If poverty levels and the state of service delivery are any indication, there is room for improvement. More than 100 million Indonesians live on less than $2 a day. Twenty-five per cent of children under five are malnourished, only 48 per cent of the rural poor have access to clean water, and only 55 per cent of poor children complete junior secondary school.

One explanation for this poor performance is low capacity. Indeed, 70 per cent of parliamentarians elected in 2009 had never before served in parliament. Celebrities, former officials’ wives, and shop-owners were all in the mix. However low capacity is not the primary cause of poor governance, and therefore pure technical assistance is not the most effective solution.

As any policymaker knows, law and policy-making are political processes influenced by many competing interests. Recently, political scientists and development theorists have argued that to deliver truly effective governance it is not enough to reform institutions, or to provide officials with technical assistance, but that political elites must be engaged and mobilised. This call for ‘politics’ to be brought back into development, looks at the problem of vested interests, and argues that unless reformers have powerful political leverage, government policy and spending will often undermine the interests of the majority, especially the poor.

Scholarly work on Indonesia’s two large mass-based organisations, Nahdlatul Ulama and Muhammadiyah (with a shared membership of 70 million people) has often not addressed the groups’ engagement in governance reform. During the reformasi period, these groups used their influence to encourage democratic reform. More recently they have worked towards encouraging governance reform. Soon after Suharto’s fall, both groups joined efforts to integrate democratic education into school and university curriculums, to influence legislation related to religious freedom and to ensure free and fair elections.

As democratic values have become increasingly integrated within Indonesian political culture, NU and Muhammadiyah activists have turned their attention to more technical issues of governance reform, especially  counter-corruption and pro-poor budget advocacy at the district level. The Asia Foundation has supported these efforts, on the premise that their political clout is necessary in order to counter vested interests at the local government level. Preliminary evidence indicates that this is an effective strategy. For example, when a Regent (Bupati) in eastern Indonesia was resistant to civil society efforts to allocate line items towards health and education, NU, Nahdlatul Wathon, and Muhammadiyah leaders convened 5000 people for an ‘istigosah‘ (religious rally) after which the Bupati promised to increase the health and education budgets.

This activity on the part of NU and Muhammadiyah is not only relevant to service-delivery and technical governance reform, but also provides insights into the changing political role of these two organisations. There is a perception expressed within both organisations that they are facing an identity crisis as Indonesia modernises and integrates increasingly into the global economy and community.

After the 2009 elections, many analysts argued that NU and Muhammadiyah were no longer the political brokers they had been for the last seven decades.  Both groups publicly endorsed former Vice President Jusuf Kalla, who garnered less than 12 per cent of the vote. At the same time, the two political parties affiliated with NU and Muhammadyah, PKB and PAN, joined President Yudhoyono’s coalition, despite their organisations’ endorsement of his opponent.

If the primary influence of NU and Muhammadiyah remains at the local level, presumably this dynamic contributes to the further decentralisation of power in Indonesia. Scholars have argued that while vertical accountability has improved with direct local elections in post-reformasi Indonesia, horizontal accountability remains very weak — this indicates room for a reformist role for these Muslim mass member organisations. Furthermore, if engaging political elites is an effective approach, decentralised power could be an opportunity for civil society organisations within NU and Muhammadiyah to effect reform and improve governance. These groups have  played an important role in Indonesia’s democratic reform; the indications are that they will continue to play an equally important role in governance reform. More research is needed in order to understand how such influence is exerted, pinpointing the precise combination of factors — individual relationships, public pressure, technical know-how — that foster effective governance.

Robin Bush is the Asia Foundation’s Country Representative in Indonesia. Dr Bush was previously the Asia Foundation’s Regional Director for Islam and Development.