The existence of local parties in the perspective of banda aceh citizens

The legitimacy of local political parties in Aceh results from a peace agreement between the Free Aceh Movement and the Government of Indonesia. Local political parties provide new hope and alternative for people who previously only voted for national parties. Since participating in the election for the first time, local political parties have obtained the people's mandate to fill legislative and executive powers. But along the way, local political parties experienced a crisis of trust. Parliamentary seat gains declined dramatically over the three election periods. This is the starting point for studying local political parties in a limited scope in Banda Aceh City. Through a qualitative approach, the results of this study describe contextual conditions from the perspective of civil society or city residents. The study results explain the lack of seats for local political parties. Residents see that local political parties have not strengthened as a catalyst in influencing policy and have not appeared unique and specific to distinguish them from national political parties. In the future, the role of local political parties is expected to be more critical in fighting for local democracy substantially.

Open the Public Space

This chapter shows the characters and problems of local democracy through analyzing local referendums in Japan. The author starts the discussion by posing three questions: (1) Why is the number of local referendums increasing? (2) Is the dialogue between citizens and local councilors efficient? (3) Can transformations in local democracy be observed? This chapter regards the history of local referendums as a lesson of democracy and reveals the necessity of dialogue through campaigns of local referendums. It comprises three parts: (1) the history of local referendums in Japan, (2) a theoretical background on local referendums and representative democracy, and (3) the analysis of a local referendum in the city of Matue in Shimane Prefecture.

Entrenching Community (Participatory) Governance Through Street Committees at Cato Crest, eThekwini Municipality

This chapter explores the role of street committees in retrenching and grounding community participatory governance at Cato Crest. The chapter is purposed to revitalise street committees as street/area democratically elected and managed structures aimed at restoring inclusive local democracy, peace, and order, especially in the prevalence of domestic violence, crime, community disunity and divisions, disobedient youth, and other anti-social behaviours. The author argues that the current configuration of street committees as partisan structures compromises their fundamental purpose of uniting people regardless of race, culture, gender, and socio-economic class. The chapter found that without clear developmental roles, street committees are often highjacked to serve a party political agenda. The chapter is qualitative in nature when data were collected through observation and face-to-face interviews with street committees at Cato Crest. The empirical data was also enriched by secondary sources in the form of journal papers, books, and government reports.

Persistence of The Tarekat Naqsabandiyah in Local Politics of Indonesia Post New Order

In the Indonesian context, tarekat is seen as a social movement with a broad impact. Its existence and activity need to be paid attention to by the State, society, and other political infrastructure. Many experts have carried out the discourse on tarekat with various points of view. This study focuses on the socio-political sphere of tarekat and its movements in local Indonesian politics after the Soeharto Era using a qualitative approach with interpretive data analysis involving the informants who understand the tarekat activity in Rokan Hulu in depth. The emergence of spiritual organs with various ideological variants, visions, and missions indicates the strengthening of civil supremacy in Indonesia. As part of a religious civil society organization, the Naqsyabandiyah order can grow and exert a strong influence on the dynamics of Indonesian local democracy, especially in Rokan Hulu - Riau. The existence of this movement strengthens Bruinessen's argument about the tarekat as a "storehouse of sounds," whose symbolization of motion is described by the gesture and commands of the teacher. After the New Order, there was a shift in the political orientation of this group; the nature of taqlid to master teachers was only for religious matters, while on political issues, there was a shift in direction that was more directed at the individual interests of the congregation. Even so, the Naqsyabandiyah Rokan Hulu tarekat could still maintain its existence and political power.

Analysis of the Influence of Local Politics on Implementation SDGs 4 Policy for Quality Education

SDGs-4, the quality education is one of the factors in achieving the goals of the SDGs. The problem is that the SDGs look ambitious in integrating local level policies that are responsive to political interests. The research used a mixed method of exploration, searching for interview data and questionnaires. The results showed that the implementation of the SDGs was strongly influenced by local democracy. The implementation of the promotion of SDGs requires strengthening local politics and democracy, including; the quality of the Pilkada, the role of the community, political parties, media control, and public meetings. The influence of local democracy on policy implementation is 51.5%. Policy implementation has a positive effect on the implementation of the SDGs with a value of 0.187. The influence of local democracy and policy implementation on the promotion of SDGs-4 is 64.2% and the remaining 35.8% is influenced by other factors.

Possibilities for Decentralisation in Thailand: A View from Chiang Mai

In this article we examine radical proposals for political, administrative and fiscal decentralisation in Thailand which were developed for Chiang Mai as a potential model for Thailand as a whole. They lay emphasis on local self-government and citizen participation. We argue that these proposals offer a way forward for a Thai decentralisation process that has yet to proceed to the extent envisaged when it was commenced in the 1990s as part of democratisation, embraced most notably in the 1997 Constitution. Moreover, this process, we argue, offers a way out of the extreme confrontation between the yellow and red factions that has troubled Thailand since 2005. As Thailand returns to civilian rule after five years of military government, and local and provincial government comes once more to the fore, we argue that the Chiang Mai Metropolitan Administration Bill of 2013 offer more local democracy as well as imaginative ways of recruiting the enthusiasm of local stakeholders in a system designed to link provincial and local authorities, and the citizenry, in a virtuous circle of democracy and development.

From Confrontation to Collaboration: Peasant Negotiations in the Arena of Decentralization

Decentralization and local democracy are two inseparable elements of post-New Order Indonesia development politics. Furthermore, the quality of decentralization to a certain extent is influenced by the depth and quality of local democratic practices. This study reveals that decentralization is not only an arena of competition between local elites in possession of capital through local democratic institutions, but also an arena in which grassroots groups (peasants) could fight for their land rights. This study observes that local democratic procedures and institutions that are practiced in unison with decentralization are not utilized by the lower classes in the struggle for their rights. This shows the failure of local democratic institutions from taking root in the marginal groups. The success of peasant movements in the struggle for their rights and the practice of local elite domination of the decentralization arena does not come out of the blue, but is related to the history of the formation of the agrarian structure and social class. This study concludes that on one side, local elites trust democratic institutions and procedures to achieve their goals, while on the other side the grassroots have their own logic on how local democracy should have been practiced, namely by not separating practice of local democracy from the missions of justice and social welfare for the common good.

Interventions and intersections: institutional environment and local level autonomy in LEADER. A comparative study

In 2010, when hope emerged that the new conservative government would improve the governance of the LEADER Programme, the Naturama Alliance, a co-operative network of seven Hungarian LAGs, issued a Declaration that summarised procedural issues to be addressed by a revision[1]. After introducing the alliance, the first chapter was entitled “Decentralisation and Autonomy”, indicating the direction of the desired shift towards a more autonomous operation. The LEADER Programme is scrutinised in this article from the point of view of autonomy and local democracy, exploring to what extent these are linked with or distinct from higher level governance transformations towards decentralisation or recentralisation. Theoretical approaches derived from rural and government studies are interpreted in the first sections of the paper, exploring the debate regarding the correlation of autonomy and local democracy and the way it is manifested in LEADER. Most authors regard LEADER as a promoter of local democracy and identify a positive correlation between democracy and an enhanced local autonomy. However, a consensus among scholars also seems to be unfolding from these studies suggesting that the scope of ‘LEADER democracy’ is mostly narrow, restricting participation to more resourceful social groups due both to the ‘thematic filters’ of the Local Development Strategy and to ‘procedural filters’, such as capacities allocated to the staff for animation and assistance to overcome difficulties of application. The empirical research background of this article is provided by two case studies, which were conducted in 2018-2019, one in England (Northumberland Uplands) and one in Hungary (Balaton Uplands), two states with complex recent histories and trajectories in terms of devolution of governance to lower levels and local autonomy. The secondary interpretation of these case studies focuses on the degree of participation and autonomy of LAGs. The analysis reveals that the degree of autonomy (and to some extent of participation) declined in both countries in the last iteration compared to the 2007-13 programming cycle. It has also been uncovered that rather than the ‘post transition’, recentralised Hungarian context, it was the British institutional system and governance tradition that permitted more top-down intervention and less autonomy for the LAGs. [1] A NATURAMA Szövetség Akciócsoportjainak javaslatai az UMVP III. IV. tengelye intézkedéseinek hatékonyabb megvalósítása érdekében. [Suggestions of the NATURAMA Alliance for the more effective implementation of III-IV axes of the RDP], 2010. http://leadercontact.com/images/stories/https___leaderkontakt.pdf

Unraveled Practices of Participatory Budgeting in European Democracies

The goal of the final chapter was to summarize lessons about the worst and best practices, causes, and effects of (successful or unsuccessful) participatory budgeting, delivered by the country case studies included in this book. The information collected serves to check to what extent participatory budgeting as practiced in the countries involved presents a real attempt to change municipal budgets toward addressing the needs of marginalized groups and to improve decision-making based on local democracy and participation, or whether these processes as such are to be judged to be more important than any output and outcomes. All in all, the practices of PB as they evolved in European countries out of the innovative original as developed in Porto Alegre in the 1990s can be seen neither as a process of policy diffusion nor as a process of policy mimesis. The terminology of participatory budgeting remained, but the goals and tools to achieve the goals resulted only in marginal changes in the status quo in municipalities in European countries practicing participatory budgeting, instead of resulting in radical changes to increase spending in favor of marginalized groups. Participatory budgeting in selected European countries is far away from the level of “best practice” in which local democracy and participation are promoted. However, it is also not possible to conclude that all experiences are just “trivial pursuits”.