Following the fall of the authoritarian New Order regime in 1998, Indonesia embarked on a path of democratic decentralisation. However, more than two decades since it began, the results of this reform have been mixed. While some local governments have shown enhanced capacity to deliver effective governance, others remain mired in inefficiency and corruption. The outcomes appear to depend on specific features of the local political landscape, in a general context of greater fragmentation of local political actors and heightened competition among local elites to control government resources than during the New Order era.

Two analytical lenses have dominated academic discussion of the drivers of these mixed outcomes. The first lens focuses on the destructive roles played by elites, whether remnants of the old New Order governing coalition or new elites that have emerged alongside democratic decentralisation. Some authors, such as Hadiz (2004, 2010) and Heryanto and Hadiz (2005), argue that old predatory elites continue to wield influence, resulting in weak democracy and poor policy performance at both national and local levels. This perspective, however, is largely unable to explain variation in patterns of local governance, though others, such as Aspinall (2013) and Buehler (2014), have examined the interplay between old and new elites in the heightened competition for local power and resources in local politics.

The second lens emphasises the role of local leadership. Many studies focusing on this aspect contend that democratic decentralisation incentivises local political leaders to pursue popular welfare-oriented and developmental policies in order to boost their political support and keep winning elections. These policies may either hinder or promote good governance, but the key is that the willingness and effectiveness of leaders to implement them varies. Bunnell et al. (2013), for example, suggest that the individual agency and quality of local government leaders is crucial in determining how well particular districts and cities perform. Von Luebke (2009, 2012) asserts that ambitious leaders are more likely to pursue reformist policies and implement them than unambitious ones. Rosser et al. (2011) and Rosser and Sulistyanto (2013) suggest that local leadership lies along a spectrum, ranging from ‘political entrepreneurship’—that is, the mobilisation of poor voters by the introduction of popular policies—to patronage distribution—that is, the mobilisation of both the poor and nonpoor through the cultivation of clientelist networks (Rosser et al. 2011: 15).