Since the introduction of direct local elections in Indonesia in 2005, urban issues have garnered increasing scholarly attention. Numerous observers— including some who write in this volume—have suggested that urban leadership has emerged as a pivotal factor alongside urban planning in influencing how a city develops, and how effective a city government is at meeting the aspirations and needs of its residents. In this chapter, I bring my personal perspective on this issue, drawing on my decade of experience as mayor of Bogor city (2014–2024) and as chairperson of the Association of Indonesian Municipal Governments (Asosiasi Pemerintah Kota Seluruh Indonesia, Apeksi) since 2021. I focus on investigating urban leadership dynamics, the obstacles mayors encounter as they go about the tasks of urban governance and planning, and the models of leadership employed. While I draw primarily on my own experiences, I am sure that the perspectives articulated here mirror in many respects the daily experiences of many mayors and regional leaders in Indonesia. At the same time, from my position as Apeksi chairperson, I have observed how mayors in different parts of the country exhibit unique leadership approaches to tackle the myriad challenges faced by their respective cities, so I acknowledge from the start that no other mayor's experience or perspective will exactly resemble mine.

This chapter is organised into five sections. The first section discusses how the campaign process influences leadership effectiveness in each city. The next section addresses the challenges and issues confronted by mayors during their tenure. The third section discusses the leadership strategies they commonly adopt to confront these challenges. The fourth section provides an overview of the future of Indonesian cities within the context of democracy, regional autonomy and decentralisation. I conclude by emphasising my optimism and faith in Indonesia's system of local governance.

Campaign funds and public policies

Local political campaigns play a pivotal role in determining election outcomes and shaping the subsequent decision-making processes of elected officials. Consequently, the issue of campaign funding becomes important. If a mayoral candidate lacks sufficient personal financial resources to fund their own campaign, securing adequate funding sources poses a significant challenge.

Indonesia is an increasingly urban society. In 2011, for the first time, the number of people living in Indonesia's towns and cities exceeded those living in rural areas. That number is steadily increasing. By 2020, 56 per cent of Indonesians were urban dwellers (Malamassam and Katherina, this volume). In 2045, when Indonesia will celebrate 100 years of independence, it is estimated that 220 million people, or 70 per cent of the population, will live in towns and cities (Roberts et al. 2019: 2).

Recognising this reality requires a shift in perception. For much of the past century, Indonesians have viewed their national identity as reflecting the overwhelmingly rural composition of Indonesian society. The country's political movements have mostly competed for support in the villages. National governments have focused on servicing and securing the country's vast rural population. Back in the 1920s, when the young nationalist leader Sukarno imagined an archetypal Indonesian, he thought of ‘Marhaen’, a small farmer living in West Java (Soekarno 1960). Two decades later, when Sukarno proclaimed independence in 1945, only 12.5 per cent of the population lived in urban areas (Roberts et al. 2019: 1), more than 70 per cent were peasant farmers and 75 per cent of GDP (gross domestic product) was derived from agriculture (Metcalf 1952: 7). Indonesia's national revolution played out mostly in the countryside and, over the subsequent two decades, the political parties that fought for control of Indonesia's government did so mostly by mobilising rural supporters. When Suharto assumed power in 1966, initiating his 32-year authoritarian New Order regime, still only 16 per cent of the population lived in towns and cities, a figure that had risen to 40 per cent by the time he resigned in 1998. Even so, Suharto's regime focused single-mindedly on securing its rural base, promoting agricultural and infrastructure development in the villages while celebrating achievements such as selfsufficiency in rice production. Even during the post-Suharto reformasi era, as Indonesia has become an increasingly urban society, its presidents have practised forms of ‘agro nationalism’ that emphasise ‘Indonesia's agrarian identity in policy and propaganda’ (Graham 2020).

Following the fall of the authoritarian New Order regime in 1998, Indonesia embarked on a path of democratic decentralisation. However, more than two decades since it began, the results of this reform have been mixed. While some local governments have shown enhanced capacity to deliver effective governance, others remain mired in inefficiency and corruption. The outcomes appear to depend on specific features of the local political landscape, in a general context of greater fragmentation of local political actors and heightened competition among local elites to control government resources than during the New Order era.

Two analytical lenses have dominated academic discussion of the drivers of these mixed outcomes. The first lens focuses on the destructive roles played by elites, whether remnants of the old New Order governing coalition or new elites that have emerged alongside democratic decentralisation. Some authors, such as Hadiz (2004, 2010) and Heryanto and Hadiz (2005), argue that old predatory elites continue to wield influence, resulting in weak democracy and poor policy performance at both national and local levels. This perspective, however, is largely unable to explain variation in patterns of local governance, though others, such as Aspinall (2013) and Buehler (2014), have examined the interplay between old and new elites in the heightened competition for local power and resources in local politics.

The second lens emphasises the role of local leadership. Many studies focusing on this aspect contend that democratic decentralisation incentivises local political leaders to pursue popular welfare-oriented and developmental policies in order to boost their political support and keep winning elections. These policies may either hinder or promote good governance, but the key is that the willingness and effectiveness of leaders to implement them varies. Bunnell et al. (2013), for example, suggest that the individual agency and quality of local government leaders is crucial in determining how well particular districts and cities perform. Von Luebke (2009, 2012) asserts that ambitious leaders are more likely to pursue reformist policies and implement them than unambitious ones. Rosser et al. (2011) and Rosser and Sulistyanto (2013) suggest that local leadership lies along a spectrum, ranging from ‘political entrepreneurship’—that is, the mobilisation of poor voters by the introduction of popular policies—to patronage distribution—that is, the mobilisation of both the poor and nonpoor through the cultivation of clientelist networks (Rosser et al. 2011: 15).

The evolution of military influence in contemporary Thailand represents a classic case of praetorianism. What is currently called Thailand has witnessed the evolution of multiple principalities into one kingdom through brute force under the supervision of managers of violence—the military. Though royalty has led this kingdom, the armed forces built it, consolidating it through coercion and making it a praetorian kingdom. The pyramid of the armed forces hierarchy revolves in entourages connected by kith and kin among military families as well as aristocracy, but ultimately achieving legitimacy via linkages to the royal family. It has been and remains a “khakistocracy”, where military-buttressed royalty has been located—at least ceremonially, if not in actuality—at the macrocentre. Across time, military cohesion has functioned, at a macro level, through the martial role of guarding the monarchy, making the armed forces a “monarchized military”. Yet, within the ranks and experiences of officers, the “glue” that has taken priority at the micro level in tying them together has not been the overarching ideology of “monarchization” but, rather, the camaraderie and brotherhood of the corps based upon the same military class, identical unit, or shared combat experience. At the lowest levels, such brotherhood has been based around the personal charisma of military “warlords”. Informal hierarchies based upon fraternal codes or norms of trust have superseded a formal hierarchy of rules-based legitimacy. Ultimately, a political and bureaucratic culture permeates the armed forces to which officers have connected themselves through asymmetrical shared experiences. They see themselves as the guardians of the monarchy, intervene in politics to protect the palace as they see fit, and believe they deserve special privileges as coercive servants of the royalty. They are therefore a monarchized military that has sustained an arch-royalist praetorian status quo. Since 1980, the Thai armed forces have crucially undergirded a palace-led parallel state.

This study has argued that Thailand's military (as led by military strongmen) has been able to persevere as a leading societal actor primarily because it has managed to achieve and hold on to a monopoly of violence across the kingdom outside of any oversight by elected civilian actors, ousting those governments it deemed to impede its interests, and has retained its power over the years as a senior or junior associate of the monarchy in a partnership of power.

The roots of post-1932 praetorian Thailand necessitate an exami¬nation of the military prior to that period. The legacy of a powerful armed forces was to be expected given that violent disorder in polities throughout Southeast Asia was only quelled by soldiers using violence. Indeed, in pre-colonial and/or pre-twentieth-century Southeast Asia, praetorian traditions flourished, though soldiers were not wage earners and war was not meant to be a wholesale sanguinary subjugation of enemy troops (though massive bloodshed did occur). Moreover, the defence of, or acquisition of, new territories within larger boundaries was not the objective.1 The preservation of royalty at that time oscillated around the preservation of a king vis-à-vis a population of mostly rural agricultural workers.

In early kingdoms based in present-day Thailand (e.g., Ayutthaya), ordinary people were required to fulfil manpower needs, but they were differentiated into a complex hierarchy of labour. Commoners (phrai or lek) were a form of bonded labour connected with debt as a result of economic, social and cultural events. Royal phrai or phrai luang worked specifically for the king. Meanwhile, there were private phrai (phrai sow) or khong muang who worked for local lords (jao muang). These lords acted as tax farmers for kings. Slaves (tat) were the socially lowest form of labour. The latter were bought and sold and could not work off debt; they were permanent and thus stable fixtures guaranteeing the economic and infrastructural necessities of kingdoms. Phrai and tat were inherited, purchased or granted to lords by the king. Above (phrai) and tat were regular officials (nai) and senior officials such as generals and governors (khun). At the top of the pyramid were the jao muang (local lords), khunnang (nobles) and jao (princes). The societal value of a person depended on his status within the sakdina (power over rice fields) system. People possessing high sakdina controlled manpower.

Especially during the Ayutthaya period (1351–1767), manpower needs were crucial for both “civilian” and “military” purposes. Regarding the former, agriculture and hunting were of predominant importance for the subsistence of the people, but also to shore up resources for the kingdom. Regarding the latter, phrai were required to provide the manpower for royal armies going to war. Kings would regularly levy corvée obligations upon phrai (as a form of unremunerated tax) for a variety of reasons, including construction work, but also the needs of war. To obtain and maintain royal power, it was necessary to control debt peons and slaves.

The 24 June 1932 victory by Khana Ratsadon (People's Party) over King Prachadipok represented the nadir of monarchical power in Siam. But it also marked the unbridling of praetorian ascendancy, no longer blocked by royalty. The armed forces now replaced royalty as the ascendant political institution in Thai society—although the monarchy remained a leading political institution cosmetically. This was because, at least initially, the Thai insurrectionists needed a thin veil of monar¬chization, in the form of popular support and simple legitimacy, to consolidate their control. Yet, despite appearances of maintaining itself as a monarchized military in terms of ritual and pageantry, the path dependence of military hegemony over society was solid and would generally remain so until 1957.

Dominating Khana Ratsadon in 1932 was Colonel Phraya Phahon Phonphrayuhasena.1 He was the leader of the “Four Tigers” or “Four Musketeers” and the reader of the revolutionary pronouncement of 24 June 1932. He was born, on 29 March 1887, as Pote Phahonyothin, and was known as Phraya Phahon. He descended from Mon-Chinese heritage. His patron had been his elder half-brother Phraya Phahonyothin Ramnithara Phakdi, a royal military officer. With the help of his brother, Phahon was able to enter the Royal Army Cadet Academy at the age of fourteen (class of 1901), and he graduated near the top of his class. In 1904 Phahon won a scholarship to study in Potsdam, Germany. There he met German student Hermann Goering and Japanese pupil Hideki Tojo.

Phahon became an early member of the “Kaiser” faction: non-royal Siamese military officers studying in Germany. Phahon was also part of the Siamese Artillery; officers in this unit faction also included Song Suradej, Phraya Ritthi Akkanay and Luang Phibun Songkram. Phahon returned to Siam in 1906 and completed his academy training in 1910. He then gained his first commission as second lieutenant. In 1912 Phahon returned to Europe, this time to Denmark, to study engineer¬ing at Copenhagen Engineering College. In 1914 Phahon entered the 4th Artillery Regiment, later becoming a captain and the commander of the 9th Artillery Regiment in Chachoengsao Province. He then rose to be the commander of the 2nd Artillery Army

The year 1992 was the beginning of a fourteen-year period that seemed to transition Thailand towards democracy and civilian control over the military. During the first part of this period (1992–2001), three principals (the palace, the king's Privy Council and key retired generals) dominated the country, given that Thailand possessed a defective democracy (defective because most power was centred upon the aforementioned principals). The only “civilian” who really could control the country was King Bhumipol, lording over the people and the armed forces. Thailand after 1992 thus became what Thongchai Winichakul calls a “royalist democracy”:

A “guided democracy or ‘managed democracy’ is a formally democratic government that functions as a de facto authoritarian government.… Such governments are legitimized by elections that are free and fair, but do not change the state's policies, motives, and goals.” Merkel (2004) refers to this “guided” or “managed”, defective variant of democracy as “tutelary democracy” because unelected entities exert veto power over democratically elected civilian governments. Thailand has experienced such democracies.

But at the post–Black May inception of this “royalist democracy”, the 13 September 1992 election resulted in the centrist Democrats taking 79 seats, while the conservative Chart Thai received 77, indicating that a political divide was alive and well in Thailand's lower house. A Democrat-led ruling coalition formed on 29 September with General Chavalit Yongchaiyudh's New Aspiration Party and General Chamlong Srimuang's Palang Dharma.

If there is an assumption in urban historiography that every epoch will produce a governing regime appropriate to its time, Indonesia is perhaps a fine case in point. In 1950, soon after the transfer of sovereignty from the Dutch to the new republic, the Indonesian government convened the Congress of Healthy Housing for the People (Kongres Peroemahan Rakjat Sehat) in Bandung. The political leaders of the newly independent Indonesia were aware of the housing gap in colonial rule and regarded peroemahan rakjat (people's housing) as one of the major goals of the Indonesian revolution. In 1952, during the second congress in Jakarta, Vice-President Mohammad Hatta indicated that this goal ‘won't be realised in two years. It won't be completed in ten or twenty years. However, in forty years or in half a century we will be able to fulfil our wish, if we are committed and make effort with confidence’ (Hatta 1954: 254).

Yet, by the 1970s, with the violent death of Sukarnoist socialism and the rise of Suharto's New Order, the notion of peroemahan rakjat (with its association of the state's mass housing program supported by community self-help, which Hatta (1954: 257) called ‘auto-aktivitet’ and ‘gotong-royong’) had eroded into a failed utopia of the past. The new political regime, encouraged by international development agencies such as the World Bank, preferred to enable the private capital market to determine the prices of land and housing. This shift at once ensured urban development would be, above all, an arena for business interests. For the next several decades, the Indonesian city was governed by an urban growth coalition that consisted of the president and other government elites, the military and business groups. By the mid-1980s, fuelled by neoliberal ideas of deregulation and privatisation, it was clear the government's urban development program was being driven by the short-term interests of capitalist modernisation, not by any long-term vision of social planning for the public, as was perhaps envisioned by Hatta.

Evidence of Praetorianism in Thailand (1932–2023)

A rapid staccato pop of pistol fire echoed down the long dimly lit corridor. I was at the Senayan shooting range in central Jakarta to meet with senior players in Jakarta's booming private security industry. ‘We come here regularly to hone our skills, socialise and to meet and train clients’, shouted Pak Brata. Hailing from a military family, he is director of Agung Rahardja Manunggal Yahya, or PT ARMY, a security company specialising in VIP bodyguard services and security for ‘national vital objects’, or objek vital nasional, typically extractive industry facilities. A career security professional, he has done specialist training in Israel and the United States and accompanied clients to Somalia and Iraq. As a senior figure in the nationalist paramilitary organisation Pemuda Pancasila (Pancasila Youth), Brata is also responsible for coordinating its ‘core commandos’ (komando inti, KOTI), who undergo focused physical and ideological training and are tasked with protecting the organisation's leadership. As we attempted to talk over the din, a group of Bank Negara Indonesia (BNI) executives clumsily shot at paper targets under the instruction of another security company director. ‘He's just finished providing briefings to BNI and Shangrila Hotel Group on 2024’, says Brata. ‘An election year means lots of business for us. Companies want contingency plans, like how to get staff to the airport if there's unrest, potential hotspots and risks to company assets.’ Noticing my interest in the executives’ bespoke gold-plated pistols being diligently cleaned by pistol range staff, he added ‘more and more corporate clients are carrying guns nowadays. The more they have, the less safe they feel’.

What does it mean to be secure in twenty-first century Jakarta? While for the city's bank executives it may mean access to a firearm and specialist bodyguard services, for others it can be a matter of securing a place to live free from risk of eviction. Security perceptions and needs depend upon who and where you are in the city. Rather than consisting of fixed properties, security is politically constructed and contested, conceptually and in practice; notions of security and risk are also central to how cities are planned, built, governed, inhabited and imagined (Zeiderman 2016).

Myanmar has experienced various governmental regimes over the past six decades, transitioning from socialist to democratic systems and from planned to market economy structures. Despite each government's earnest aspiration for sustained development, the majority of economic policies they implemented were highly disjointed and often ad hoc in nature. These policies resembled quick fixes or short-term solutions aimed at alleviating symptoms rather than addressing root causes.

Since 1989, policymakers across different administrations have believed they were steering Myanmar towards a market-oriented economy, albeit with a limited understanding of what a true market economy entails. This resulted in what was termed the “Burmese/Myanmar Way to Market Economy”, characterized by numerous restrictions and controls imposed at the discretion of policymakers. It wasn't until the military-backed Union Solidarity and Development Party (USDP) assumed power in 2011 under a military-orchestrated process to democratic transition that many policymakers began to acknowledge the need for reforms and recognize the prevalence of poverty in the country. Despite some positive strides in reform and liberalization during the USDP years, there were also negative consequences stemming from inadequate policy formulation, including a lack of thorough cost/benefit analysis, policy evaluation, and adjustment mechanisms. Although Myanmar was seen as a latecomer with the opportunity to learn from other countries’ experiences, policymakers often neglected to reference international lessons. Instead, they relied on Myanmar's own past experience, which included errors made by predecessors such as the State Peace and Development Council (SPDC) military regime that held control of state power (first as the State Law and Order Restoration Council or SLORC) from September 1988 (and changing its name to SPDC in 1998) up to April 2011. For instance, the USDP's Ministry of Transport looked to the establishment of rice procurement corporations from the SPDC era when considering the corporatization of entities like the Myanmar Port Authority and Myanmar Airways, rather than drawing insights from a wealth of international examples in similar areas. As a result, separate special laws were enacted to corporatize and operate the Myanmar Port Authority and Myanmar Airways rather than incorporating them in accordance with existing Companies Law. These special laws aimed to allow them to become off-budget units with greater financial and operational autonomy and to enable them to receive all possible benefits from the government regarding fiscal incentives and market preferences rather than to strengthen their efficiency. Their boards of directors were predominantly composed of current high-ranking government officials, and their intention was not to operate efficiently and compete fairly with private sector counterparts in a competitive market, but rather to enhance monopoly advantages.