Below is an excerpt from a paper written by The Asia Foundation’s country representative in Indonesia, Sandra Hamid, that was featured in the Bulletin of Indonesian Economic Studies (BIES), a journal published by the Taylor & Francis Group and housed in the Indonesia Project in the Arndt-Corden Department of Economics at The Australian National University. To read the full article, visit Taylor & Francis Online.

Indonesia is a successful but flawed democracy: while the electoral process has worked well, the quality of democratic governance is less encouraging. Missing from the equation between elections and democracy is political accountability. Parties’ obsession with coalition building as a route to political power has made it difficult for voters to attribute success or failure to elected officials. Coalition government allows politicians to send contradictory messages, and in 2012 religious minorities – which are neither banned nor protected – have paid a heavy price for the lack of accountability and leadership. In Jakarta an outsider, Joko Widodo, won the gubernatorial election despite facing an incumbent backed by a broad coalition. His victory illustrates that coalition building does not guarantee success, and that the electorate is mature enough not to be swayed by appeals to religious and ethnic sentiment. This gives heart to those hoping to strengthen democracy and democratic values in Indonesia.

Afghans seem to want their government to be strong and capable, accessible and accountable, modern and democratic. But perhaps Afghans do not compare how Afghanistan is today with how much better it could be, as most internationals seem to: that comparison would surely suggest Afghan governance falls far short of the ideal. Perhaps, instead, Afghans compare how Afghanistan is today with how much worse it could be, possibly with how much worse it has been in recent memory. …

The vision for governance laid out in Afghanistan’s constitution, its national development strategy, and the communiqués of international donor conferences is a vision of good governance and modern democracy – a vision that most Afghans strongly support, at least in principle. But the “rule of law” and the “rule of man” still operate side by side in Afghanistan today, and most Afghans seem to recognize that it will take many years for the latter to give way to the former. Meanwhile, they have lives to live, jobs to create, roads to build, children to educate, problems to solve, injuries to treat, conflicts to resolve, and decisions to make. No community that wants to preserve – or establish – a modicum of peace and stability can afford to wait around for a government (or foreign donors) to catch up to their needs for rules, decisions, institutions, services, and so on; instead they will use whatever governance options are available to them, whether from formal, informal, or even illicit sources. The result, inevitably, is going to be a hybrid system, and Afghans themselves will argue over its form, its rate of formalization, and its fairness, for many decades to come.

The withdrawal of ISAF troops and the transition to Afghan lead over the next few years will be accompanied by a heightened sense of uncertainty and potential for civil war. The top priority for the international community should be to keep the current hybrid system from falling apart so that those arguments can take place without resort to violence. That objective might best be served by helping to give as many Afghans including power brokers and insurgents – a stake in the system as possible. Doing so, however, would require that foreign donors make some uncomfortable compromises to their own visions for Afghanistan’s governance, and take Afghans’ views – contradictory and nuanced as they are – much more seriously.

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In 2009, The Asia Foundation began tracking suco (village) council performance through over 750 focus group discussions in all sucos of Oecusse, Bobanaro, Ainaro, and Baucau districts, as well as across sucos in the control districts of Ermera and Manatuto. A new report, produced by The Asia Foundation, analyzes the data collected during the three-year project while highlighting strengths, weaknesses, and trends in suco governance.

In this just-released paper, “Staying True in Nepal: Understanding Community Mediation through Action Research,” the 10th in The Asia Foundation’s “Occasional Paper” series, John Paul Lederach, Professor of International Peacebuilding, University of Notre Dame, and Asia Foundation Senior Program Officer Preeti Thapa explore the use of participatory action research as a method to deepen the practice of mediation at the village level in rural Nepal. The paper looks at how mediation has evolved through practice and as a response to daily conflict during and after the nation’s civil war, and includes discussion of how participatory action research has affected the practice of community mediation. Download paper.

Often in countries where people feel that democracy has failed to deliver on its promises, the public perception of parties and politicians is extremely negative. Parties and representatives that should be serving the people are – with few exceptions – perceived as ineffectual, self-serving or corrupt. Rather than helping the people achieve their aspirations, parties are seen as standing in the way of their achievement. Parties are perceived as the problem, not the solution.

Growing awareness in the democracy assistance community of this pathology led to the recognition that for democratization to be successful more attention and assistance should be directed to improving political parties. Of course, international assistance for political parties is not new. Although never a very high priority, it has been provided in one form or another for several decades by European and American aid agencies and party institutes. And there is no doubt that some party assistance had been highly useful and effective in some cases; in others it has been perceived as either ineffectual, or tangential to actual priorities for democratization.

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