Local Autonomy and Inter-Sector Performance-Based-Governance in Lampung Province

The dramatic shift in the management of local government in Indonesia, from the centralised, authoritarian New Order Era to the more democratic Reformation Era since 1996, met public demands for, among other things, more accountability. Decentralised local government requires a system that allows the Central Government to supervise and, at the same time, gives local governments the capacity to carry out their duties. This paper compares the institutional capacity of three regencies in Lampung using a ten-part inter-sector performance evaluation method developed by the Sustainable Capacity Building for Decentralization , project funded by the Indonesian Ministry of Home Affairs. Three separate surveys between 2007-2011 used the data from a 10% sample of all civil servants in each rank. We show that local government institutional capacities in Lampung Province differ not only regionally, but also within inter-sectors functions. All three regencies performed poorly in the inter-sector function of information and communication, and all three performed best in procurement of goods and services. In terms of local autonomy, the single recipe of symmetric decentralization which applies similarly all over Indonesia, needs to be replaced, we suggest, with asymmetric decentralization, which is more suited to the local governments’ varied institutional needs.