Disaster Emergency Management: The Emergence of Professional Help Services for Victims of Natural Disasters by Liza Ireni Saban

Author:Liza Ireni Saban [Saban, Liza Ireni]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Public Policy, Social Science, Political Science, Disasters & Disaster Relief, General
ISBN: 9781438452432
Google: QEXSAwAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 18792445
Publisher: SUNY Press
Published: 2014-07-01T00:00:00+00:00

Disaster Resilience Management in Indonesia: The West Sumatra Earthquakes, 2004

The Civil Service of Indonesia

The civil service in Indonesia should be traced back to the roots of the Javanese administrative practices that regulated public affairs and established norms in a succession of the island’s notable empires, including Sailendra Mataram, Majapahit, the Demak confederacy, and seventeenth-century Mataram. The Javanese administration was highly centralized and authoritarian based on a hierarchical structure of administrative chain-of-command by the master (gustiand, local ruler) and his servants (kawula).56 This tradition lasted for nearly a millennium before submitting first to the European colonial practices, and subsequently to global standardization. Today, these administrative practices still bear some influence on Indonesian public administration. Traditional Javanese norms, such as centralized and patrimonial power, and top-down decision-making system and conflict solutions are entrenched in modified form as dominant features of Indonesia’s public administration. Thus, the Indonesian public administration structure is formally hierarchical, composed of informal patron-client relations between public officials and citizens. The initiatives set down by the New Order aimed to limit the huge increase in civil officials, whose numbers stood at 2.5 million in 1968.57 The New Order addressed regulations directed at tightening the central control over the bureaucracy, such as daily operations and clarifying the authority of central government over personnel of the regional government.58

The New Order followed the Pancasila, which was set by the 1945 constitution as the embodiment of basic principles of an independent Indonesian state. The Pancasila included five principles, among them belief in one supreme God, humanitarianism, nationalism expressed in the unity of Indonesia, consultative democracy, and social justice. These principles were articulated by Sukarno in a speech known as “The Birth of the Pancasila,” which he gave to the Independence Preparatory Committee on June 1, 1945. The spirit of the Pancasila was also applied in the New Order reforms of the civil service by developing merit-based criteria to improve government capacity for economic development. For example, in 1978, a national indoctrination program was initiated to incorporate Pancasila ethics by civil servants. Suharto’s New Order seems to pursue a mix of centralized and decentralized arrangements and to link them in ways that most effectively promote stability and economic development.

Currently, Indonesia’s civil service stands at about 4.6 million employees. Among them, about 500,000 are employed in police and military agencies, leaving some 4 million civilian civil service employees. It should be noted that there is no formal job classification in the civil service. Entry ranks are mainly determined by education level, and increases in rank are largely driven by seniority—with a maximum rank depending on the entry level of the civil servant; significant discretionary allowances are distributed by top management in individual agencies to their subordinates in exchange for loyalty and, frequently, collusion in malfeasance.59

The administrations in China, Japan, Indonesia, and the United States have all put in place economic policies designed to increase economic growth and competitiveness, reduce poverty, and improve effective governance. In each case, these efforts responded to their own histories. Despite differences

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