Smart City-Regional Governance: A 'Dual Transition'

This paper introduces the concept of ‘dual transition’ in relation to the notion of ‘smartness’ in city-regional governance. This consists of two intersecting dimensions, a broader change in political-economic and societal circumstances which surround city-regions, and a more detailed, local change towards ‘smartness’ in policy practices. Although ‘smart’ seems to have become a somewhat ubiquitous adjective in urban policy, it seeks to project policies that seek to go beyond a one-dimensional ‘growth agenda’ by addressing also the multifaceted quest for social, economic and environmental sustainability. The underlying shift in discourse, rationality and suggested policy responses in both dimensions may be captured by the concept of ‘transition’ in relation to policies and governance. Originally developed in conjunction with broad political-economic regime change, such as post-authoritarian democratisation, the idea of ‘transition’ has also been applied to the more specific concept of sustainability as ‘sustainability transition’.

Cultural cooperation, institution building, and metropolitan governance in decentralizing Indonesia

The institutional turn in metropolitan governance has been influenced to a considerable degree by a rational choice approach, which views metropolitan governance as essentially created by local actors to reduce the transaction costs of inter-jurisdictional public-service provision. Another influential theoretical route follows a historical approach, which emphasizes the role of the state structure in producing formal institutions to enable governance at the regional level. Both approaches tend to be formalistic, simplistic and deterministic in nature, thus neglecting the dynamic interactions between the actors and their more informal, intangible, yet more basic, legitimate institutions, such as culture. This article examines the dynamic role of culture in metropolitan governance building in the context of decentralizing Indonesia. The analysis focuses on ‘best-practice’ experiences of metropolitan cooperation in greater Yogyakarta, where three neighbouring local governments known as Kartamantul have collaboratively performed cross-border infrastructure development to deal with the consequences of extended urbanization. We draw on sociological institutionalism to argue that building this metropolitan cooperation has its roots in the capacity of the actors to use and mobilize culture as a resource for collaborative action.

Metropolitan Governance and Institutional Design: Transportation in the Jakarta Metropolitan Region

In the Jakarta Metropolitan Region (JMR), the lack of co-ordination and appropriate governance has resulted in paralyzing traffic jams at the metropolitan scale that cannot be resolved by a single government entity. The issue of metropolitan governance is especially crucial here as the JMR lacks an established and formally pre-designed system of governance (e.g., in a constitution or other legal regulations). Instead, it relies on the interaction, coordination and cooperation of a multitude of different stakeholders, ranging from local and regional authorities to private entities and citizens. This chapter offers a discussion on the various governance approaches relating to an appropriate institutional design required for transportation issues at the metropolitan scale. The case used is a regional Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) system as an extension to the metropolitan transport system. Institutional design analysis is applied to the case and three possible improvements - i) a ‘Megapolitan’ concept, ii) a regional spatial plan and iii) inter-local government cooperation; were identified that correspond to current debates on metropolitan governance approaches of regionalism, localism and new regionalism. The findings, which are relevant to similar metropolitan regions, suggest that i) improvements at the meso-level of institutional design are more readily accepted and effective than improvements at the macro-level and ii) that the appropriate institutional design for governing metropolitan transportation in the JMR requires enhanced coordination and cooperation amongst four important actors - local governments, the regional agency, the central government, and private companies.