Cross-Cultural Learning for Securing Decentralisation and Democratisation: Assessing Indonesia's Response to Globalisation

Abstract

Drawn by globalization, Indonesia's governance has been transformed into a more decentralised and democratically shaped one in the pas decade. Given the scale of the challenges, its achievement deserves admiration. Yet, the remaining challenges, namely to ensure that decentralised democratic governance remains culturally deep-seated in Indonesia politics is enormous. The stage of the transformation has hardly reached the fundamentally required cultural change due to the lack of cultural understanding within the process of transformation. Since democratisation and decentralisation are, essentially, forms of cultural engagement of global political-economic powers, the article proposes to reframe those two processes as the kings of cultural transformation. Analysing along this line of thought allows us to uncover the fact of the stubborn obstacle that Indonesia has been facing to reconcile the intangible, yet, continuously-embedded clashes of sub-cultures. A kind of cross-cultural learning strategy is important for Indonesia to secure that agenda.