, increased governments’ ability to provide social welfare, and lifted millions out of poverty.