Eko Prasojo

Eko Prasojo was born in 1970. He graduated from the Faculty of Social and Political Sciences, University of Indonesia.  He received a Master and a Doctor Degree in Public Administration from Deutsche Hochschule für Verwaltungswissenschaften, Speyer, Germany. From 2006 Eko Prasojo holds a chair at the Department of Administrative Science and served as head of the departement from 2006-2009 and Board of Trustee, University of Indonesia (2006-2011). He is now head of the postgraduate Program for Public Administration, University of Indonesia. Eko Prasojo is now also chairman of Local Governance Watch (LOGOWA) at the Faculty of Social and Political Sciences, University of Indonesia and head of the editorial board of  the Journal Bisnis and Birokrasi.

Eko Prasojo is a member of the steering committee within the executive council of the Eastern Regional Organization of Public Administration (EROPA), chairman of  the expert commission, Indonesian Association of Public Administration (IAPA) and member of the Asian Association for Public Administration (AAPA). He was a visiting scholar at the University of Freiburg (1998) and the graduate Research Institute for Policy Studies (GRIPS),Tokyo (2010). He published 15 books (in Indonesian language), several journals and presented papers in some international conferences and seminars.

From 2003 - 2010 Eko Prasojo worked with the GTZ  for the Ministry of Administrative Reform of the Republic of Indonesia, where he served and consulted some reform projects. Eko Prasojo was involved in several drafts of law on bureaucratic reform and decentralization in Indonesian. He is a member of the advisory council for local autonomy in Indonesia since  2006. Now he serves as a member of the  Independent Team for National Bureaucratic Reform in Indonesia under the Vice President of the Republic of Indonesia.

His research interests include federalism and decentralization, democratization and local democracy, political economics in bureaucary, administrative reform, and public policy studies.

Conference Talk: "The Problem of Regional Proliferation in Decentralization in Indonesia"

Big bang decentralization that has taken place in Indonesia since 1999 has brought about implications of tremendous importance to the development of democracy and government in Indonesia. Among the developments is the increasing demand for the formation of new autonomous region a.k.a. regional proliferation or regional division. During the last nine years there have been 7 provinces, 164 regencies and 34 cities established. However, the evaluation conducted by the Ministry of Home Affairs in 2010 shows that many of the targets of the new autonomous region formation remain unmet. There are only 2 out of 198 regencies/cities that reached 75% of the set target indicators. Meanwhile, the results of the study conducted by the author in 2010 also indicate some issues and phenomena in the implementation of new autonomous region formation, e.g. the lacking of human resources quality of the apparatus, unclear border between regions, unfinished asset transfer, indecent government infrastructures and facilities, and the increasing power of certain ethnics in politics and government. Regional division is facing problems not only in its implementation, but also during the approval process to such a demand. Partial political interest remains prevail within the political process in the House of Representatives (DPR), leaving the government ‘stuck and kept hostage’ by those political interests. The formation of new local Government has become the symbol of local autonomy, as it will create new authority, new posts, fund allocation (DAU), new balance fund, deconcentration fund, and other things as its consequence. This paper thus will provide description on (1) how the political and bureaucratic process goes in regional division in Indonesia, (2) what are the problems of the regional division in its implementation, and (3) what are the future regional division strategies to be implemented in Indonesia.