Political management in the Indonesian family planning program.

Family planning programs are political institutions: Globally, donors, governments and nongovernmental organizations argue over their effectiveness, purposes and financing; nationally, politicians and interest groups mobilize for and against their establishment; locally, administrators encounter social resistance to implementation; and at the household level, attempts to influence fertility can be seen as political acts as they involve exercising state power to bring about change in individual behavior. Because of the political nature of family planning programs, their administrators face multiple challenges. Among other tasks, they must build bureaucratic alliances, neutralize religious opposition and secure social support. Development administration scholars have referred to these challenges as tasks in “political management” and have suggested that administrators anticipate political conflict, identify potential allies and opponents, understand their interests and consider their concerns in program design and implementation.1 A handful of family planning scholars also have considered these issues;2 however, these dimensions of management have received considerably less attention in the family planning field than those of technical management, such as the administration of contraceptive delivery systems. In this article, I seek to help redress this imbalance by investigating political management in the Indonesian family planning program during the Suharto era, from the 1970s through the 1990s. Scholars consider the program to have made a considerable contribution to Indonesia’s large rise in contraceptive use and decline in fertility.*3 To examine the role of political management in agency effectiveness, I draw on excerpts from interviews conducted with officials in the National Family Planning Coordinating Board (BKKBN), the government organization responsible for administering the program. In addition, I explore how the agency addressed three political challenges: defusing religious opposition, overcoming a weak human resource base and generating implementation support from the bureaucracy. Numerous observers have pointed to political management as a factor behind the program’s effectiveness.4 Hull has documented the agency’s ongoing struggles to institutionalize priority for the program and argued that “The BKKBN achieved legitimacy through the...integration of its activities in the government structure;”5 others have identified similar processes. I seek to build on their insights and highlight two critical facets of the BKKBN’s experience. First, it was not only agency leaders who actively engaged in this kind of management. A culture of political orchestration developed from the top to the bottom of the organization in an attempt to secure political priority at the national, regional and local levels. Second, it was not a given that the BKKBN would act in this way. Initially, the agency was less politically proactive. The agency learned to take advantage of opportunities that many of its sister agencies in the bureaucracy ignored. The political system under Suharto had unique characteristics, and one must be cautious in drawing generalizations for other settings. The system was authoritarian and established its power across the country to a degree that few nonsocialist developing world states have achieved. The president exercised considerable control over ministers as well as governors who, in Indonesia’s unitary system, were appointed from above rather than elected from below. Civil society was weak, as the state limited the ability of groups to organize autonomously. Democratic checks on state action were few, and government employees were required to be members of the ruling party. There was a legislative body, but for much of the Suharto era, it functioned largely as a rubber-stamp institution. These authoritarian characteristics afforded Indonesian bureaucrats unusual power. They were both the creators and implementers of policy, and were relatively unimpeded by social groups and parliament. This being said, a number of the principles that emerge here are applicable across political settings. In particular, family planning program administrators in democratic and nondemocratic settings alike need to learn to systematically identify, understand and cultivate both allies and potential opponents.