Indonesia

There are 514 Cities and Municipalities in Indonesia which implement participatory budgeting mechanism.

PB processes is nationwide program, all local governments are obliged to do so. Although there is variation in the way how PB may be implemented. Some cities are now allowing online PB by inviting citizen to send their proposal through certain online platform. There are 514 cities and municipalities.

Following the implementation of National Development Planning System under the Law No.25 Year 2004, all the local authorities from Villages, and Cities (followed by Provinces and National government) has to conduct participatory planning and budgeting mechanism. The bottom-up procedures allow more democratic process at the lower level to discuss and allocate budget. In 2014, the national government decided to improve local autonomy by establishing Village Law No.6 Year 2014 followed by establishment of Law No.60 Year 2014 about Village Budget. This law allocates portion of budget transferred directly from national government to the village, by which each village has to implement participatory budgeting to plan and use the budget. There are regulations and laws that are affiliated to the implementation of participatory planning and budgeting in Indonesia:

Decentralisation / Local government (the latest is the active law)

· Law No. 22 / 1999

· Law No. 32/2004

· Law No. 23/2014

· Law No. 9 /2015 regarding local government

National law on finance

· Law No. 17/2003 on National Finance

Fiscal decentralisation

· Law No. 25/1999

· Law No. 33/2004 (revision) on Balancing national & local finance

Development planning system

· Law No. 25/2004 on Indonesian national development system

Village autonomy

· Law No. 6 / Year2014 about Village

· Law No. 60 / Year2014 about Village Budget

The privilege of participatory budgeting in villages; greater budgetary authority as a result of village autonomy.

E-Musrenbang promotes efficiency and better transparency to the PB process by providing accessible through its open platform. Indicative Budget Ceiling .

How PB counts the voice of marginalized groups.

The involvement of marginalized groups often limited to territorial based engagement. A good example is Solo City by also inviting sector-based associations such as informal transport association, street vendors associations, women’s association and many more.

The use of online platform does not necessarily omit direct participation.

City government use different online tools to allow collection of proposal from communities, but in many cases, we have to be aware of how the proposal itself is built and discussed among the community members. The off-line mechanism is still needed to make sure that people are not marginalized by the process.

Many ways of budget allocation and distribution.

There are variations where local government put their budget to finance PB projects in Indonesia. Some cities prefer to allocate a fixed budget to village or wards, so they can plan and allocate resources to solve small scale urban issues. While the city is more focus in implementing city scale intervention. However, cities also sometimes only allow citizens to collect proposal, and all the implementation of the budget will be executed by the local government units. With the upcoming Village Law, Indonesian villages will have more financial resources to propose long term development projects. This allows the community in the village to design independent intervention scheme based on actual funding that was received from the national allocation.

In the Indonesian context, Participatory planning and budgeting is a mandatory mechanism that must be implemented by national, provincial and local governments (city and municipalities). This means that all municipalities / cities have implemented participatory planning and budgeting since 2004, after the establishment of Law No.25/2004. Nevertheless, the quality of participation depends on the local political and social context.

There is no current research that investigates it. However, Kota Kita researches in six cities and describes what are some dynamics around the implementation of Musrenbang (PB forum) from seven aspects: regulatory environment, organization of the process, participation, access to information, budget allocation, innovation, and project type (Rifai et. al., 2016). Since its formal establishment in 2004, the implementation of PB in local level has had variations in terms of processes, project implementation, information provided, budget allocation, regulatory strategy and environment, and innovation features.

The city/municipality have to adapt the national regulation into its local specific context. For provinces or cities who have special recognition like in Aceh, may have different denomination and ways of implementing PB. In Aceh, with sharia law circumstances, the P.B focused in women is being developed to allow women to propose projects based on their special needs and issues. In many cases, cities create regulation that fits their local circumstances. There are many approaches of executing the PB forum in local level, especially in the aspect of scope of participation, ways to participate, and size of budget allocation.