5 Indonesia Blane

The Republic of Indonesia is the fourth largest country in the world with a population of over 200 million people. It is an extremely socially and culturally varied nation: there are more than 300 ethnic groups, each with its own language, customs, and form of social organization. Population and attendant social, political, and economic activities are dispersed across a collection of nearly 14,000 islands, spanning more than 3,000 miles. Indonesia is a unitary country comprising central, provincial, and local levels of government. Until recently, the regional administration of public affairs operated via a hierarchical, multitiered, and parallel system of deconcentrated central government agencies and nominally autonomous subnational units. Throughout most of its history, Indonesia’s public sector has been counted among the most centralized in the world. Many observers would date Indonesia’s modern administrative and fiscal decentralization program to Law No. 5 of 1974. And this law did indeed provide a basis for a greater involvement of decentralized subnational governments in the provision of public services that existed until that time. Although in the early 1990s some implementing regulations were written and a pilot