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ItemNo Preview AvailableThe political battle over health policy in Indonesia(Ear to Asia: an Asia Institute podcast, 2021-10-12)Ear to Asia podcast What’s at stake and who are the stakeholders in steering health policy in Indonesia? While the right to health for all Indonesians has been embraced by progressive, populist and technocratic political forces in recent years, oligarchic elites with ties to business and the military are now reemerging to thwart further improvements in healthcare for ordinary people. Political economist Prof Andrew Rosser and public policy specialist Dr Luky Djani join presenter Peter Clarke to examine the politics of healthcare in Indonesia. https://www.melbourneasiareview.edu.au/podcasts/the-political-battle-over-health-policy-in-indonesia/
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ItemUsing Courts to Realize Education Rights: Reflections from India and Indonesia(World Bank, 2018-05-22)This paper examines the role of courts in promoting fulfillment of the right to education in developing country democracies, focusing on India and Indonesia—two countries that have experienced increased education rights litigation in recent years. The paper argues that this litigation has been part of broader struggles over education policy, inequality, and the capture of educational institutions by political and bureaucratic forces; and that the extent to which litigation has been used and led to policy changes has depended significantly on the nature of, and access to, the court system; the presence of support structures for legal mobilization; the ideology of the courts and judges; and the roles and willingness of litigants to pursue redress. Broadly, litigation has served the interests of the poor and marginalized, although gains have largely come through better access to education, while issues of improving quality have been less prominent.
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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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ItemDiaspora organizations, political settlements, and the migration-development nexus: the case of the Indonesian Diaspora Network(Oxford University Press (OUP), 2022-09-08)This article examines the Indonesian Diaspora Network (IDN), an organization that seeks to ‘facilitate’ and ‘empower’ Indonesia’s diaspora and enhance its contribution to the country’s development. IDN portrays itself as an expression of the collective will of a unified and coherent Indonesian diaspora that is working to promote development-for-all, while critics suggest it is the instrument of elite and professional elements within the diaspora pursuing narrower interests and agendas. By contrast, this article suggests that IDN is a political settlement between these and other elements within the diaspora, each of which has distinct interests and agendas with regard to Indonesia’s development. Its impact on Indonesia’s development is consequently much less clear-cut than existing analyses suggest while also being contingent on processes of political and social struggle. In theoretical terms, the article encourages an understanding of diaspora organizations in terms of political settlements analysis.
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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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ItemBeyond the Crisis: Re-energizing Southeast Asian Studies(Bina Nusantara University, 2022-12-21)This article examines the main drivers of the fiscal crisis in Asian/Southeast Asian Studies and considers ways of overcoming or at least ameliorating it. In the Australian context, several leading scholars in Asian Studies have called for various new forms of strategic state financial support to help keep the field alive, including incentives and structural support for Asian languages at both school and university levels and priority in publicly-funded research grant schemes. However, re-energizing Asian Studies in fiscal terms will undoubtedly require efforts to make the field more appealing to prospective students because of the prevalence of higher education funding models in which money follows student enrollments. This will particularly be the case with Southeast Asian Studies, given the weakness of enrollments in this sub-field. In this respect, there may be some value in seeking to create new education pathways in Asian Studies that focus on cross-national issues and problems within the region as an alternative to the traditional country-focused area studies approach.
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ItemNo Preview AvailableObstacles to Realising the Right to Health(Inside Indonesia, 2022-11-28)
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ItemNo Preview AvailableThe Australian Diaspora(ABC Radio National, 2021-11-23)Harnessing the talents, expertise and contacts of highly skilled Australian expats seems obvious and uncontroversial. So why doesn't Australia have a formal policy that guides how we engage and connect with the diaspora.
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ItemThe Political Economy of the Learning Crisis in Indonesia(Research on Improving Systems of Education, 2022-07-29)Indonesia has done much to improve access to education in recent decades but it has had little success in improving learning outcomes. This paper examines the political origins of this problem. It argues that Indonesia’s learning crisis has reflected the political dominance during the New Order and post-New Order periods of predatory political, bureaucratic and corporate elites who have sought to use the country’s education system to accumulate resources, distribute patronage, mobilize political support, and exercise political control rather than produce skilled workers and critical and inquiring minds. Technocratic and progressive elements, who have supported a stronger focus on basic skills acquisition, have contested this orientation, with occasional success, but generally contestation has been settled in favour of predatory elites. The analysis accordingly suggests that efforts to improve learning outcomes in Indonesia are unlikely to produce significant results unless there is a fundamental reconfiguration of power relations between these elements. In the absence of such a shift, moves to increase funding levels, address human resource deficits, eliminate perverse incentive structures, and improve education management in accordance with technocratic templates of international best practice or progressive notions of equity and social justice—the sorts of measures that have been the focus of education reform efforts in Indonesia so far—are unlikely to produce the intended results.
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ItemAustralian Business and Economic Engagement with Asia(International Institute for Asian Studies, 2022-07-01)Australian government policy-makers have long asserted that Asia is a source of economic opportunity for Australia, especially for Australian businesses seeking to internationalise their operations. Neither growing geopolitical tensions between Australia and China in recent years nor the economic dislocation caused by the COVID-19 pandemic appear to have altered their thinking in this respect.