13 - Regional Autonomy and Its Discontents: The Case of Post-New Order Bali

Summary

INTRODUCTION

Habibie's 1999 governance reform — implemented and revised during the legislatures of Abdurrahman Wahid and Megawati Sukarnoputri, and supported by international donor agencies such as the Asian Development Bank, the World Bank, the German GTZ (that is, Gesellschaft für Technische Zusammenarbeit or Society for Technical Cooperation), the United Nations Development Programme, USAID, AusAID, the Asia Foundation and the Ford Foundation (see Holtzappel's introduction to this volume and also Lubis and Santosa 1999, pp. 345–46; Turner and Podger 2003, pp. xi, 129; Schulte Nordholt and van Klinken 2007, p. 16) — projected great expectations of enhanced administrative efficiency and accountability, political participation and transparency as well as macro-economic stability and equity against the bleak backdrop of the complete collapse of Suharto's rentier economy. Yet, at least for Bali, since decades one of the most developed provinces in Indonesia (see for example, Interim Consultative Group on Indonesia 2002, p. 2), the preliminary results of the still incomplete, if not inchoate, reform seem so far to have fallen rather short:

“Regional autonomy has come to us too early, we are not ready for it yet”, said Mertha Ada, a cosmopolitan Theravada-Buddhist meditation master of Chinese descent-cum-traditional healer of modern illnesses with a large clientele of discontent urban middle-class Balinese, Javanese and international expatriates. He was echoing a common belief among Balinese elite that blames the general preoccupation with parochial interests for the increasing fragmentation of the Balinese community. The growing fragmentation or decreasing sense of solidarity would quite obviously be detriment to the commonweal priorities suggested by the opportunities as much as by the shortcomings of the decentralization process.

At first sight, this belief seems to resonate with what has formed a major focus of attention for Pamela Allen and Carmencita Palermo (Allen and Palermo 2004; 2005), Michel Picard (Picard 2005), Henk Schulte Nordholt (Schulte Nordholt 2007) and Carrol Warren (Warren 2007): the prevalent obsession of the Balinese with their own distinctiveness and interests in the name of local identity (kebalian), local tradition (adat) and “true” Hinduism.