Building Internal and External Constituencies for Police Reform: An Indonesian Casec Study

Abstract

How can donor assistance facilitate and empower actors of change inside and outside the police? How can donor assistance articulate itself to emerging institutional challenges while at the same time enforcing true local ownership for reform? This article explores such questions by revisiting ICITAP's Institutional Transformation Project (ITP) one year after its completion. The article starts by providing the particulars of Indonesian political and institutional dynamics, and civil society engagement with police reform. With this backdrop the author shows how the ITP was conceived as an attempt to concretise a political concept into an institutional practice. In so doing, the author argues, the ITP became a vehicle for building relationships between police officers and local research institutions, advocacy groups and universities around a common ground that explored the reach of evidence-based planning. The article closes with a review of unanticipated effects and challenges that the outcomes of this project have had in the progress of police reform in Indonesia.