HEADING OFF CORRUPTOIN: INDONESIA ACTS TO MEET UN STANDARDS, 2010-2016 Tristan Dreisbach drafted this case study based on interviews conducted in Jakarta in May and June 2017. The British Academy-Department for International Development Anti-Corruption Evidence (ACE) Program funded the development of this case study. Case published August 2017. SYNOPSIS In 2010, Indonesia planning agency official Diani Sadiawati acquired a mandate to expand the government's anticorruption measures. Sadiawati sought to bring the country in line with its obligations under the United Nations Convention against Corruption. The country's powerful anticorruption agency already had a full agenda and there was plenty more to do. With support from top-level officials, especially reform-minded Vice President Boediono, Sadiawati and her colleagues focused on prevention of corruption. With help from the president's delivery unit, they began to coordinate actions among a large number of government agencies, overcome resistance to reform, and develop a system for monitoring impact and tracking progress. By 2014, the agencies had met 88% of the targets they had committed to. Civil society observers said the program had not treated many of the root problems, however, thereby underscoring the need for further work. In 2017, new President Joko Widodo leant his support but asked for a number of changes as the program moved into its next phase. INTRODUCTION In 2010, Indonesia was running late. Four years earlier, the country's parliament had ratified the United Nations Convention against Corruption (UNCAC), which required participating countries to address a variety of problems-from petty bribery to large-scale financial crime. But Indonesia's powerful anticorruption commission, the lead agency, had a full agenda, and action in other parts of the government had lagged. However, the 2009 reelection of President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, who promised to "lead the jihad against corruption,"1 offered an opening for change. First tapped in 2006 to oversee compliance with the UN obligations, Diani Sadiawati, longtime director of legal analysis at Indonesia's national development planning agency, Bappenas, began meeting almost immediately with government and civil society leaders to discuss a new corruption strategy. High among her priorities was prevention, which required close attention to systems, procedures, norms, and standards. Broad cooperation within the civil service would be essential to success, and Sadiawati's office was well positioned to negotiate with other parts of government. Although Indonesia had made strides in investigating and prosecuting corruption, Transparency International still gave the country poor marks. The 2009 Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI) rated Indonesia 111th of 180 countries surveyed. More than half of companies responding to a 2009 World Bank survey reported that they expected to pay bribes to officials in exchange for government contracts.2 Government concessions and contracts often went to bidders who had personal relationships with agency employees. And lack of regulation and transparency in political campaign financing created numerous opportunities for influence peddling.3 At the street level, citizens grappled with petty corruption. More than half of Indonesians perceived the police as extremely corrupt, according to a 2010-11 Global Corruption Barometer report by Transparency International, and 11% of respondents who had contact with the police in 2009 reported paying bribes. Citizens held the judiciary, parliament, and political parties in similarly low regard.4 Seeing opportunity in the president's campaign promises, in 2010 Sadiawati presented a blueprint for stronger corruption prevention to the office of Vice President Boediono, who was deeply involved in efforts to improve the performance of government. Boediono, who like many Indonesians had just one name, had served as minister of national development planning (the ministry in charge of the National Planning Agency) in 1998 and 1999, during a wave of public anger against abuse of office that led to street demonstrations, regime change, and a transition period known as Reformasi. He had earned a reputation as a reformer and went on to hold other positions, including finance minister and governor of the central bank, before Yudhoyono tapped him to be his running mate in his successful bid for a second five-year term in 2009. Sadiawati's strategy identified six priority areas: prevention, law enforcement, law and regulation, international cooperation and asset recovery, anticorruption education and culture, and the development of an integrated reporting mechanism. With a president who promised to fight corruption and a vice president who wanted to change the way government worked, it was time to put that strategy into practice. THE CHALLENGE Sadiawati's task in 2010 wasn't easy. Preventing government corruption required clear rules, the threat of meaningful consequences for those who broke the rules, increased transparency, better ethics education and training, and effective monitoring. Because Bappenas lacked explicit authority over other parts of government, Sadiawati had to adopt a cooperative rather than a confrontational approach. Sadiawati had ample qualifications that anchored her credibility. A lawyer by vocation, she had joined Bappenas in 1988. Eleven years later, during Indonesia's transformation from a military-dominated one-party state to a multiparty democracy, she had become the youngest-ever department director at the planning agency, which was responsible for formulating, coordinating, and evaluating development plans and the government's reform agenda. Sadiawati, who oversaw legal analysis, focused on two areas crucial to a well-functioning democracy: access to justice and the fight against corruption. Sadiawati also well knew the ins and outs of reform and had a strong reputation for building broad popular participation. When the government had first signed the UN convention, in 2006, she had broken with Bappenas's usual way of doing things and taken her case directly to the people. "At the time [2006], civil society was just shouting in the streets," she recalled. "I was thinking . . . why don't we sit down together and plan what we have to do to combat corruption?" She was already in the middle of piloting a corruption prevention strategy focused on citizen participation and participatory monitoring in Indonesia's provinces, regencies, and districts. Sadiawati had quickly assumed responsibility for finding ways to fulfill the treaty's commitments to combat bribery, influence peddling, abuse of office, private-sector malfeasance, and other problems. Although the KPK, the country's powerful anticorruption agency, assumed leadership of the country's response to UNCAC, the planning agency was responsible for coordination, and with that role came space for taking the initiative. (For more about the KPK, see "Inviting a Tiger into Your Home," a 2012 ISS case study on the creation of the commission.) At the outset, Sadiawati had contacted Kemitraan (the Partnership for Governance Reform), a Jakarta-based law association initially managed by the UN Development Programme, to convene leaders from civil society, government, and academe. Her aim was to outline the parameters for a new national anticorruption strategy. "We trusted Diani," said Dadang Trisasongko, director of Kemitraan at the time. Sadiawati's approach was refreshing and encouraging for citizens who had long felt shut out of government decision making. Trisasongko and other civil society leaders said Sadiawati took their input seriously and made sure they were always kept informed. In 2010, when a new opportunity to make progress arose, Sadiawati focused on building high levels of coordination and cooperation throughout government-a challenge that had impeded success during the previous four years. Because corruption assumed many forms, success meant identifying specific risks and changing specific processes and procedures. Sadiawati had to build relationships with more than 50 national-level agencies and monitor their efforts to implement anticorruption reforms. Many of the reforms, such as those intended to improve wealth declaration or procurement, required cooperation between multiple offices. The coordination problem was even more difficult in working with provincial and local governments, which, under Indonesia's decentralized system, enjoyed a high degree of autonomy over policy and spending. The coordination problem grew more difficult when the KPK suddenly downgraded its role. The agency's commissioners worried that close cooperation could compromise their political independence, according to Sujanarko, who was the KPK director in charge of relationships with other institutions at the time. The KPK later altered its position, but initially, Sadiawati had to take the lead in persuading other parts of government to join the initiative. Sadiawati also knew that government workers would likely push back against the strategy. Employees in many offices benefited from the status quo and did not want change. For example, officials who took bribes had no interest in stronger wealth declaration systems or in clear conflict-of-interest rules. Managers and directors might resist reforms because they profited from the existing system or because they feared internal resistance if they upended policies and procedures or tried to change institutional cultures. To succeed, Sadiawati had to cultivate active support for change from the presidency as well as from other powerful institutions and organizations. The incentive problem was especially difficult when it came to the legislature, which had passed no anticorruption legislation since 2002, during the early years of the Reformasi period. The corruption strategy called on parliament to approve new legislation in several areas, including criminalization of transnational bribery and the creation of rules for international asset confiscation and direct return of illicit assets, as stipulated by UNCAC. However, many members of parliament benefited from the status quo, and surveys showed that citizens viewed their representatives as part of the problem.5 There were also practical challenges. Sadiawati's draft strategy contained broad principles. However, implementation required specific commitments from individual agencies. Sadiawati had to devise a system for establishing clear goals and objectives, as well as action plans. She also needed a way to track progress, identify trouble spots, and assess impact. FRAMING A RESPONSE When Sadiawati sent the draft strategy to Boediono in 2010, the vice president enlisted the help of the presidency's newly created UKP4 delivery unit, which monitored progress toward the government's policy goals. (For more on the UKP4, see the ISS case study "Translating Vision into Action.") Yudhoyono had appointed Boediono to help define the unit's mission, and the vice president maintained a close working relationship with Sadiawati's team. The UKP4's point man for work on the anticorruption strategy was Mas Achmad Santosa, a public interest lawyer who headed the unit's work on law enforcement institutions. Previously he had served on a judicial corruption task force and worked briefly with the KPK. Santosa said he viewed the strategy as an extension of the reforms that had begun in 1998: "It was time for us to accelerate progress in reforming the governance of all institutions." He enlisted several employees to work with Sadiawati. Because neither Bappenas nor the UKP4 had funding to hire new people, all team members had to balance their anticorruption work with their other responsibilities. Although the UKP4's role was temporary, the delivery unit's close association with the vice president would provide Sadiawati's office with the political clout it needed to drive implementation in the early stages. When the project was off the ground and working effectively, Bappenas could assume full control. Sadiawati and Santosa worked together closely to decide how best to proceed. They lacked the political power to dictate the agendas of other government institutions, nor did they have in-depth knowledge of the corruption challenges that each office faced, although they consulted with the external audit agency, the ombudsman, and the witness protection agency to get a more complete picture. The two leaders therefore decided to take a cooperative approach that relied on joint deliberation to create action plans that all sides agreed on. Representatives of each office had the final say over specific objectives and the steps for achieving them. In short, the aim was to create a separate action plan for each agency. Precise, measurable goals with clear performance targets formed a crucial part of the action plans. The aim was to include a mix of projects: Some would be straightforward and easy to implement. Others would be challenging, though Sadiawati and Santosa knew they faced a tough job in working to persuade officials to set ambitious commitments. Once specific goals and objectives were in place, the next step would be to win agreement on the steps required to achieve them. The Bappenas-UKP4 team also recognized that implementation would be worthless without effective follow-up in the form of a reliable system for monitoring progress. Any reporting system had to avoid the inaccuracies and misstatements that could stem from pure self-reporting schemes, but the team lacked the capacity to develop its own progress assessments. Effective progress reporting had three requirements, Sadiawati and Santosa decided. The first was a dedicated, online system that would enable agencies to upload evidence showing their progress toward specific goals. Such a system would eliminate the need to shuffle paper and communicate by e-mail. Second, to ensure clear and responsive communication with the Bappenas-UKP4 team, each office had to appoint one employee as a point person, who would be the go-to contact with responsibility for knowing what was going on, when, and where. Third, even though the action plans set full-year goals and objectives, the team required quarterly progress reports so it could identify implementation problems as early as possible. Such quarterly updates were hallmarks of the UKP4's approach to monitoring. Frequent reporting was the key to successful troubleshooting. Sadiawati and Santosa knew that agencies might struggle to implement ambitious action plans, and they believed steady communication was essential for spotting problems and helping officials stay on track. When team members identified a potential issue in a quarterly report, they could reach out to the agency's point person and offer support and advice about how to overcome implementation challenges. To assess impact, the team chose to use several indicators. They hoped to eventually use a national integrity index that the KPK was supposed to develop, but for the time being, they decided to draw chiefly on the Transparency International Corruption Perceptions Index. The index used data from opinion surveys to measure how people in a country perceived corruption problems. Sadiawati said it was the best indicator available. "We chose the CPI because it was internationally accepted," she said. The minister in charge of the planning agency at the time supported using the index, and Sadiawati consulted with Transparency International Indonesia to better understand what went into the yearly index score and which specific actions could improve Indonesia's showing. She planned to supplement the CPI with a prevention index derived from the World Bank's Ease of Doing Business and Control of Corruption surveys and additional information from settlements, investigations, prosecutions, and convictions in corruption cases. In rolling out the new program, the team decided to focus initially on 16 high-profile ministries and agencies that had authority in corruption-prone sectors: the justice system, the civil service, health, and education. "The idea was to prioritize participation by the main strategic institutions at the national level to maximize impact," said Rifqi Assegaf, one of the UKP4 members of the team. Chief among those institutions were the police, the attorney general, the Ministry of Law and Human Rights, and the Ministry of Finance. If implementation succeeded, the team planned to scale up participation in subsequent years and reach out to local governments. Textbox 1: Establishing Boundaries Sadiawati concentrated most of her national strategy on a specific set of preventive measures. In doing so, she chose to largely avoid certain important areas either in the KPK’s domain or under the purview of other institutions: wealth declarations, a national code of conduct, and procurement. Indonesia had an asset declaration law that required top officials in the government, all members of parliament, prosecutors, judges, auditors, and several other categories of government employees to submit yearly wealth reports to the KPK. Similarly, the country had a national code of ethics for public servants, adopted in 2004. Although the code was vague and included no definition of what constituted a conflict of interest for government employees, Sadiawati said fixing it was the domain of the KPK. Some agencies had developed their own codes, however, and negotiators from Sadiawati’s team stressed compliance with agency ethics codes in action plans and worked to improve compliance with existing codes. For example, the team negotiated commitments with the Ministry of Law and Human Rights to improve oversight of ethics violations, set clear punishments for violators, and create a specialized code of ethics for corrections officers. The government had also started to reform procurement. In 2007, Yudhoyono created the National Procurement Policy Agency, and the following year, the new agency set up an electronic procurement system and worked with 11 government offices to create specialized purchasing units.2 The agency also negotiated central-government contracts for many commonly acquired products, starting with vehicles and expanding to include Internet service, schoolbooks, office supplies, and medical devices.3 By 2017, the catalog of negotiated contracts contained 90,000 items, according to Robin Suryo, the agency’s deputy chairman of policy and strategy development. As a result, in its work, the Bappenas team simply incorporated obligations to comply with the regulations the agency had created. 1In 2015, new government regulations expanded wealth-reporting obligations to include all government officials, many of whom did not report directly to the KPK under the new scheme but, rather, to the Ministry of Administrative and Bureaucratic Reform. The KPK had access to those reports. 2 “Indonesia Procurement System: Enhancement of e-Procurement,” National Public Procurement Agency, October 2016; http://e-gp.adb.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/D1-S4C-Indonesia-e-GP-G.Putranto.pdf. 3 Achmad Nurmandi, “What Is the Status of Indonesia’s E-Procurement?” August 2013; https://www.researchgate.net/publication/259467834_What_Is_The_Status_Of_Indonesia's_E-Procurement All of these groups agreed to participate. Dealing with the legislature was a different story, however. "When we began to discuss strategy, we also thought about how to involve parliament," Sadiawati recalled. But conversations with members of parliament went nowhere. Legislators denied any involvement in corruption, and party leaders refused to commit to reforms. "At the time, we decided-together with civil society-OK, we'll leave parliament out for now," she said. Parliament's failure to engage with the strategy meant that legislative changes necessary to comply with UNCAC would be difficult to negotiate. The strategy team also wanted to avoid goals or projects that belonged under the jurisdiction of other anticorruption institutions. For example, one of the first steps usually taken was to prepare new civil service guidelines or create a code of ethics so as to ensure the rules were clear to all government employees. Indonesia already had such a code, but the contents were ambiguous, and there were big gaps. Responsibility for overhauling the government-wide code lay with the KPK, but the Bappenas-UKP4 team could assist other agencies in developing codes that would cover only their own employees. That approach colored decisions about how to handle asset declaration and procurement as well (text box 1). GETTING DOWN TO WORK Sadiawati and the UKP4 team set out to turn their strategy's words into action. The work ahead of them was daunting: They had to avoid encroaching on the domains of other anti-corruption agencies, and they had to persuade often-skeptical institutional representatives to make meaningful commitments to prevent corrupt practices. Tracking progress throughout government required efficient and accurate reporting and monitoring. Effective communication with agencies was vital. And intervention, when required, was sure to be a sensitive political matter. Developing goals In 2010, Sadiawati and the UKP4 team arranged meetings with representatives of the 16 critical offices they targeted. Leaders of those institutions usually chose midlevel staff (echelons two and three in the Indonesian civil service system) to represent them. The format of the meetings varied. Santosa said large workshops brought together everyone involved, then bilateral talks between the team and institutional representatives helped refine ideas. The aims were to negotiate commitments, create action plans, and establish metrics. "We would come with a substantive idea," Santosa said. "Sometimes they agreed, sometimes they disagreed, and then we negotiated or tried to convince them." He and Sadiawati aimed to press government offices to commit to ambitious goals. "We had to represent the desires and expectations of the public," Santosa said. "That was our job." The list of projects ranged widely. For instance, the attorney general's office sought to increase compliance with laws that required prosecutors to file wealth reports with the KPK; the office set an initial target of persuading 90% to submit their paperwork. Other agencies focused on developing new standard operating procedures, reforming recruitment practices, creating mechanisms for sharing information with the public, or establishing systems to enable whistle-blowers to report misconduct. Sadiawati pushed back when agencies proposed commitments that amounted to business as usual, because either they had already completed most of the actions required or the function was already part of someone's job. When meetings with the midlevel representatives failed to produce an agreement on targets, the team bumped the issue up to the boss, Santosa said. The joint deliberations also yielded metrics. "The indicators of progress could be quite detailed," Assegaf said. "If the action concerned enacting a regulation, for example, the success indicator could include the principles or substantive provisions to be included in the regulation." When the team concluded negotiations with the 16 pilot agencies in early 2011, Sadiawati and the UKP4 staff assembled a government-wide action plan consisting of 102 commitments. For the action plan to have authority, the president would release it as a presidential instruction, which was a statement of political commitment that lacked the force of law but directed government offices on measures they should take.6 The instruction appeared months later, after initial reporting was in progress. Talking tough with the police Developing the action plans was not always smooth sailing. Negotiations with the police, one of the 16 critical agencies, were especially sensitive. In 2009, after the KPK had begun investigating alleged acts of corruption by police officers, the police arrested two KPK commissioners on charges that many observers said were spurious.7 Sadiawati's team met with police representatives several times in an effort to win strong commitments. On several occasions, the representatives took time out to discuss matters internally before resuming discussions. Eventually, there was agreement on a compromise package. There were two main sticking points. When Sadiawati's team pushed for most officers to submit wealth declarations to the KPK, police negotiators countered that the requirement should apply only to selected high-ranking officers. Similarly, they blocked a proposal to provide the finance ministry and tax authority access to the national vehicle registration database. In the end, the two sides cut a deal. The police agreed that their top three ranks would submit wealth reports and that they would make the vehicle information available. The police required that other agencies agree to undertake corresponding changes too. For example, the KPK had to agree to verify the asset reports of high-ranking police officials promptly. Other elements of the action plan were less fraught. One was to create new procedures for the public sharing of information. The negotiations led to an agreement that the police service would alter its standard operating procedures by October 2011, provide forms for requesting information, and publicize a list of types of information available. The planning agency-UKP4 team also secured agreement to improve adherence to proper investigative processes. This target was more difficult than others to measure, but the negotiations resulted in an indicator that public complaints about police investigations had decreased by December 2011. The team also won a commitment from the police to develop a stronger working relationship with other government agencies. The action plan included adoption of a memorandum of understanding between the police force and eight other agencies, including the KPK, internal and external audit agencies, and the ombudsman. The police plan accounted for 27 of the 102 total commitments listed in the team's 2011 government-wide action plan. In May of that year, Yudhoyono released the plan in the form of a presidential instruction that underscored the president's strong support for the anti-corruption effort, even though the statement lacked the force of law.8 Yunety Tarigan, who was in charge of the UN Office on Drugs and Crime's anticorruption work in Indonesia, said the strategy pushed the police to expand wealth declarations and increase the transparency of its recruitment process. She also said the strategy helped increase the transparency of information in government and raised knowledge of the official anticorruption agenda among lower- and midlevel civil servants. Developing a reporting system The anticorruption team turned to the UKP4 for support in setting up a reporting system for the 16 initial agencies. The delivery unit had pioneered the use of a standardized reporting form throughout government to help monitor implementation. The form listed the action, the agency responsible, the indicator, the target measurement of that indicator, subtargets, and the agency's progress toward those targets. "We lent the system to Bappenas . . . with minor adjustments," Assegaf said. The planning agency hosted a website containing the online system, and agencies used it to report progress every three months. As required by Yudhoyono's May 2011 presidential instruction, each of the 16 pilot offices had a coordinator to handle reporting and serve as the primary contact person for issues involving the anticorruption strategy. "Each agency could appoint anyone, but usually it was the person heading the planning bureau," Assegaf said. "That is normally the same person that is the contact for any programs involving the UKP4." Most of the team's communication with each office was through e-mails sent to the coordinator, who kept track of commitments and targets and submitted progress reports through the password-protected system. The anti-corruption team made sure that coordinators were attentive to their responsibility to file their quarterly reports during the scheduled one-week window. The team e-mailed reminders to coordinators a month before each reporting deadline and followed up a week ahead as well as during the reporting window itself. The website required coordinators to upload documentation in support of their agencies' reported progress toward each target. Sadiawati said the system rejected reports that failed to include supporting documentation for every indicator that had been agreed upon. Members of the planning agency-UKP4 team worked for a full week after each reporting period to judge the validity of the quarterly progress reports and the related information that coordinators had submitted. If an agency had committed to draft a new policy, for instance, it could submit a version to demonstrate that the process was under way. Team members reviewed such documents to ensure they were in line with the reported progress, and if the submitted evidence failed to support the material in the progress report, the verifier notified the coordinator. After the final reports for 2011 came in, the team prepared the first annual reports for distribution to the president and the heads of each of the 16 participating institutions. (The 2011 reports covered only the second half of the year because the president had not released the action plan until May.) The reports used colors to rate overall progress toward commitments, a technique the team hoped would encourage top officials to take notice of operations that were falling short of goals. Those with 100% achievement were highlighted in blue, those achieving 75% to 99% were green, those achieving 50% to 74% were yellow, and those achieving 49% or below were red. The report used a similar color-coding system to indicate whether offices had met specific goals or had fallen behind in their commitments.9 In keeping with the UKP4's standard policy on disclosure, neither the public nor other agencies had access to the team's information or the reports regarding specific agencies. Only the president and the planning agency-UKP4 team had access to all the reports, Sadiawati said. She supported limited disclosure because citizens might misunderstand the data and draw inappropriate conclusions about an agency's performance. "We don't need to report while [a reform] is still in progress," she said. "I don't want people to get misinformation that a ministry is not doing its job well." However, in a limited gesture to broader transparency, the team did post two primary measures of results in an online report: the percentage of agencies that submitted their reports properly and the overall percentage of goals agencies said they had fulfilled. Beginning in 2012, the team sent a midyear report to agency heads and Vice President Boediono to "increase the pressure" to comply, Assegaf said. Helping agencies meet their goals In its review of the quarterly reports, the team looked for potential implementation problems. "The monitoring tools enabled us to anticipate possible delays or the failure of agencies to achieve a target," Assegaf said. Even just one poor showing on a progress report was often enough to spur an agency to devote more energy and resources to compliance, he added. When reporting showed that an agency was behind schedule in implementing a program the team believed was important, team members contacted the coordinators to offer their assistance. "We invited them to discuss why they could not achieve the commitments," Sadiawati said. "Mostly it's about internal coordination and commitment." Team members made themselves available to help, and Sadiawati herself tried to help each institution improve internal communication, which she considered a root problem in many cases. The team played an especially important role in helping agencies implement projects that required intergovernmental cooperation. Sadiawati and the UKP4 team reached out to partner agencies, clarified those agencies' obligations under the action plan, and asked the agencies to cooperate. If the conversations failed to resolve the problem, the team appealed to higher-level government officials for help. "In some cases, particularly if the problem was very serious, we appealed to the vice president," Assegaf said. Although Boediono's involvement could bridge divides, the team still had to rely on ministers or other agency leaders to order their negotiators to make meaningful commitments and to make sure their agencies followed through on those commitments. Scaling up After Yudhoyono released the first action plan in May 2011, the team reached out to more government offices to expand participation. The 2012 action plan, which the president released in December 2011, included an additional 14 national agencies, although the team chose to continue to focus most of its energy on the original 16 as it scaled up. The president and vice president continued to tinker with the strategy, however. In January 2012, a presidential instruction included two orders that the team had anticipated but that nonetheless put pressure on them to move quickly. First, Yudhoyono instructed every national government office and every local and provincial government to participate. Second, the instruction stated that the National Planning Agency would be the secretariat responsible for coordinating implementation of the strategy. The UKP4 would still support the planning agency when requested to do so, but it would not co-manage the effort. Sadiawati became head of the secretariat and chose three planning agency employees to work with her. Others assisted during the busy quarterly reporting periods. Sadiawati assigned each employee a portfolio of offices. The office's labor constraints required changes in approach. By the end of 2012, the secretariat had negotiated a total of 48 action plans with national agencies. Although it could handle this expansion of its workload, reaching 34 provincial and about 500 local governments (cities and regencies) was a different story. Instead of trying to negotiate an action plan with every local government, the secretariat created one set of goals and plans for all governments below the national level. It focused on streamlining service delivery, providing public access to regional development plans, and improving transparency in budgeting and procurement. To oversee implementation, Sadiawati enlisted the Ministry of Home Affairs, which worked with subnational governments. The ministry had authority over many aspects of policy making in provinces, regencies, and cities, including veto power over annual budgets. The ministry also had the authority to approve or reject new local or provincial laws and regulations. The secretariat asked local governments to report progress by using the online system. However, its direct role in securing cooperation was limited. "All we could do was make a good relationship with the Ministry of Home Affairs and communicate with the ministry," said Ratna Dasahasta, a former Transparency International Indonesia employee who joined Sadiawati at the planning agency secretariat. "We could monitor and evaluate local government through the system, but we could not go directly to local government and say, 'You have to do this and that.' . . . We had to coordinate with the Ministry of Home Affairs." The relationship between the two lead institutions was not easy. "The planning agency found it difficult to get support from the ministry to help monitor local-government reporting," Assegaf said. Sadiawati's team asked Vice President Boediono to settle the problem, and the ministry agreed to take responsibility for ensuring the compliance of lower-level governments with their reporting obligations. To play a constructive role despite its limited resources, the secretariat sought ways to work as closely as possible with local governments. Secretariat workers offered to provide advice if needed, usually over the phone or via messaging software. "We cannot go to hundreds of local governments, but they can consult with the planning agency," Dasahasta said. "They are supposed to consult with Home Affairs, but sometimes they feel more comfortable talking to the team here." She added that this new role grew significantly. "It's a lot of work. In a day, I can have texts from 15 different local governments." Despite limited capacity, secretariat staff occasionally conducted incognito in-person spot checks to verify that local governments were implementing actions as reported. If a spot check indicated problems, the secretariat staff offered to help the office find a solution. In 2013, 33 of 34 total provinces, 40 districts, and 33 cities participated in action plan reporting. By the next year, the planning agency said, every province, district, and city had joined the program. OVERCOMING OBSTACLES As implementation of the strategy scaled up, the secretariat struggled to secure meaningful commitments across agencies. In 2013, Sadiawati sought an outside assessment of the secretariat's work and asked civil society leaders to evaluate implementation. The Indonesian Legal Roundtable, a nongovernmental organization (NGO), led that effort in partnership with other organizations, including Transparency International Indonesia and Corruption Watch. The report the organizations produced the next year was largely negative, finding that despite Sadiawati's efforts to secure commitments beyond business as usual, the action plans were not ambitious and often incorporated goals that offices had already included in their internal planning. In addition, government employees' awareness of the strategy and the action plans was insufficient, especially in local governments. The group noted that the secretariat lacked the power to pressure institutions to take serious steps toward reducing corruption risk and to follow through. The 2014 release of the NGO review came at an opportune time for rethinking the strategy and the secretariat's approach to implementation. Yudhoyono's second term was coming to an end, and elections for his successor occurred in July. The winner was Joko Widodo, governor of Jakarta, who had campaigned on a platform that called for government to step up the fight against corruption. The new president reviewed the national anticorruption strategy and the action plans after his inauguration in October and decided to narrow the focus of the effort in order to increase the impact. Widodo's chief of staff chose Bimo Wijayanto, a top adviser, to coordinate with Sadiawati's secretariat. In 2014, the secretariat negotiated about 250 actions across more than 50 national government offices. At Wijayanto's request, Sadiawati's secretariat slashed the number of actions in the 2015 plan by more than half, to 96, with an emphasis on procurement reform. The next year, Wijayanto and Sadiawati collaborated to cut the action plan down even further, to 31 actions.10 Widodo also chose to revamp the action plans so they would reflect new priorities and more-focused goals. Wijayanto and Sadiawati began to prioritize areas in which Widodo wanted to see results, including revenue collection, procurement, import/export controls, and resource extraction. The 2016 action plan contained only 31 actions, most of which came from the president's office rather than negotiations with individual offices. ASSESSING RESULTS Sadiawati's secretariat measured success of the action plans primarily through percentages of commitments fulfilled per year. In 2013, the first year the action plan expanded to local governments, it reported that agencies had achieved 76% of the targets they had set for the year. That number rose to 86% in 2014 and 88% in 2015.11 Secretariat members pointed to certain specific successes. Dasahasta, of the planning agency's secretariat, said the Ministry of Law and Human Rights had successfully redesigned a corruption-prone procedure for obtaining passports, thereby reducing wait time and eliminating the need to pay in cash. She also cited a finance ministry-led project to gather and share information at Indonesia's ports electronically, which made it more difficult to import or export illegal commodities. Sadiawati was especially proud of a new electronic system that shared information between Indonesia's financial intelligence unit and government ministries and agencies about suspected incidents of corruption. Other notable action plan commitments that yielded positive results included an increase in qualified candidates accepted to positions at the attorney general's office, improved standard operating procedures for police investigations, and new systems for processing public complaints and whistle-blowing reports in various agencies. But there were notable shortcomings too. The strategy listed as an indicator of progress increased compliance with the country's UNCAC obligations. It set a goal of 80% compliance by 2014 and 100% by 2019. However, as of 2017, parliament had passed no new anticorruption legislation, and Indonesia remained at 53% compatibility overall, according to the planning agency.12 For impact monitoring, the secretariat focused on Transparency International's yearly Corruption Perceptions Index. When President Yudhoyono released the national strategy in 2012, Indonesia's score was 32 on a 100-point scale. The strategy aimed to reach a score of 50 by 2014, 65 by 2019, and 80 by 2025. By those measures, Indonesia failed to reach its short-term goal. By 2015, its score was only 36. More-qualitative assessments were also mixed. Some well-placed observers were skeptical that the six-year-old strategy had yet had a strong impact on corruption in Indonesia. Trisasongko of Transparency International Indonesia said government agencies had continued with business as usual and not undergone real reform. The Supreme Audit Board's data lent support for that view. Its 2016 investigative audit found more than 15,000 irregularities in central and local government financial reports.13 The board's data on the second half of 2016 alone showed state losses of 12.6 trillion rupiah (US$950 million), a 27.5% increase over the same period a year earlier. REFLECTIONS Looking back on initial efforts to develop and implement a strategy, participants and observers singled out certain areas where they might have proceeded differently in order to increase impact. Former UKP4 employee Rifqi Assegaf pointed to three issues. First, it would be better to have a more targeted strategy that focused on a small number of core problems. In the early years, the secretariat had struggled to devote adequate resources to the very large number of objectives agencies had articulated. Second, it was important to link the action plans to the budget. The yearly timeline for determining the action plans was out of sync with the annual budgeting process, meaning that agencies were agreeing to action plans after they had already determined their spending priorities for the year. Third, limiting the burden on workloads shaped success. "Most, if not all, institutions were reluctant to engage with the national strategy," Assegaf said. "For them, the action plans only added to their workload." Another problem was lack of political power behind implementation. Sadiawati's team at Indonesia's national development planning agency, Bappenas, was good at drawing up plans and setting goals, but it had little power to push agencies to commit to significant reforms and implement them. As a result, leaders of some government offices felt free to spurn Bappenas's requests to make ambitious anticorruption commitments. "It depends on the leadership in each ministry or even in the units within a ministry," said Ratna Dasahasta of the planning agency. "If there are good leaders, we will get to know them and encourage them, but otherwise," results often were weak. The planning agency relied on the president and the ministers to react to progress reports and order compliance, but observers said they did not believe the government saw the action plans as top policy priorities. As a result, civil society observers said the strategy was largely a failure. Deciding to limit the information made available to the public contributed to the problem. Political sensitivities may have motivated the decision to report only general results across the sum total of the agencies involved, but the lack of transparency undermined the ability to create a partnership with the public in bringing pressure on reluctant officials to comply. Certainly there were good reasons to refrain from too frequent public reporting or from releasing data that intruded on privacy protections, but the summary statistics erred in the opposite direction. Ade Irawan, deputy director of Indonesia Corruption Watch, a Jakarta-based civil society organization, said it was difficult for civil society to verify the results reported by Bappenas because relevant public documents were very difficult to obtain. Although some criticized the secretariat for avoiding engagement with parliament, civil society leaders agreed that doing so would have been a lost cause. As of July 2017, the KPK had convicted 119 parliament members of corruption. Also that month, the KPK named the speaker of the parliament's lower house as a suspect in a graft investigation regarding a national identification card project; graft related to the contract had allegedly cost the state more than $170 million.14 Mas Achmad Santosa, the UKP4 deputy who led the delivery unit's involvement in the national anticorruption strategy, acknowledged that statutory gaps left important corruption problems unresolved. President Joko Widodo's decisions after the 2014 elections suggested that the government had learned from its mistakes. Widodo's office reconfigured the secretariat to incorporate Indonesia's powerful anticorruption agency-the KPK-and the office of the president, thereby increasing the power and authority behind implementation. The office also narrowed the action plan agenda and began rewriting the strategy to focus on a smaller set of goals that relied less on negotiations with individual agencies (text box 2). In mid 2017, it remained to be seen whether Widodo's policies would achieve the kind of transformation that Sadiawati had hoped to produce when she developed her anticorruption program at the beginning of the decade. Textbox 2: Learning from Experience In early 2017, Widodo’s office hosted a meeting with representatives of the National Planning Agency and the KPK. The three parties agreed to form a new secretariat in which the KPK would take a leading role. The KPK would focus a department within its prevention division on coordinating and monitoring strategy implementation. The meeting also produced agreement on long-term goals, better corruption impact indicators, and a gradualist, pragmatic approach to reform. The KPK’s commissioners looked more favorably on playing a leadership role than they had earlier. Appointed in 2015, Laode Muhammad Syarif, who had been an active civil society leader on corruption issues as head of the Partnership for Governance Reform, was a strong advocate for engagement. He saw participation in prevention activities as essential to achieving agency objectives and did not view it as a threat to the KPK’s independence in investigating and prosecuting corruption. Sadiawati accepted the KPK’s new role and noted the potential benefits of the anticorruption commission’s respect and influence in national and local government. “We need leadership from the KPK,” she said. 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They shall not hold Princeton University liable for any loss or damages resulting from the use of information in the archive. Princeton University assumes no liability for any errors or omissions with respect to the functioning of the archive. g. In all publications, presentations or other communications that incorporate or otherwise rely on information from this archive, they will acknowledge that such information was obtained through the Innovations for Successful Societies website. Our status (and that of any identified contributors) as the authors of material must always be acknowledged and a full credit given as follows: Author(s) or Editor(s) if listed, Full title, Year of publication, Innovations for Successful Societies, Princeton University, http://successfulsocieties.princeton.edu/ References 1 Kath Quiano, "Thousands march against corruption in Indonesia," CNN, December 9, 2009; http://edition.cnn.com/2009/WORLD/asiapcf/12/09/indonesia.protests/index.html. 2 World Bank Enterprise Survey, 2009; http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/460941468052131911/Enterprise-surveys-Indonesia-country-profile-2009. 3 Indonesia Corruption Report, GAN Business Anti-Corruption Portal; http://www.business-anti-corruption.com/country-profiles/indonesia. 4 [U4, 2012] www.u4.no/publications/causes-of-corruption-in-indonesia/downloadasset/2890. 5 [U4, 2012] www.u4.no/publications/causes-of-corruption-in-indonesia/downloadasset/2890. 6 "OECD Reviews of Regulatory Reform: Indonesia," OECD, 2012; https://www.oecd.org/indonesia/chap%202.%20Capacity%20for%20High%20Quality%20Regulation%20in%20Indonesia.pdf. In mid 2011, staff members in the offices of the president and vice president were still working on the final draft of the national anticorruption strategy. Because he had originally committed to publish the strategy in 2010, President Yudhoyono agreed to issue the first action plan before the official release of the strategy. He did so by issuing a presidential instruction in May 2011. 7 Gabriel Kuris, "Holding the High Ground with Public Support: Indonesia's Anti-Corruption Commission Digs In, 2007-2011," Innovations for Successful Societies, September 2012; http://successfulsocieties.princeton.edu/sites/successfulsocieties/files/Policy_Note_ID212.pdf. 8 "OECD Reviews of Regulatory Reform: Indonesia," OECD, 2012. 9 Hendra Prabandani, Tackling Corruption in Indonesia: Government Efforts on Corruption Prevention and Eradication, November 15-16, 2016; http://birohukum.bappenas.go.id/data/data_presentasi/6%20Indonesian%20Gov%20Perspective-Hendra%20Prabandani.pdf. 10 INPRES NO. 10 TAHUN 2016 AKSI PENCEGAHAN DAN PEMBERANTASAN KORUPSI TAHUN 2016 DAN TAHUN 2017, National Planning Agency, November 14, 2016; http://stranasppk.bappenas.go.id/upload/file_article/document/(sosialisasi-dan-penajaman-inpres-10-tahun-2016)-Inpres%2010%202016_Sosialisasi%20dan%20Penajaman.pdf. 11 Hendra Prabandani, Tackling Corruption in Indonesia: Government Efforts on Corruption Prevention and Eradication. 12 Hendra Prabandani, Tackling Corruption in Indonesia: Government Efforts on Corruption Prevention and Eradication. 13 Viriya P. Singgih, "Poor reporting, irregularities cause state losses: BPK," Jakarta Post, October 5, 2016; http://www.thejakartapost.com/news/2016/10/05/poor-reporting-irregularities-cause-state-losses-bpk.html. 14 Jeffrey Hutton, "How This Agency Is Waging War against Corruption in Indonesia, and Winning," This Week in Asia, July 22, 2017; http://www.scmp.com/week-asia/politics/article/2103395/how-agency-waging-war-against-corruption-indonesia-and-winning. "KPK to send suspect notification to Setya Novanto this week," Jakarta Post, July 18, 2017; http://www.thejakartapost.com/news/2017/07/18/kpk-to-send-suspect-notification-to-setya-novanto-this-week.html. GLOBAL CHALLENGES: CORRUPTION Indonesia (c) 2017, Trustees of Princeton University Terms of use and citation format appear at the end of this document and at successfulsocieties.princeton.edu/about/terms-conditions. ISS is program of the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs: successfulsocieties.princeton.edu. ISS invites readers to share feedback and information on how these cases are being used: iss@princeton.edu. (c) 2017, Trustees of Princeton University. This case study is made available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.