By: Rutiana D. Wahyuningsih and Rima Vien Permata
The Rencana Pembangunan Jangka Menengah Nasional (the National Medum Term Development Plan) requires a sinergy between development policies from the central government, local goverments, and inter-local governments. The purposes of the requirement are to ensure the link and consistency between planning, budgeting, implementation, and monitoring; to optimize the participations of the communities in the process; and to ensure effective, efficient, fair, and sustainable utilization of the resources. There are findings in researches which indentify failures in impementing good governance values in the local contexts.
Based on those facts, the propose of this research is to explore to development of sound public governance development planning model for improving the local autonomy performances. This research aims to develop the concepts and find a model on how to contextualize and relate the sound public governance principles in the local development planning process in order to improve the local autonomy administration performances.
The method used in this policy research in participatory research, where the objects of the research are positioned also as “researchers”. The research was conducted in the city of Surakarta. The city of Surakarta was selected because it has high reputations, it had recieved many national awards, it also hosted many international events, and the mayor and vice mayor of this city were elected for the second term by 90% of the voters in the 2010 local election. Those facts indicate that the city of Surakarta has outstanding features in its governance performance.
The research aims to produce a Sound Public Governance Based Local Development Planning Model which can be used by local governments to improve their local autonomy administration performances based on planning. Sound Public Governance is the public administration management which is based on the understanding of the actors on the public values, which will produce vertical and horizontal relations in a flexible networking,
responsive and creative in the legal organization, and adaptive to the local aspects and the interventions of global values.
This research identifies several keys factor in administering Sound Public Governance as follows: (1) a responsive and accontable leadership; (2) a good social reciprosity, which includes an egalitarian political system in the society, a good telerance between groups, an openess among the social organizations; and a good interactions between policy communities and networks; (3) a high community participation in the development planning, implementation, and monitoring/evaluation. The internal supports come from the Local Government Organizations (LGOs). The LGOs need to be able to translate the visions of the head of the local government, to be responsive in supporting the head of the local government, to be able to build a synergy of programs between LGOs, and to be able to collaborate with the nongovernmental and the international organizations. The external supports come from the international organizations and the central goverment in the forms of partnership fundings in equal collaborations, so that the local goverment still has room to be creative and innovative to go with the local conditions and potencies.