3 - The Irrigation Agency's Contested Bureaucratic Identity

Summary

INTRODUCTION

This chapter explores the irrigation agency's bureaucratic identity, and how it is sustained and reproduced by core policy actors' interests and strategies (see Sabatier and Jenkins-Smith for a definition of core policy actors). It describes the agency's main attributes, which are its orientation towards infrastructure development and its focus on bureaucratic rent-seeking. These mutually reinforcing drivers of agency behaviour are translated into specific management rules and procedures in and around the project development approach. This chapter also analyses how the agency's identity was contested by the shift in international policy trends in the late 1980s and again with the Indonesian political reform of 1998, and, finally, how its identity was affected by the major changes in its organizational structure when the Ministry of Settlement and Regional Development (Kimbangwil) was formed in November 1999, to replace the Ministry of Public Works (MPW), in directing irrigation sector development.

I discuss the irrigation agency's bureaucratic identity as the product of “bureaucratic capitalism” (Section I), and illustrate how the agency's organizational foundation is based on infrastructure-oriented irrigation development (i.e. construction and rehabilitation) and how its bureaucratic mechanisms are shaped by the practice of bureaucratic rent-seeking (Section II). This chapter goes on to clarify how rent-seeking rules are established in the actual management of project funds (Section III). Details are given on how the policy shifts in irrigation systems management — from infrastructure to system operation and maintenance (O&M) and farmer empowerment, and later to irrigation management transfer (IMT) — were hampered by core policy actors’ resistance to change (Section IV). This chapter ends with how these same actors’ bureaucratic powers were diminished with the abolition of the MPW and the establishment of Kimbangwil in 1999, which were later restored with the transition into Kimpraswil in 2001 (Section V).

SECTION I: THE IRRIGATION AGENCY'S BUREAUCRATIC IDENTITY

I define the irrigation agency's bureaucratic identity as the product of accelerated bureaucratization or what Evers calls “run-away bureaucratization” (p. 666). According to Evers, the process of bureaucratization in Indonesia resulted in retarded Weberian bureaucracy, where the rapid growth in government personnel was not accompanied by a growth in its ability to perform the assigned bureaucratic tasks.