Third Sector Organisation Governance in Indonesia: Regulations, Initiatives and Models

Abstract

This panel with four presentations report the outcomes of a major comparative research work complied in the Comparative Third Sector Governance. This first of its kind work is an overview of third sector organization (TSO) governance in Asia, especially in the six participating countries (China, India, Indonesia, Philippines, Thailand, and Vietnam). The work is based on the responses of 184 ‘key informants’, and organizational data from 492 TSOs of varied sizes, staff status, and geographical locations (working in eight different fields of activity). The work is about the third sector governance, democratic governance, in particular; but in all country, among all different type of respondents, as well as domestic and local sponsors “democracy is about outcome, and not process”. The foreign funding agencies in our participating countries do not care about who runs the organizations or how; only thing they care about is what the TSOs do. Thus, they see democracy not as a process (process equity), rather as an outcome (benefit equity). The discussion, in the later part of this presentation, brings in John Rawls. To Rawls ‘process equity’ relates to ‘liberal people’ or state with a basic structure of constitutional regime that respects certain familiar basic rights and liberties equally for all its citizens, gives the protection of these rights and liberties priority over the claims of the social good, and assures all citizens’ access to the primary goods needed to make productive use of these freedoms. On the other hand, the ‘outcome equity’ relates to Rawls’ other category ‘people’, the ‘decent peoples’ or state that hold a “common good conception of justice” in which each person’s interests are taken into account in public decisions, and basic human rights are secured for all; all persons are treated as subjects of legal rights and duties; and judges and other officials accept and apply the ‘common good’ conception of justice in carrying out their public responsibilities (Beitz, 2000). Democracy is about outcome, not process; and good third sector governance is about results, irrespective. What is your position or experience in this debate?