Indonesia helped launch Open Government—why are we now falling behind?
What happened when you built a house but lost the key
Did you know that two weeks ago (May 19-23) was Open Government Week? If not, you’re not alone—most Indonesians probably didn’t either. And that’s the problem. Indonesia was once a loud, proud founding member of the Open Government Partnership (OGP), a global push for transparent and accountable governance. But today, our voice in that movement has gone quiet.
It’s more than just a missed calendar date—it’s a warning sign. Open Government’s mandate upon birth to build a government that citizens can trust should’ve continuously propelled Indonesia’s young democracy to new heights. But more than a decade later, the momentum has stalled. The question is: has trust stalled with it?
In this volume of The Reformist, we ask where Indonesia’s open government ambition really stands—and we don’t just mean the cosmetic kind, but the kind that eradicates corruption, earns public trust, and creates policies that work.
The question remains: are we now living up to the reformist ideals we helped launch?
What Open Government is all about
Before everything, let’s first talk about what Open Government is. The concept advocates for the re-thinking of public information management, so that governance is more transparent, inclusive, and accountable through encouraging reform in key policy areas, including but not limited to anti-corruption, civic space, climate, digital government, justice, and public participation.
It’s important to note that despite the overlap that often occurs between open government initiatives and digitalization, open government is not simply about going digital.
Without the transparency, accountability, and public participation that is advocated for by open government, a state would face:
increased struggle with corruption,
lack of trust in government institutions, and
inefficient policymaking.
To put it simply, open government builds a culture of transparency that facilitates citizen commitments.
You may be surprised, but Indonesia is not only part of large-scale efforts to push for open government, but also a founding member of a key initiative to encourage it globally. In 2011, under the SBY administration, Indonesia joined seven other founding governments—including the Philippines, Brazil, and the UK—to launch Open Government Partnership (OGP). The partnership works to secure commitments from both national and sub-national governments to promote initiatives that enable access to information, civic participation, and public accountability.
Does OGP work?
Has OGP been showing results or is it just another global initiative that never made it out of the blueprints? In a report published to convince skeptics (that could be you!) that Open Government is indeed beneficial, OGP showcased some key success stories from its member states’ initiatives.
Public engagement improves public service delivery: In South Korea, the metropolitan government in Seoul began publishing up-to-date information about the water quality being supplied into people’s homes. This increased citizens’ trust and contributed to an increase of 20% in tap water consumption.
Civic monitoring prevents corruption: In Côte D’Ivoire, the Ministry of Interior and Security established local anti-racketeering committees made up of civil society, government, and policymakers. The goal is to hold information campaigns to educate the public, identify sectors most affected by racketeering, and involve citizens in monitoring extortion and illegal activity.
Open procurement saves public money: In the Philippines, the Department of Education monitored the full textbook procurement cycle to detect and prevent corruption. This shortened the bidding process by half (24 to 12 months), and cut the price of textbooks by 40%, resulting in savings of approximately US$1.4 million. It also identified and replaced more than 60,000 defective textbooks, and ensured the delivery of over 750,000 textbooks.
How are things looking at home? Our commitments to OGP
Throughout the SBY administration, the Indonesian government seemed invested in encouraging initiatives for open government. Under SBY, Open Government Indonesia was set up under UKP4, or the President’s Delivery Unit for Development Monitoring and Oversight.
In 2008, Indonesia passed the Public Information Disclosure Law (No. 14/2008), establishing the right of every citizen to access public information. In principle, this law has already backed our alignment with OGP, but SBY formalised our commitment through the Presidential Decree No.13/2014. While the Decree does not establish any enforceable framework or funding for open government initiatives (OGI), it highlighted that the Partnership sought to “increase transparency, public participation, and accountability” in Indonesia.
Since then, Indonesia has created seven National Action Plans (NAPs) comprising 159 commitments that cover OGP’s key policy areas discussed above. Some facts about NAPs:
NAPs are co-created every two years and informed by both government agencies as well as civil societies.
The Plans should be informed by experiences from its predecessor, and recommendations from the Independent Reporting Mechanism.
Each NAP contains a varying list of specific commitments that align with the aforementioned OGP policy areas. For example, in the seventh NAP (2022-2024), Indonesia listed 15 commitments that fall under six policy areas, which were:
Anti-Corruption and Budget Transparency,
Civic Space and Democracy
Inclusive Public Services
Access to Justice
Gender, Disability, and Social Inclusion
Energy, Environment, and Natural Resources
Did any of these action plans ever materialise?
Indonesia actually made notable progress in our main commitments for the 2020-2022 NAPs:
Election data is now integrated, accessible, and analyzable… or is it?
The sixth NAP (2020-2022) resulted in the open data portal (opendata.kpu.go.id) by the Election Commission (KPU). This was part of a larger API for open voting systems, and integrated the Voters List Information System, Candidate Information System, Political Party Information System, and Recapitulation Information System for public viewership. According to the Association for Elections and Democracy (Perludem), the portal reflects some open data principles by ensuring that data can be analyzed, not under owners’ control, and is accessible at all times. Upon release, it was noted that the portal needed to maintain its data quality, improve navigation from the main KPU website, and fix periodic outages.
Editor’s note: At the time of writing, The Reformist team tried to see if the portal is now any better. We started from KPU’s main website to check if navigation is now improved (unfortunately, it’s not; we couldn’t find any visible link in the navigation bar). So, we typed the portal’s address into the search bar. The portal took forever to load; when it did load, datasets were nowhere to be seen (outage still happens; or user experience is just bad). Consequently, we couldn’t check if the data quality is in fact maintained.
Rampant graft cases pushed open contracting for procurement
Recognizing that 64% of corruption cases in 2019 involved public procurement (resulting in annual losses of up to four billion USD), the 2020-2022 NAP sought to increase the transparency and accountability of government procurement processes through open contracting. The government partnered with the National Public Procurement Agency (LKPP) to adopt the Open Contracting Data Standard (OCDS) to make procurement data more traceable from every state so that civil society groups could monitor projects more effectively. The project provided an important legal framework for open contracting, but had limited success.
LAPOR! platform built to improve public services, but usage is low
The government is committed to improving access to high-quality public services via digital innovation, such as the development of LAPOR! or the national public complaints online platform, an integrated complaints management system that enables citizens to report public service issues that have been implemented to reach over 500 regional governments. Similarly, the commitment led to the revitalization of the National Public Service Complaint System (SP4N). However, reports generally state that the usage level of SP4N-LAPOR! is relatively low.
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The initiatives above are a glimpse into how open government initiatives can positively impact both trust in public institutions as well as facilitate better policymaking that is supported by clear implementation.
However, distinct challenges still exist. Let us illustrate a stubborn challenge from our long fight to tackle rampant corruption through the case of beneficial ownership. What is that—and what does it have to do with open government?
Tell us who actually benefits from a company, so we know who to hold accountable
Under the Anti-Corruption policy area commitments, Indonesia has a particular focus on promoting the transparency of beneficial ownership. The term refers to the actual persons who ultimately own and benefit from a company—even if this ownership is exercised through an intermediary. In this sense, company ownership is legal ownership, but does not necessarily identify the person who benefits from the ownership. Beneficial ownership is the new form of legal entity ownership that extends beyond legal documents.
Collecting and publicly disclosing beneficial ownership data can help track money laundering, conflicts of interest, improperly awarded government contracts, and tax evasion, among others. Quite simply, knowing who ultimately benefits from a company can also help to identify responsibility for other violations of the law.
A particularly famous case that emphasizes the importance of beneficial ownership transparency is the Panama Papers; a leak of 11.5 million files from one of the world’s biggest offshore law firms. The scandal led numerous governments announcing that they sought to enable increased beneficial ownership transparency, so that beneficial owners could be better-identified.
The issue is so distinct in Indonesia that regulatory steps have been taken, including through Presidential Regulation No.13/2018. Under the Regulation, the government sought to build a centralized beneficial ownership registry under the Ministry of Law and Human Rights. However, only 29% of all registered entities had filed their beneficial ownership information by August 2022. To boost capacity and align with global best practices in the extractives sector, Indonesia joined the Opening Extractives program built by both the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI) and Open Ownership (OO).
A key outcome of Indonesia’s latest OGP action plan was to make the beneficial ownership registry publicly available, which occurred through launching an open portal that civil society advocates hailed as “substantial progress”. With this new registry, any user can query beneficial ownership information directly, rather than paying fees for a formal request.
However, there remain some issues.
Some details (e.g. foreign owners) might still be redacted under pending regulations, poor searchability means people may not easily access relevant information, and imperfect verification processes may mean the data is questionable at best. Another key concern is that the Regulation for beneficial ownership only covers domestically-registered entities, meaning foreign-owned and offshore entities may not be noted down.
OGP pushes for transparency and Indonesia is often included in the conversation, but the frameworks we implement are rarely updated. By mid-2022, approximately one-third of corporations had disclosed beneficial ownership information. But, it still did not include information on most Indonesian corporations. There was also no process to verify data through financial transaction data; and the records were not searchable by owner names—only full company names.
Indonesia Corruption Watch (ICW) noted that the beneficial ownership regulation above lacks enforcement, has unclear legal norms, no sanctions, and no public registry. This means that while we have made formal commitments, they have mostly manifested as policy aspirations rather than institutional reforms.
What’s stopping Open Government from being the best reform ever?
As perhaps obvious, the continuity of policymaking beyond a single administration (much like many other reforms we have covered) continues to be a key point of struggle for ensuring long-term change.
As touched upon earlier, the UKP4 coordinating agency under SBY was dissolved after 2014. This meant that many early initiatives lost momentum, including open government initiatives. Plus, the lack of legislative baseline means the whole initiative is sidelined by new leaders.
Additionally, the implementation of open government initiatives faces various technical challenges. There has been considerable progress in creating OGP initiatives in Indonesia, but they often lack updates or standardized formats that allow long-term progress tracking, much like the beneficial ownership dataset above.
For example, Satu Data Indonesia (SDI) launched in 2019 for seven pilot regions—the Provinces of West Nusa Tenggara, Riau, and East Java; the City of Semarang; the Regencies of Banggai, West Sumbawa, and Brebes—with limited success. Not only did regional datasets differ thematically from national-level ones (which means that they’re not interoperable), but three out of seven regions were still awaiting technical guidance by the end of the implementation period.
Interestingly, capacity building and assistance from the SDI Secretariat faced challenges at the city-level, because the SDI scope was initially limited in implementation to provincial governments. Additionally, struggles related to funding and central-to-local government communication deeply limited the effectiveness of SDI’s roll out.
Synchronizing information is similarly difficult. In the case of quantifying rice production for SDI, different government authorities (including the Ministry of Agriculture, Ministry of Trade, and the Bureau of Logistics) produce data on rice production. The data is not integrated, and thus cannot be used for joint planning, and produces redundant datasets that pollute rather than inform the internet.
The general public knowledge of open government initiatives also poses a significant issue. Evaluators have stated that “widespread public engagement remains difficult” and OGI must engage a broader range of stakeholders in developing commitments. This low visibility means that feedback loops are weak (or perhaps non-existent): public complaints submitted via platforms like SP4N‐LAPOR! are negligible relative to population, and follow-up is inconsistent.
As a result, the utility of SDI remains questionable. Without machine-readable formats, compliance with open data standards, or clear pathways to public readership, there is little practical effect to having the information online.
As a founding member, is this enough?
Obviously, no. The goal is clear, but goals and pledges alone won’t move mountains. Indonesia has the right ideas, but without sustained leadership, integrated data systems, enforceable rules, and true civic partnership, these remain half-hearted measures with little discernible impact.
If open government is to survive beyond speeches and meetings, it will need to be anchored in the system, with long-term commitment between presidential administrations and government agencies.
There has no doubt been a regression to the state’s commitment to OGP throughout the past few years, from prioritization during the previous administration to today’s lackluster engagement. In this sense, it is crucial to call for innovative approaches to policymaking that facilitates democratic governance.
Open Government has now extended into parliament-level processes—Indonesia was, once again, in the frontline
Indonesia became the first and only country in Asia to date to have a formal Open Parliament programme led by DPR RI. The initiative produced two action plans between 2018 and 2022, but then went… quiet. Most recently, the Committee for Inter-Parliamentary Cooperation of DPR RI began to revive the Open Parliament initiative through merging it with OGI.
However, as we have seen time and time again, a fancy initiative by name alone does not automatically lead to clear results. Clear achievements in open governance require long-term commitment, sustainability, and strong political leadership that actually wants to reform policymaking processes.
In the meantime, civil society organizations can (and should) step up. The Bijak Demokrasi secretariat—a dear part of our family at Think Policy—have recently launched Bijak Memantau. It’s a platform that facilitates your curiosity to understand different issues, monitor legislation, and keep political figures accountable—sounds very much in line with the spirit of Open Government, don’t you think? With your help, we’re working to be a part of a larger movement for better governance, starting with Bijak Memantau.
Tell us more…
Have you had experiences with Open Government Indonesia—whether in the workplace or beyond—that you’d like to share with us? Comment below or write to us at socmed@thinkpolicy.id.