Public Information Disclosure: Mapping the Understanding of Multiple Actors in Corruption- Prone Indonesian Provinces

Recent scholarships in public administration and legal studies have agreed on the role of public information disclosure as a necessary requirement in eradicating corruption. Moreover, it is evident that accessibility of public information to the citizen helps to improve governance reform and policy making. In that situation, the citizen is involved in the participatory process and subsequently tightens public oversight to the government. Nevertheless, the literature might only be valid in relatively homogenous societies or in countries successfully achieving their development goals. This article seeks to confront this scholarship to the prevalence of a country experiencing ongoing construction of administrative law framework amidst discrepancies of development progress across regions. Three provinces in Indonesia are chosen to explain this matter by identifying relevant actors and mapping their understanding about public information disclosure against corruption. We employ qualitative research by process-tracing methods to identify causal mechanisms over multiple determining factors affecting the understanding. Data is inquired through in-depth interviews and analyses of open, accessible electronic data. Our recent work progress suggests that impediments to undertake public information disclosure against corruption come from very basic situations, including a sort of misunderstanding of predefined terminology between disclosed or classified information to the public and over-reliance on prevailing laws related to the issue without any improvements of the regulatory framework or policy instruments.


Introduction
The implementation of regional autonomy that began since the issuance of Law No. 22 of 1999 on Regional Government brings the implementation of decentralization, which then implies a shift in the dynamic between the central and regional powers, including those among regional institutions. This change has not only good impacts, such as bringing services closer to the people and improving the infrastructure, but it also has undesirable impacts, such as corruption.
Modern-day vassal lords abuse their authority and power to commit corruption, especially in the issuance of permits. Opportunities for corruption are also increasing because regions have greater freedom in regulating themselves, which sometimes conflicts with the central government's policy.
Data from the Corruption Eradication Commission (KPK) shows the rising number of corruption cases closed in Indonesia. Since the commission's establishment in December 2002, this anticorruption institution has processed more than 100 regional heads (regents/ mayors and governors). As seen in Graph 1, corruption cases involving regional heads mostly take forms as bribes and gratuities. Of 81 cases, regent/mayors are the most common offenders. The same graph also shows that a regional head can be ensnared in more than one case. These numbers of corrupt region heads spread over 25 provinces, with North Sumatra and East Java as the top two. Data as of Oct 8, 2019, showed a rise to 119 cases (Kompas, Oct 8, 2019).

Source: adapted from KPK Annual Report, 2019
Muhammad Yasin Sipahutar is a Doctoral Student at Universitas Indonesia since 2018, a journalist at hukumonline.com, and an activist of Freedom of Information Network Indonesia. He is active in various information disclosure activities including assisting the Indonesian government in formulating various policies in the field of information disclosure. His research focuses on information disclosure and constitutional law.

Desy Hariyati
is a lecturer at Faculty of Administrative Science Universitas Indonesia. She studied Public Administration, Democratic Governance and Civil Society in Universitas Indonesia and Universitaet Osnabrueck, Germany. Her research interest includes governance, administrative reform, anti-corruption, trust, and local government. Currently, she is doing some researches on the topic of state-society relation, strategic management, and political trust. Her researches are disseminated in national dan international conference, books, and journal articles. Some of her publications are "Reformasi Birokrasi dalam Transisi (2016)", "Failing Support of Transparency against Corruption (2017)", and "Civil Service Reform in Indonesia (2013)." She also serves government institutions by delivering advices on the issues of bureaucracy reform and public sector management, civil service, and public policy.
The implementation of regional autonomy that began since the issuance of Law No.
22 of 1999 on Regional Government brings the implementation of decentralization, which then implies a shift in the dynamic between the central and regional powers, including those among regional institutions. This change has not only good impacts, such as bringing services closer to the people and improving the infrastructure, but it also has undesirable impacts, such as corruption. Modern-day vassal lords abuse their authority and power to commit corruption, especially in the issuance of permits. Opportunities for corruption are also increasing because regions have greater freedom in regulating themselves, which sometimes conflicts with the central government's policy.
Data from the Corruption Eradication Commission (KPK) shows the rising number of corruption cases closed in Indonesia. Since the commission's establishment in December 2002, this anticorruption institution has processed more than 100 regional heads (regents/mayors and governors). As seen in Graph 1, corruption cases involving regional heads mostly take forms as bribes and gratuities. Of 81 cases, regent/mayors are the most common offenders. The same graph also shows that a regional head can be ensnared in more than one case. These numbers of corrupt region heads spread over 25 provinces, with North Sumatra and East Java as the top two. Data as of Oct 8, 2019, showed a rise to 119 cases (Kompas, Oct 8, 2019).   (2006) and Ackerman and Sandoval-Ballesteros (2006) have made a map that shows the trend of the majority of countries that adopt the regulation.
The connection between information disclosure and corruption prevention and eradication is also discussed by Klitgaard (1988), Rose-Ackerman (1999), and Pope (2007  c. The right to submit suggestions and opinions responsibly to a law enforcement officer who handle corruption cases.

Information Disclosure
As a basic human need in the simplest as well as in the most modern and complicated interaction, information is sought by citizens to make clear their rights and obligations as well as the mechanisms of participating in governance.
Conversely, government officials value and must manage information appropriately to meet the objectives of governance. Interaction between citizens and state officials will be of higher quality if there is information disclosure between the two.
The Law on Regional Governments has embraced the principle of information disclosure by making it an obligation for local government officials to provide and publish public information on the one hand and to make it the people's right to obtain information on the other. The spirit is to encourage openness so that government officials' performance is accountable to the public and so that the public can monitor offenses such as corruption. Information disclosure is seen as a means to corruption prevention, especially in public policy making and governance.
This spirit is also reflected in the objectives of Law No. 14 of 2008 as follows: (i) guaranteeing citizens' rights to know public policy making plans, programs, and processes; (ii) encouraging public participation in the making of public policies; (iii) realizing good governance based on transparency, effectivity and efficiency, and accountability; and (iv) finding the reasoning behind public policies that affect the lives of many.
Regulations on the clarity of mechanism, institutional matters, and each party's rights and obligations are vital to optimize disclosure information as a means to preventing acts of corruption. In the context of regional governance, the clarity of the regulations serves in the following ways: • As an indication of whether the regional government is consistent in running democratic and transparent regional government. • As a guarantee that the regional government is obliged to provide information and documents of public interests.
• As a guideline for local governance in managing and providing information and in collecting information across its own organizations.
• As a clear instruction for local government officials on which information can be disclosed to the public and which are confidential, as well as on the mechanism of declassification of information.
• As a means to ensuring that no public information is covered up by government officials in order to gain personal benefits (corrupt behaviours).
• As a means to encouraging good archival management.
Openness of public information is a means to optimizing public monitoring of governance, especially in issues related to the public interest.

Information Classification
As mentioned earlier, clear information disclosure arrangements are useful for government officials to determine which information can be fully disclosed to the public and which should be kept confidential. Technological developments have undermined the confidentiality of information (Florini, 1998;Roberts 2006), a. Information that must be provided and announced periodically, e.g., regional apparatus profile (OPD) as a public agency, OPD activities and performance, and financial reports.
b. Information that must be announced immediately, e.g., incoming disasters, infectious diseases, food poison, and disruptions to public utilities, such as power outages.
c. Information that must be available at all times, e.g., list of public information, regional laws and regulations, budget of a public agency, LAKIP.
Information that is open means that the public can access it. Local governments are obliged to publish the categories of information that must be provided and announced and information that of the Law on Regional Governments states that regional governments must provide information on regional development and regional finances.
Regional government information is managed in an competition, e.g., prices offered by a company in a tender for the procurement of goods/ services before the tender takes place, recipe protected by trade agreements.
• Information that can disclose personal confidence, e.g., medical records, funds in bank accounts, and the results of a person's psychological evaluation.
• Information declared confidential as ruled by regulations.
In general, public agencies at central and regional levels specifically regulate the categories or types of information. Unfortunately, regulating exempt information is often inaccurate, inattentive, and irrelevant to the mechanism of consequence test as regulated by law, and ignorant of the prohibition to exclude certain information.

Information Obtaining Mechanism
In opening information, orderliness or governance is still necessary. The public can obtain information through regulated mechanisms, and a public agency is obliged to provide information through easily accessible channels and infrastructure. Regulating the mechanism for obtaining information is also helpful in preventing preferential or unequal treatment due to motives of collusion, corruption, and nepotism by government officials. To prevent abuses, certain laws have set the time window for obtaining information and have set dispute resolution.
In preventing corruption, Indonesia is a step ahead than some other countries, for citizens who want to file an information dispute are not charged.
Citizens, however, are still charged a reasonable fee if the information requested must be in copies.
The mechanism for obtaining and resolving

Actors in Information Disclosure
In the mechanism for obtaining and resolving information disputes, actors in information disclosure are clearly defined. A petitioner is a citizen, as mentioned before; government agencies are responders, and the information commission and the court is an information dispute resolution agency.
The applicant is a person who submits a request for information to a public agency. The principle that applies universally is that everyone has the right to obtain information. However, in Indonesia, not all citizens have the right to obtain information through the mechanism regulated in Law No. 14 of 2008. Only three categories are permitted: individuals, groups of individuals, and legal entities. This regulation has been used as justification by public agencies to refuse requests and for information commissions to refuse to grant a dispute resolution.
A responder is any qualified public agency, which includes all government agencies at central and regional levels. Other public agencies include state or regional enterprises (BUMN/BUMD) and political parties. Interestingly, in Indonesia, non-governmental organizations also qualify as responders if they receive funds from the state or The table shows two different trends of openness. Central Java is always on the best list of provinces with good information disclosure practices; on the contrary, Bengkulu almost never moves from its uninformative rank. This disparity should be considered when viewing these two provinces' information disclosure practices, with regard to corruption prevention.

Ac to r s a n d T h e i r U n d e r s t a n d i n g o n Information Disclosure
In general, research in both provinces shows that actors' understanding of the meaning of information disclosure is still rather low. This shows that despite the decade-old Law No. 14 of 2008, only a small portion of the public is aware of the law, mostly non-governmental organization activists. The rest of the public is unfamiliar with the law. Consequently, not many understand their right to access public information.
On the other hand, the government, especially the Central Java provincial government, continues to improve its information disclosure practice through various platforms, both web and social media-based.
However, this effort was not necessarily equivalent to the increase of public awareness in accessing information and engaging in supervision based on available information, again due to the public's minimum understanding of public information access. Each actor's understanding of information disclosure in the two provinces is explained in the following section.

1) Government Agencies
Government agencies are the main actors in the success of all information disclosure programs.
The information disclosure regime as regulated in Law No. 14 of 2008 is intended to encourage transparency in governance, both at central and regional levels. This initiative is largely driven by the idea that only a transparent government is able to provide good public services to the public as well as to account for each of its programs and budgets. In addition, a transparent government also has the opportunity to involve the public in policy making and public monitoring. However, the government's response to the execution of these laws varies.
Since NGOs, in its policy-making process, in particular in those related to public information disclosure.
In the two provinces, information from the public to the government centers on the condition of regional infrastructure, such as complaints related to hazardous roads at several points. However, due to the the public's limited understanding on governance authority, some complaints cannot be followed up because they are not the authority of the provincial government.

) S o c i e t y a n d N o n -G o v e r n m e n t a l Organizations
Data collection in two provinces shows that there is a lack of understanding of society on information disclosure. Society tends to be apathetic to public information, except they need it. Consequently, they do not have any important roles in accessing public information, and they depend on non-governmental organization's role.
Non-governmental organizations serve a dual role in the public information disclosure age in Indonesia. Not only do they act as a petitioner, but they also act as a public agency. This is a NGOs in Central Java played a significant role in supporting public information disclosure.
An NGO actively involved in policy-making and government monitoring in Central Java is Pattiro.
According to Pattiro, the Central Java Provincial Government cannot yet be categorized as fully transparent with public information, as it assessed that reports and complaints submitted to channels provided by the provincial government, e.g., LaporGub or the governor's social media handle, cannot yet be tracked for their follow-up or resolution. In other words, they remain "received complaints" without any follow-up.

3) Academics
The support from hundreds of academics in the formulation of policies on corruption and public information disclosure issues, but not much of this is found at the regional level, especially the provincial one, and it shows that regional governments and academics are distanced, or in other words, there is not much involvement of academics in the regional policy-making process. It seems that academics, especially, do not yet have the same understanding to provide assistance in the preparation and implementation of information disclosure in the regions. Consequently, many policies at the regional level have not been based on studies with scientific procedures (no evidence-based policy).
In addition to the reticence, academic research in Central Java and Bengkulu rarely concerns itself with corruption and information disclosure issues. Corruption and information disclosure issues have not been an area of research that attracts academics, and therefore only a few could serve as reference. In this context, academics are expected to play more roles in the society, i.e., to encourage people to be aware of their rights and obligations as citizens, to know about government programs, and to participate in controlling government activities.

4) Provincial Information Commission
The public's understanding of information disclosure issues in the two provinces in general shows that it is still limited to the availability of channels or platforms to submit their complaints.
LaporGub in Central Java, for example, makes an effective medium for two-way communication between the provincial government and the public. In addition, social media, such as the governor's Twitter handle, is an effective medium for communication. However, the public has not yet fully realized and understood that the type and amount of accessible information outnumber those available on government social media. This limited understanding is seen from the trend of the requests for information, which is largely limited to issues in vogue, such as the case of the Nationalist Gathering held by the provincial government of Central Java. The event allegedly cost tens of billions of rupiah and made the news.
However, requests for information on the source and use of the event's budget were apparently not as heated as the news.

Conclusion
Research in the two provinces conclude that actors' understanding on information disclosure issues is still far from comprehensive.
Government actors had not yet fully understood their obligation to announce all public information.
Likewise, non-government actors, academics and NGOs alike have not paid enough attention to public information disclosure issue. The public also still has a limited understanding of public information that leads to frequent inaccuracies in the submission of complaints. These actors' poor comprehension influences their assessment in deciding that public information disclosure is not directly related to efforts to minimize corruption. In order to raise the public awareness in corruption prevention through information disclosure, cooperation among actors is needed, and Syifa Amania Afra involved in data collection.