The National Program for Community Empowerment (known as PNPM Mandiri in Indonesia) is the principal, over-arching initiative through which the Indonesian government has pursued community-led development since 2005, though it has roots in...
moreThe National Program for Community Empowerment (known as PNPM Mandiri in Indonesia) is the principal, over-arching initiative through which the Indonesian government has pursued community-led development since 2005, though it has roots in much earlier programs. It is repeatedly referred to as the largest community development program in the world in World Bank documents (World Bank, 2012). It is a nation-wide program that reaches 60,000 villages and disburses about USD$2 billion yearly to more than 50,000 sub-projects. There are two strands of this initiative, with one serving urban areas (PNPM Urban) and the other serving rural ones (PNPM Rural). In both cases, the program “works by giving communities block grants that they can spend to carry out plans that they have developed through a participatory, bottom-up planning process that is facilitated by social and technical specialists who provide advice to communities but do not control the funds” (World Bank, 2012a, p. 18).
This program has a long history that goes back to the 1970s (and beyond) and is linked with a series of World Bank-funded projects. Just as importantly, the trajectory of this program has significantly impacted the emergence, evolution, and prominence (or lack thereof) of other governance reforms in the education sector, such as school-based management and low-fee private schools. The present report seeks to examine these issues, with the purpose being to understand the trajectory, politics, and implications of the PNPM program generally and the ways that it has enabled (or not) reforms in the education sector related to school-based management and low-fee private schools. Throughout, this report also focuses on the influence of the World Bank, the way that this organization’s influence has changed over time, and the mechanisms through which the World Bank has exercised that influence. Put differently, this study uses the PNPM program as an entry point into governance reform dynamics within and beyond the education sector in Indonesia between the government and the World Bank.
The findings presented here document how the World Bank creates and uses parallel programs outside of the core government bureaucracy. Not only do World Bank projects build on these programs over time but this institution is able to take advantage of moments of crisis to expand and adapt them. In Indonesia, the financial crisis of the late 1990s provided an opportunity for the World Bank further scale up the general community block grant program it had been supporting (the predecessor to PNPM) while also transferring the block grant model to realm of education (where it would serve as the predecessor to the government’s school-based management program).
Separately, while the relationship between the World Bank and the Indonesian government has been rocky at times, World Bank technical assistance has been consistent over a long period of time reaching back into the 1960s. This technical assistance has taken the form of policy advice, program management and implementation, research, monitoring and evaluation, pilot testing new programs, training, coordination of donor initiatives, management of trust funds of donor resources, and chairing consultative forums, among other examples. However, while the World Bank has certainly been influential thanks to this assistance and through the immense financial resources it has leant to Indonesia over the years (estimated at USD$30 billion during 1968-2004 alone), this report also discusses reasons to nuance our understanding of World Bank influence, particularly at the sub-national level where this institution has continually wrestled with political and organizational factors that are beyond its control and which have hampered the realization in practice of neoliberal governance reforms that circumvent the central state apparatus and that attempt to institute relations of accountability at the community level.