What makes some governments perform better than others? With rising levels of decentralization and local democracy, the focus of "good governance" is increasingly shifting from national to subnational levels. While much of the existing development literature remains preoccupied with formal institutional and society-centered explanations, there is growing evidence that local policy reforms are strongly affected by informal norms and elite-centered processes.

Post-Suharto Indonesia, a country with one of the most pronounced shifts to democratic decentralization anywhere in recent history, is a case in point. Drawing on empirical comparisons across ten districts (comprising 1000 business surveys and 150 interviews), Dr. von Luebke argues that societal pressures are often less significant in explaining policy differences than the quality of local government leadership. In the early transition to democracy, local firms, associations, and district councils continue to be constrained by collective action and political incentive problems. Local government leaders, on the other hand, have wielded historically strong formal and informal powers and stand, for better or worse, at the gateway to local policy reform. Motivated by direct elections and prospective donor funding, some district heads have become catalysts for better governance by introducing informal public-private dialogues, innovative monitoring instruments, and meritocratic promotion schemes. In response to current development debates, these findings highlight the importance of government leadership as an often underestimated policy determinant that can compensate for weak societal checks in periods of transition from authoritarian rule.

Christian von Luebke is completing a book manuscript titled “Heterodox Governance: The Political Economy of Local Policy Reform in Post-Suharto Indonesia.”  He has been awarded a 2009-2011 German Science Foundation Fellowship for a follow-up project incorporating cases from the rest of Southeast Asia and China.  In 2001-2006 he worked in rural Indonesia as a technical advisor for the World Bank and the German Development Agency. He holds a Ph.D. in public policy from the Crawford School of Economics and Government at the Australian National University.

ISEAS is pleased to invite you to the panel discussion and book launch for Donald Emmerson's new book, Hard Choices: Security, Democracy, and Regionalism in Southeast Asia.

Program

• 3:00 pm - Welcome by Ambassador K Kesavapany - Director, Institute of Southeast Asian Studies
• 3.05 pm - Introduction of Panelists by Professor Donald K Emmerson
• 3.10 pm - Presentation by Professor Donald K Emmerson
• 3.20 pm - Presentation by Professor Jörn Dosch
• 3.30 pm - Presentation by Dr Alan Chong Chia Siong
• 3.40 pm - General Discussion
• 4.30pm - Comments, Q & A
• 4.30 pm - Concluding Remarks
• 4.35 pm - Book Signing

Alan Chong Chia Siong is an assistant professor in the Department of Political Science at the National University of Singapore.  His recent publications include "Asian Contributions on Democratic Dignity and Responsibility:  Rizal, Sukarno and Lee on Guided Democracy" in East Asia: An International Quarterly (2008) and Foreign Policy Global Information Space: Actualizing Soft Power (2007).  His PhD is from the London School of Economics and Political Science.  

Jörn Dosch is a professor in the Department of East Asian Studies at the University of Leeds.  Among his recent publications are The Changing Dynamics of Southeast Asian Politics (2006), Economic and Non-traditional Security Cooperation in the Greater Mekong Subregion) (GMS) (co-authored, 2005).  His PhD is from Mainz University.

Donald K Emmerson heads the Southeast Asia Forum at Stanford University.  His recent publications include "ASEAN's Black Swans," Journal of Democracy (2008) and "Southeast Asia in Political Science:  Terms of Enlistment," in Erik Martinez Kuhonta et al., eds, Southeast Asia in Political Science:  Theory, Region, and Qualitative Analysis (2008).  His PhD is from Yale University.

Asia’s economies have been hard hit by the current global financial crisis, despite in most cases enjoying strong macroeconomic fundamentals and stable financial systems.  Early hopes were that the region might be “decoupled” from the Western world’s financial woes and even able to lend the West a hand through high growth and the investment of large foreign exchange reserves.  But that optimism has been dashed by slumping exports, plunging commodity prices, and capital outflows.  The region’s most open, advanced and globally-integrated economies—Hong Kong, Singapore, and Taiwan—are already in severe recession, with Japan, Korea and Malaysia not far behind, and dramatic slowdowns are underway in China, India, Indonesia, Thailand and Vietnam.  What role did Asian countries play in the genesis of the global crisis, and why have they been so severely impacted?  How is their recovery likely to be shaped by market developments and institutional changes in the West, and in Asia itself in response to the crisis?  Will the region’s embrace of accelerated globalization and marketization following the 1997-98 Asian financial crisis now be retarded or reversed?

Linda Lim is a leading authority on Asian economies, Asian business, and the impacts of the current global financial crisis on Asia, and she has published widely on these topics. Her current research is on the ASEAN countries’ growing economic linkages with China.

Forthcoming in 2009 are Globalizing State, Disappearing Nation: The Impact of Foreign Participation in the Singapore Economy (with Lee Soo Ann) and Rethinking Singapore’s Economic Growth Model. She serves on the executive committees of the Center for Chinese Studies and the Center for International Business Education at the University of Michigan, where formerly she headed the Center for Southeast Asian Studies. Before coming to Michigan, she taught economic development and political economy at Swarthmore. A native of Singapore, she obtained her degrees in economics from Cambridge (BA), Yale (MA), and Michigan (PhD).

Marcus Mietzner is currently Lecturer in Indonesian Studies at the Faculty of Asian Studies, Australian National University. Between 1998 and 2008, he lived, worked and researched in Indonesia. He has published extensively on Indonesian politics, among others in Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, Southeast Asian Research and Contemporary Southeast Asia. His most recent book is Military Politics, Islam, and the State in Indonesia: From Turbulent Transition to Democratic Consolidation, published by ISEAS in Singapore in December 2008.

Capital in its many facets is variable.  Like quicksilver, it can divide, reunite, and metamorphose seamlessly across a spectrum of ownerships by foreigners, the state, and domestic private
entrepreneurs.  

What does variable capital mean in and for Vietnam?  Who are the different investors?  How do they respond to state efforts to attract investments from overseas Vietnamese?  How do global supply chains—corporate buyers, contract factories, and subcontractors—shape the changing nature and impacts of capital in Vietnam?  How does a self-described socialist state use policies on investment, employment, and the privatization of state-owned factories to control the relations between workers and owners?  What roles in this mix are played by journalists who can ignore neither the party line nor the workers who protest in spite of it?  

In addition to addressing these questions, Prof. Tran will argue that workers in Vietnam are not resigned to being squeezed between morphing capital and state control.  They defend their interests flexibly in diverse forms of protest, overt and covert, including appeals to the state’s own socialist vision.  Fresh from extensive fieldwork in labor-intensive industries such as textiles, garments, and footwear, Prof. Tran will show how Vietnamese workers use origin, class, gender, and ethnicity to mobilize collective action against morphing capital in a one-party state.

Angie Ngoc Tran is a professor of political economy at California State University, Monterey Bay.  Her latest publications include articles in the Labor Studies Journal (2007) on labor media and labor-management-state relations in Vietnam.  Her PhD is from the University of Southern California (1996).