Indonesia's New Developmental State: Interrogating Participatory Village Governance.

This article analyses the implementation of the New Developmental State in Indonesian politics and development as the realisation of the increasing authoritarianism of President Joko Widodo's administration. Rather than focusing on the national level, as other studies do, this article focuses on sub-national contexts, particularly at the village level, and the implementation, since 2014, of the world's largest participatory village governance experiment. Data were collected during three years of longitudinal monitoring and additional ethnographic fieldwork in different parts of Indonesia. Framed in the New Developmental State perspective, this article characterises New Developmental governance in Joko Widodo's regime as a pragmatic and hybrid approach to village development and governance with roots in New Order developmentalism. Of special importance is the transmission of authoritarian ways from the national to village level through village institutional arrangements. Notably, this new approach to village governance has failed to encourage creative and innovative village governments and has made village democracy vulnerable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]