Depoliticisation and democratic governance in Indonesia: the case of the extractive industries transparency initiative

Despite various efforts to undertake substantial democratic reform in the extractive sector in Indonesia, a full democratic governance process has process never been entirely realised. Therefore, by deploying depoliticisation as the overarching framework, focusing on contextual ignorance, denial of the pluralism and antagonism and impediment of participation, this study investigates the Extractive Industry Transparency Initiative (EITI) in Indonesia between 2010-2018. It shows that the shifts of global and domestic political landscape are the main drivers of the localisation of transparency. The study finds that EITI Indonesia acts as an anti-politics “machine” by partially recognising the local context. However, the civil society organisations (CSOs) persistently try to repoliticise and make use the EITI for demanding more information. Furthermore, the deliberative processes of the multi-stakeholder group (MSG) also indicate a complex process of the pursuit and prevention of issues onto EITI’s public agenda. Along with such dynamic process of governmental depoliticisation, this study also finds that societal depoliticisation in Indonesia’s extractive sector works through the participation of intermediaries and the primacy of technical solutions. This study provides conceptual contributions that are: (1) a stipulative definition of depoliticisation which reconciles narrow and extensive definitions; and, (2) reconsidering the contingency of depoliticisation but emphasising that the contingency is dynamic and highly dependent on the circumstances in which the process has taken place. Empirically, it claims that: (1) the centrality of transparency in creating its own contestation: transparency is deployed as a tool of knowledge-based power struggle by continuously “testing the boundaries” of information disclosure and making use the MSG for scaling up CSOs’ leverage; and, (2), that local context does matter. New democratic spaces, waves of transparency and the rise of civil society stimulate the repoliticisation of EITI while, at the same time, actors’ cultural and historical parameters and the nature and scale of extractive commodities limit the extent of the contestation process itself.