INTRODUCTION

When in 1999, decentralization policies were being developed in post-Suharto Indonesia, West Sumatra was the first province that set out to restructure its administration. The region has received much attention for this, but it became particularly famous because it immediately used the opportunity provided by Law No. 22/1999 to reorganize village government. The territorial and administrative scale of village government was transformed from the rather small and purely administrative villages (desa) to the much larger nagari. The nagar had been the most important pre-colonial units of Minangkabau political organization and had served as the lowest unit of local government through colonial times and after independence. When the Law on Local Government of 1979 (that is, Law No. 5/1979) was implemented in Minangkabau in 1983, each nagari had been divided up into several much smaller desa. In 2000, the province “returned to the nagari” (kembali ke nagari). What has become known as “The Minangkabau way” of decentralization has also attracted much attention from outside West Sumatra. Going back to the nagari is understood by Minangkabau and other Indonesians as going back to older adat political traditions and as a revitalization of adat in general. Within Indonesia representatives of other Indonesian regions have initiated similar movements to revitalize older structures of village government. The international donor community such as the GTZ, USAID, and the UNDP Partnership for Governance has hailed the West Sumatra initiative as the most successful example of the new trend towards a decentralized government along traditional lines that is supposed to be more democratic, participatory and accountable (Asian Research Centre 2001; UNDP 2001).

This chapter analyses this development in its wider historical context. It will be argued that decentralization is not new in West Sumatra. Periods of centralization have followed periods of decentralization in the past, but previous policies of decentralization were usually relatively limited in scope. In contrast to these earlier policies, the current decentralization means a more fundamental shift in authority from the central and provincial government to the districts. The chapter focuses on two inter-related contradictions that characterize the decentralization process in West Sumatra. The process is contradictory because top-down regulation, in which the centre enacts higher legislation to be followed by implementing regulations on ever descending and smaller levels of administration goes hand-in-hand with the dynamics of relatively autonomous local politics and regulation.