The Politics of Accountability in Southeast Asia: The Dominance of Moral Ideologies (Oxford Studies in Democratization) 9780198703532, 0198703538

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THE POLIT IC S O F AC COUNTAB I LI TY I N S O U T HE AST ASI A

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OX F O R D S T U D I E S I N D E M O C R AT I Z AT I O N Series editor: Laurence Whitehead

Oxford Studies in Democratization is a series for scholars and students of comparative politics and related disciplines. Volumes will concentrate on the comparative study of the democratization processes that accompanied the decline and termination of the Cold War. The geographical focus of the series will primarily be Latin America, the Caribbean, Southern and Eastern Europe, and relevant experiences in Africa and Asia.

OTHER BOOKS IN THE SERIES Democracy, Agency, and the State: Theory with Comparative Intent Guillermo O’Donnell Regime-Building: Democratization and International Administration Oisín Tansey Rethinking Arab Democratization: Elections without Democracy Larbi Sadiki Accountability Politics: Power and Voice in Rural Mexico Jonathan A. Fox Regimes and Democracy in Latin America: Theories and Methods Edited by Gerardo L. Munck Democracy and Diversity: Political Engineering in the Asia-Pacific Benjamin Reilly Democratic Accountability in Latin America: Edited by Scott Mainwaring and Christopher Weina Democratization: Theory and Experience Laurence Whitehead The Politics of Uncertainty: Sustaining and Subverting Electoral Authoritarianism Andreas Schedler

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The Politics of Accountability in Southeast Asia The Dominance of Moral Ideologies

G A R RY RO DA N AND CAROLINE HUGHES

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Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP, United Kingdom Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries © Garry Rodan and Caroline Hughes 2014 The moral rights of the authors have been asserted First Edition published in 2014 Impression: 1 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Control Number: 2013950252 ISBN 978–0–19–870353–2 Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials contained in any third party website referenced in this work.

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Preface Normative appeals to accountability by political leaders, social activists, and international policy and aid actors have never been more widespread. It is tempting to view this development as indicative of the growing power of liberal and democratic ideas associated with greater global economic and political integration. However, despite a strong historical link between accountability and liberal democracy in early industrializing countries, there is no inevitability about this relationship. This book investigates the different ideologies informing accountability politics in Southeast Asia and finds that morally conservative ideologies are much more important than liberalism and democracy in shaping demands for accountability and responses to them. The key test for distinguishing between moral, liberal, and democratic ideologies is whose authority is advanced by accountability practices. Democratic accountability ideologies advance the authority of the sovereign people; liberal ideologies advance the authority of the freely contracting individual in the political or economic sphere; moral ideologies advance the authority of established or charismatic moral guardians who interpret or ordain correct modes of behaviour for public officials. In Southeast Asia, we find both authoritarian and post-authoritarian regimes that are resorting to the exploitation of moral ideologies to contain pressures for accountability. This is not culturally based but a by-product of the social foundations of political and social organizations influenced by Cold War legacies and their intersection with contemporary dynamics of capitalist development—nationally, regionally, and internationally. The political economy of different countries produces a range of social forces that act strategically to contest for power through efforts to promote different kinds of institutional reform. In the context of such struggles ideology becomes an important means for both mobilizing supporters to preferred reforms as well as a way of potentially constraining the range of reform options. This is as true of accountability reforms as it is of reforms to any other set of political institutions. In the case studies presented in this volume, we show that different social actors have various interests in promoting accountability but ideology plays a crucial role in how this pans out. Ideology influences the extent to which accountability campaigns resonate with a broader group of actors, and whether or not the basis for cross-class coalitions of social forces is laid. Ideological appeals can create a sense of common interest around prevailing values that

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Preface

may have already been internalized among social groups. The effectiveness of ideology is, however, boosted by the presence of powerful organizations that can propagate these views. In Southeast Asia, religious bodies, political parties, and broadcast media are among the most significant such organizations. We find that the kinds of ideologies most powerful in accountability politics in Southeast Asia are morally based ideologies. The lack of civil society organizations propagating liberalism or democracy means that moral critiques of public officials and institutions are the most influential bases for binding coalitions of activists for greater accountability. In drawing distinctions between ideologies we adopt a strong emphasis on the need to transcend the mere procedural aspects of democratic accountability. For us, institutions are sites of ideological conflict, so we cannot neatly line up each ideology with corresponding institutions. This presents methodological problems, particularly with respect to democracy which, over the past twenty years, has increasingly been treated in procedural rather than substantive terms as definitions of democracy have been pared back and tightened. Yet we consider procedural definitions of democracy inadequate precisely because they obscure the extent to which institutions commonly associated with democracy are the sites of ideological conflict. This is made abundantly clear in our examination of accountability procedures in Southeast Asia across authoritarian and democratic regimes. Although this particular study focuses on Southeast Asia, our framework and arguments have universal applicability. Indeed, the aim of this project was to contribute to general debates about accountability via detailed case studies of Southeast Asia. In other regions, with contrasting histories and political economies the nature and extent of organizations and social actors shaping accountability politics will differ, but the importance of these factors will not. Garry Rodan and Caroline Hughes

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Acknowledgements Research for this book was financially supported by the Australian Research Council (ARC), as a Discovery Project (DP0984569) entitled ‘The Politics of Accountability Reform in Southeast Asia’. Without such support a project of this nature and scale would have been impossible. We are thus extremely grateful to the ARC. Equally, the cooperation of interviewees across Southeast Asia who generously submitted their views and insights about accountability reform has been vital to this project and therefore greatly valued and appreciated. Additionally, colleagues at the Asia Research Centre, Murdoch University, and many that are part of the international network of colleagues and occasional collaborators of the Centre have in varying ways and degrees assisted this project. Special mention is warranted for some in this category whose assistance was particularly significant: Shahar Hameiri, Vedi Hadiz, Jane Hutchison, Kanishka Jayasuriya, Luky Djani, Khoo Boo Teik, Kevin Hewison, Pasuk Phongpaichit, Thitinan Pongsudhirak, Eng Netra, and Walden Bello. We benefited also from suggestions and constructive criticisms provided by one Oxford University Press-appointed anonymous referee in particular, to whom we express our thanks. The research assistance of James Boyd, Michelle Hackett, Ros Lumley, Ingebjørg Helland Scarpello, Kelly Gerard, and Audri Sani has also been important. Administrative support for the management of the project by Tamara Dent of the Asia Research Centre ensured the extensive fieldwork for the project was conducted as smoothly as possible. We also acknowledge that arguments and data of Chapter 5 draw in significant part on our previously published article, ‘Ideological Coalitions and the International Promotion of Social Accountability: The Philippines and Cambodia Compared’, in the International Studies Association journal International Studies Quarterly, 56, 2012. Finally, both authors have benefited from their respective families’ understanding and support for the duration of the project, including many months of fieldwork.

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Contents List of Abbreviations 1. Contrasting Ideological Rationales for Accountability 2. Accountability Coalitions in the Southeast Asian Context 3. Political Crisis and Human Rights Accountability in Singapore and Malaysia 4. Decentralization and Accountability in Post-Socialist Cambodia and Vietnam 5. Social Accountability in the Philippines and Cambodia 6. State-based Anticorruption Agencies in Indonesia, the Philippines, and Thailand Conclusion Bibliography Index

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xi 1 27 57 88 117 143 179 185 219

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List of Abbreviations ABIM AGO AICHR ANNI BACs BCBP Bersih BN BRTF CAC CBCP CICAK COA CODE-NGO COMELEC COSINGO CPP CPV CSOs DBM DFGG FUNCINPEC

GDD GLCs GPPB HINDRAF IBP ICC ICCPR

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Angkatan Belia Islam Malaysia (Muslim Youth Movement of Malaysia) Attorney General’s Office ASEAN Intergovernmental Commission on Human Rights Asian NGO Network on National Human Rights Institutions Bids and Awards Committees Brotherhood of Christian Businessmen and Professionals (Clean) Gabungan Pilihanraya Bersih dan Adil (Coalition for Free and Fair Elections) Barisan Nasional (National Front) Budget Reform Task Force Coalition Against Corruption Catholic Bishops’ Conference of the Philippines Cinta Indonesia Cinta KPK (Love Indonesia, Love the KPK) Commission of Audit Caucus of Development NGO Networks Commission on Elections Coalition of Singapore NGOs Cambodian People’s Party Communist Party of Vietnam civil society organizations Philippines Department of Budget and Management Demand for Good Governance Front Uni National pour un Cambodge Indépendant, Neutre, Pacifique, et Coopératif (National United Front for an Independent, Neutral, Peaceful, and Cooperative Cambodia) Grassroots Democracy Decree government-linked companies Government Procurement Policy Board Hindu Rights Action Force Integrated Bar of the Philippines International Coordinating Committee International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights

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xii IMF ISA JBC KKN KPK LAIKO MAP MBC MCA MIC MoI NACC NCCC NEP NGOs NIA P2D PAD PAP PAS PECSA PKN PRA PTG PTP PWI SDP SOEs SSS Suaram Suhakam TA TAN TRT TSD TWG

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List of Abbreviations International Monetary Fund Internal Security Act Judicial and Bar Council korupsi, kolusi, dan nepotisme (corruption, collusion, and nepotism) Komisi Pemberantasan Korupsi (Corruption Eradication Commission) Council of the Laity of the Philippines Management Association of the Philippines Makati Business Club Malaysian Chinese Association Malaysian Indian Congress Ministry of Interior National Anti-Corruption Commission National Counter Corruption Commission New Economic Policy non-governmental organizations National Irrigation Administration Perhimpunan Pendidikan Demokrasi (Society for Democracy Education) People’s Alliance for Democracy People’s Action Party Parti Islam Se-Malaysia (Pan-Malaysian Islamic Party) Program for Enhancing Capacity for Social Accountability Parti Keadilan Nasional (National Justice Party) Government Procurement Reform Act Procurement Transparency Group Pheu Thai Party (For Thais Party) Procurement Watch Inc. Singapore Democratic Party state-owned enterprises Social Security System Suara Rakyat Malaysia (Voice of the Malaysian People) Suruhanjaya Hak Asasi Malaysia (Human Rights Commission of Malaysia) Technical Agreement Transparency and Accountability Network Thai Rak Thai party (Thais Love Thais) Thai-style Democracy Technical Working Group

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List of Abbreviations UDD UDHR UMNO UNDP UNHRC UPR USAID VCP

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United Front for Democracy Against Dictatorship, or the ‘red-shirt movement’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights United Malays National Organization United Nations Development Programme United Nations Human Rights Council Universal Periodic Review US Agency for International Development Vietnamese Communist Party

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1 Contrasting Ideological Rationales for Accountability I N T RO DUC T IO N Institutional innovation may be required just as much in the reproduction of political regimes as in their transformation. One of the most interesting expressions of this in contemporary times is what Goetz and Jenkins (2005: 4) have heralded as a ‘new accountability agenda in the making’. This newfound appeal of accountability in developing and developed countries alike reflects attempts by various actors to redefine intrastate and state-society relations. Some of these attempts are motivated by concerns to transform political regimes, while others are meant to conserve power relations within existing regimes. Within the state the new accountability agenda includes the establishment of human rights commissions, auditing bodies with new investigative and monitoring powers, mandatory environmental impact procedures, competition commissions, and judicial and administrative powers being extended into traditional policy domains. Initiatives outside the state, or in partnership with it, involve a diverse array of civil society actors. These range from watchdogs on corruption, transparency, labour standards, corporate ethics, and electoral institutions to consumer groups evaluating and monitoring state services (Bovens 2007; Dowdle 2006; Peruzzotti and Smulovitz 2006b). Exactly what the wide embrace of accountability means for political regimes is not obvious. According to Mulgan (2003: 3–4), on the one hand this ‘reflects a growing democratic assertiveness’, but on the other hand also a diluted application of the idea of accountability beyond its ‘core meaning’ (Mulgan 2003: 8). However, the core meaning of accountability has always been ideologically contested, for example between liberals, democrats, and republicans (O’Donnell 2003; Kenney 2003). The current emphasis on accountability is manifest, not just within established liberal democracies but also within authoritarian and post-authoritarian regimes. In these contexts,

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The Politics of Accountability in Southeast Asia

forces for and against democracy and those involved in intra-elite struggles for state power are competing to promote different ideologies of accountability. Consequently, ideological contestation over different meanings of accountability has intensified. Understanding the sources and implications of increased emphasis on accountability is not straightforward. Nevertheless, a key dynamic to the politics of accountability is the ideological framing of the concept and how this reflects the nature and goals of accountability promoters and the coalitions they form to achieve their objectives. In other words, we need to know: who is supporting accountability reform, for what purpose, and how are they attempting to mobilize support? Both the nature of dominating ideologies of accountability among coalitions seeking institutional reform and the tactical role of ideological appeals are politically crucial factors. Ideology refers here to: ‘any systematic set of practical or theoretical ideas which articulate the interests of a group’ (Gamble 1981: 257). Different ideological approaches to accountability seek to vest authority in the hands of different political entities. Therefore, analysis of accountability ideologies sheds light on which groups in society political authority migrates to,1 or consolidates with, as a result of accountability reform. Hitherto, with the limited exception of O’Donnell (2003) and Kenney (2003), ideology has been largely neglected in research into accountability reform, a gap this book is specifically intended to fill. This analysis also draws important conclusions about the implications of different accountability ideologies for the prospects of democratization. Southeast Asia provides an excellent opportunity for examining the utility and contestability of accountability ideas across different regime types, given it contains a complex mix of authoritarian and democratic systems where the concept of accountability is assuming growing importance in politics. Throughout the region, citizens, governments, and international aid agencies promoting governance reform have to varying extents embraced accountability reform of one type or another. However, the rationales, forms, and objectives of accountability differ markedly between actors within and across Southeast Asia.2 1 The concept of authority migration was previously introduced by Gerber and Kollman (2004: 397) and understood as ‘the movement of power within a political system—both upwards (i.e., centralization) and downwards (i.e., provincialization)’. We employ the concept more expansively to refer to shifts in power relationships that also include changes to the authority of actors not just within or between tiers of government, but in the power relationship between state and civil society. 2 Compared with Latin America in particular, accountability institutions in Southeast Asia have received little attention outside the public administration literature (see Turner 2002; Fritzen 2006; IJPA 2007).

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The argument in this book is that, in Southeast Asia at least, struggles over accountability reform are more influenced by moral conservatism than democratic assertiveness. Morally conservative approaches to accountability may be promoted, often in alliance with liberal approaches, to challenge or co-opt incipient democratic movements. The relative strength of different ideologies reflects historical legacies and contemporary political economy relationships. Ideological categories differ over where political authority ought to rest in the accountability relationship and therefore have differential appeal to groups of varying interests. The issue is not whether accountability is diluted or not but whose authority is championed through accountability reforms. Our approach is founded on the understanding that institutions, including state institutions, are sites of dynamic expressions of political conflict between societal forces; rather than as standing outside such conflict, as understood in liberal pluralist theories of the state (Rodan and Jayasuriya 2012; Sangmpam 2007). Thus, institutions of accountability can be quite variable in their political impacts depending upon which coalitions prevail in shaping the scope and nature of permissible conflict through these institutions. Although in Southeast Asia conflict also frequently takes the form of violent confrontations, we are primarily concerned in this study with ideological conflict over accountability. As explained by Gramsci (1971: 12), the ideological realm is crucial to eliciting consent of subordinate groups for persistent unequal social, political, and economic relationships. However, this realm is in flux in contemporary Southeast Asia. Industrialization, globalization, the emergence of new social classes, the inflow of international capital and international aid, the end of the Cold War, and the shattering impact of the 1997– 98 Asian Financial Crisis have precipitated intra-elite conflict as well as, on occasion, political contestation from below in the name of differing notions of social justice.3 This has produced a degree of ideological contestation which challenges long-standing strategies for regime legitimacy. Mass protests in Malaysia and Thailand, scandals in the Philippines and Indonesia, and the continuing crisis of legitimacy in post-socialist Vietnam and Cambodia all reflect a weakening of the bases of ruling elites’ ideological supremacy across the region. Accountability politics forms an important part of this contestation. Consequently, a prominent phenomenon in contemporary Southeast Asia is the adoption of new ideological stances and appeals by emerging and/

3 Chapter 2 elaborates on these historical and geopolitical dynamics, with special attention to the significance of various forms of capitalist and state capitalist systems for the conflicts and alliances over political directions in Southeast Asia.

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or fracturing groups across different social classes as a means to build and consolidate strategic alliances. One expression of this is found in liberal and democratic rhetoric by non-governmental organizations (NGOs) to respectively secure international donor assistance for governance reforms and to assert the political authority of the poor in public policy in Southeast Asia. However, ultimately the dominant ideologies in accountability politics are moral. This includes the recasting of cultural identity, ethical thought, and religious teaching in a manner that serves elites seeking to fend off challenges from competing groups. This study explains the implications of an ideologically charged accountability politics for changing patterns of political authority in Southeast Asia. The remainder of this chapter first elaborates on the different ideological rationales of liberal, democratic, and moral accountability. These rationales are not mutually exclusive in practice. In debates and contestation over actual accountability regimes we find that these three ideological tendencies can be used flexibly and in a variety of combinations. Second, we then explain how different social and political forces use these various ideologies to justify reform initiatives, including through coalition building. Finally, we outline the core arguments of the book and show how these add a significant new dimension to the literature.

LIBERAL ACCOUNTABILITY Liberals are concerned to vest authority with the private voluntary contracting individual. Consequently, they place considerable emphasis on legal, constitutional, and contractual relationships to restrain the ability of state agencies to violate the private sphere. Checks and balances on state power are necessary to protect individual autonomy. Crucially, for liberals, the personal freedom of citizens takes precedence over their collective political authority. Hence, the principal liberal contribution to accountability has been the emphasis on horizontal accountability: oversight by intrastate institutions that act to check power abuses by other public agencies and branches of government. There are many different variants of liberalism (Arblaster 1984), but two that can be readily contrasted illustrate the preference for locating political authority with private actors. On the one hand there is a classical tradition of liberalism that emerged from the French Revolution and emphasizes ‘equality before the law, representative government, economic individualism, and

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rationalism as a guide to politics’ (Gamble 1981: 258). On the other hand, neoliberalism accords primacy to economic individualism and, in sharp contrast with classical liberals, is intended to limit the role of the state to protecting and enforcing contracts between enterprising individuals. According to Harvey (2005: 20), neoliberal ideology promotes the free market principles of neoclassical economics and the idea attributed to Adam Smith that ‘the hidden hand of the market was the best device for mobilizing even the basest of human instincts such as gluttony, greed and the desire for wealth and power for the benefit of all’. Tensions between these two dominant strands of liberalism may surface because political strategies for promoting the privileging and expanding of market relationships can at times require repressive uses of state power to recast governance institutions and societal values (see Harvey 2005: 21). The experience of Britain under the Thatcher government is one example of this (Hall and Jacques 1983; Jessop et al. 1984), while Chile under General Pinochet is a more extreme case of state violence accompanying neoliberal reforms (Valdés 1995; Silva 1991). Such episodes can put classical liberals offside because of their concerns for civil and political rights. Nevertheless, classical liberal activists frequently ally with neoliberal forces in pro-accountability coalitions owing to underlying ideological points of intersection over the priority they accord to liberty. Judicial institutions are among the traditional means through which liberals have generally sought to impose checks and balances on the exercise of state power. In the all-important separation of powers underscoring both liberal democratic and constitutional liberal regimes, the judiciary plays a vital role in interpreting and enforcing accountability relationships. In recent times many analysts have observed an expansion of such judicial powers (Hirschl 2007; Ginsburg and Moustafa 2008; Ginsburg and Chen 2009; Couso, Huneeus, and Sieder 2010; Sieder, Schjolden, and Angell 2005; Dressel 2012). This is taking a wide range of forms, including systems of judicial review of administrative action, macroeconomic planning, and national security as well as through the emergence of new constitutional courts deciding on the legality of government decisions. These judicial powers potentially operate at the expense of different kinds of actors’ authority, including that of other bureaucratic, political, and private actors (Ginsburg and Chen 2009: 3). However, the formal independence of the judiciary, so important to liberal ideology’s desire to have a check on how state power is exercised, does not preclude other ideologies exerting an influence through the courts. Use of the judicial system to block government policies, for example, can be an attractive political tactic to social and political actors who may embrace democratic or moral ideologies.

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Thus, in Thailand, for example, the extension of judicial powers over the last decade has been integral to antidemocratic strategies intended to limit parliamentary power in particular, including by disbanding electorally popular political parties (Dressel 2012). Meanwhile, in various cases in Latin America and South Asia a collective politics has emerged around public litigation that has provided a new opportunity to force social justice onto the policy agenda (Ginsburg and Chen 2009; Goetz and Jenkins 2005). Both tendencies are possible because of the complexion and ideological objectives of social and political coalitions shaping the climate in which judiciaries operate and may even attain additional powers. Where coalitions with liberal ideologies dominate, judicial processes are likely to emphasize individual rights. Classical liberal support for human rights may assist the making of collective democratic demands. Conversely, neoliberal emphasis on property rights can deliberately obstruct representative politics. In Southeast Asia, the influence of classical political liberalism is extraordinarily limited. There has been a relative lack of advocacy of, or protest over, human rights violations across the region.4 As Chapter 3 illustrates, even where there has been such advocacy, this has not been principally driven by the forces of political liberalism. Where liberal ideologies have been apparent amongst accountability coalitions in Southeast Asia they have been neoliberal rather than classical liberal. The forces involved also tend to be associated with the programmes and agendas of international development agencies or with select areas of the private sector attracted to forms of governance promoting more open commercial competition. The impact of neoliberal ideologies of accountability in recent decades has prompted the proliferation of horizontal accountability mechanisms endorsed by new public management theory. These insulate many decision-making bodies from political scrutiny and oversight (Gilmour and Jensen 1998). This includes inspectorates, boards, ombudsmen, official watchdogs, commissions of enquiry, and quality assessment agencies. Ackerman (2004) describes a phenomenal growth in such institutions. The functioning of these institutions reflects core assumptions of new public management theory articulating neoliberal priorities, including that rolling back the state in favour of private or third sector provision of services would be more efficient. The duties and obligations of semi-autonomous private sector ‘agents’ and their relationship to public sector ‘principals’ are specified by contract. Thus accountability became a matter of scrutinizing the adherence 4 The impact of classical liberal ideas in human rights advocacy and activism has been greater in Latin America (see Cleary 2007). For an account of the variants, influence, and bases of liberalism more broadly in Latin America see Peloso and Tenenbaum (1996).

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of private sector actors to predetermined contractual obligations rather than the adherence of public sector actors to possibly shifting political demands. A fundamental aim of new public management reforms was to promote market-style accountability mechanisms. Ackerman (2004: 447) describes this shift as the promotion of ‘exit’ over ‘voice’—competing sources of services allowing newly constituted consumers of public services to vote with their feet, shifting from one service provider to the other in search of better quality and lower costs. A combination of market-based accountability mechanisms associated with ‘exit’ and legal regulation by newly established boards and inspectorates replaced the emphasis on ministerial responsibility for a ladder of administrative accountability within a professional public administration (Ackerman 2004; Gilmour and Jensen 1998). The ideological rationale for new public management reforms and the proliferation of horizontal accountability institutions was thus primarily liberal, not democratic. Indeed, some authors argue that the reforms were intentionally antidemocratic, designed to remove certain decisions by technical experts from the sphere of public debate, and thus protect them from the pressures of populist campaigning. An influential argument in this vein is Romzek and Dubnick’s (1987) account of the Challenger space shuttle disaster in 1986, widely cited as indicating the dangers of political accountability in policy areas that are highly complex or technical in nature. Importantly, the horizontal accountability institutions embraced by neoliberals are not inherently antidemocratic. However, neoliberal ideology has infused the operations of these institutions with market values, ostensibly privileging efficiency in resource allocation over responsiveness to political demands.

DEMO CRATIC ACCOUNTABILITY Democracy is possibly an even more complex and variously understood concept than liberalism. Indeed, Gallie (1956: 183–7) has described it as ‘essentially contested’. Nevertheless, in both procedural and substantive forms of democracy a central claim is that the people’s voice is the fundamental source of political authority (Held 2006: 260–1). The underlying premise of a democratic ideology of accountability is the notion that official action at all levels is subject to sanction, either directly or indirectly, in a manner which promotes popular sovereignty. The predominant institutional expression of this in modern democracies is the election. As Przeworski, Stokes, and Manin (1999) point out, the idea of elections is that they both generate a mandate and hold governments

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accountable for their performance thereafter—although they are sceptical of how well this works in practice.5 However, as Goodin (2008: 178) observes, a democratic system, although ultimately organized around elections, also incorporates ‘various complementary layers of political accountability’. Examples of these include ‘accountability of appointed officials to their elected masters; the legal accountability of both appointed and elected officials to the constitution and courts; the political accountability of all to the Fourth Estate and the court of public opinion, even between elections’ (Goodin 2008: 178). Formally, in democratic approaches to accountability the political authority of citizens takes precedence over citizens’ personal freedoms. Liberal democratic systems are precisely those that attempt to reconcile popular sovereignty and individual liberty by limiting majoritarian rule through guarantees of individual rights (Arblaster 1984: 78). Within liberal democratic accountability systems there are complementarities as well as conflicts between liberal and democratic components. Horizontal institutions of accountability illustrate this paradox. On the one hand they provide liberal guarantees underlining the free participation of individuals in democratic processes. On the other hand, they can also be used to shield the individual from the impact of democratic decisions. For this reason, horizontal accountability institutions such as constitutional courts, for example, can be sites of political struggle between contending forces. Foremost amongst the rights and freedoms that liberal democrats typically seek to protect from the ‘tyranny of the masses’ are rights to private property. This concern is awarded much lower priority among social democrats, who are much more concerned about how economic inequality can threaten political equality (Berman 2009; Moschonas 2002). For social democrats, market systems naturally generate concentrations of economic power that invariably translate into undue elite, or even oligarchic, influence over political decision making and the exercise of state power by authorities. Winters (2011: 53–4) distinguishes between elites and oligarchs on the basis that the former’s power is not material but derived from official position, coercion, or mobilization capacities. Where corrupt politicians and officials abuse their powers to amass considerable assets and wealth then elites can simultaneously be oligarchs (see also Winters 2012). This leads, for example, liberal democrats and social democrats to understand the implications of corruption differently, seeking contrasting modes of 5 Hence they assert that: ‘Governments are “accountable” if citizens can discern representative from unrepresentative governments and can sanction them appropriately, retaining in office those incumbents who perform well and ousting from office those who do not’ (Przeworski, Stokes, and Manin 1999: 10).

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accountability to arrest the problem. The former are more inclined to see corruption as an abuse against the individual—for example, the citizen forced to pay a bribe in return for services or a contract—to be addressed through legal remedy; the latter view corruption as both the cause and effect of undesirable relations, or even alliances, between economic and political elites. These perspectives respectively reflect primary emphasis on individual and social justice. At one level, it would appear that democratic accountability through elections has made huge strides worldwide in modern times. Huntington’s (1991) concept of a ‘Third Wave’ of democratization in the second half of the twentieth century was intended to make that point. Political decentralization reforms have also proliferated to render elections more relevant to decision making at local and provincial levels of government (Crook and Manor 1998; White and Smoke 2005; Blair 2000). However, increasingly analysts and activists have turned their attention to complementary institutions important to ensuring democratic accountability within and beyond elections.6 Indeed, many of the cases cited by Huntington of democratization reflect his procedural or minimalist conception of democracy (Shin 1994). They involve electoralism where the authority of the citizen is exercised in a constrained political environment limiting the choices and information available to voters. Symbolic gestures towards citizens’ authority through elections entail weak and partial democratic accountability, but accountability nevertheless. Achievement of more substantive democratic accountability requires the additional mechanisms referred to above by Goodin (2008), which contribute extra elements of oversight and deliberation. The significance of deliberation is that it fosters a more open exchange and contest of ideas that renders more meaningful and powerful the authority derived from electoral choices. Deliberation by civil society actors in the public sphere is especially important for this opening up, for example through town hall meetings and other public forums and debate via popular media that present citizens with a wide range of arguments (Habermas 1991; Dryzek 1996, 2010; Fishkin 2011; Fishkin and Luskin 2005; Smith 2009). To the extent that liberal institutions guarantee a public sphere for free debate they support democratic approaches to accountability. Indeed, it is difficult to envisage successful deliberation in their absence. Theories of deliberative democracy have devoted much attention to designing new modes of deliberation in which the pernicious effects of unequal power relations can be ameliorated or reduced (Cohen 1997; Dryzek and

6 Much of this has been construed as a question of the quality of democracy. See Roberts (2005) and O’Donnell, Cullell, and Iazzetta (2004).

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Niemeyer 2008; Habermas 1984). This is because elite power emerges from structures embedded in the social order. Thus existing political institutions tend to uphold rather than undermine this power. Therefore, deliberation only awards significant authority to non-elite citizens in circumstances where the power of elites is challenged (Gill 2000). Warren’s (1996: 58) argument for deliberative models maximizing ‘the adversarial relationship between democracy and authority’ and adequate ‘deliberative resources’ for citizen engagement on at least the most salient issues is a helpful start in grappling with this challenge. Nevertheless, to the extent that public political deliberation affords opportunities to reinforce and extend the primacy of citizens’ authority to set agendas and evaluate performances of representatives or rulers then democratic accountability is possible. However, where discussion and/or participation are restricted and/or stage managed by concerns to privilege non-democratic ideas about authority, then democratic accountability is compromised. Where this happens in a manner consistently favouring dominant interests the democratic nature of the proceedings themselves must eventually be called into question.7 One new approach to accountability that foregrounds public participation in deliberation is social accountability, proving especially attractive to reformers in contexts where formally representative political institutions have been conspicuously unaccountable (Fox 2007; Peruzzotti and Smulovitz 2006b; Goetz and Jenkins 2001, 2005; Mainwaring and Welna 2003; Arroyo and Sirker 2005; World Bank 2004b, 2009a; UNDP Pacific Centre 2010). Social accountability involves various forms of civil society activism intended to hold public officials answerable. This includes monitoring and auditing functions—citizen report cards, social audits, and society watchdogs on corruption, transparency, labour standards, and electoral institutions—that may generate media attention and political pressure to activate existing formal accountability institutions. It also includes direct incorporation of social actors onto state-based or government-initiated bodies, such as truth commissions, citizens’ advisory boards, and public procurement bodies (Peruzzotti and Smulovitz 2006b). The growth of social accountability has been viewed as a force for: redemocratization in established democracies, with potential to redress democratic deficits created by new public management reforms; the deepening of democratization in post-authoritarian settings; and promoting potentially democratic spaces within authoritarian regimes. 7 Consequently, where most public forums and other deliberations are organized in such a way as to exclude or stifle dissenting voices, we regard this as an authoritarian regime—that is, one where political competition is fundamentally compromised so the will of the people cannot be effectively gauged.

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In stark contrast with new public management, social accountability increases public political participation in accountability. In our view, though, the democratizing potential of social accountability initiatives is linked to which ideological rationales associated with this participation prevail, carrying fundamental implications for the locus of political authority in any reforms. The democratic significance of the deliberative process embedded in social accountability may be considerably weakened if the discussion is dominated by ideologies rationalizing existing inequalities of power. Under such circumstances the outcome may be better described as a form of political co-optation to a hierarchical social and political order, rather than the unequivocal assertion of democratic accountability. One final variant of participatory movements in the name of democracy warranting consideration is populism. Populism covers a diverse and complex range of movements that have taken left- and right-wing complexions, although characteristically juxtaposing the interests of ordinary citizens against those of elites (Laclau 2007). However, in contrast to social accountability, populist movements exclude deliberation rather than promote it. Indeed, quite frequently these movements undermine institutions for systematic and public accountability. As Case (2010a) suggests, classic forms of populism are characterized by a ‘ “trans-class” coalition, wherein a leader possessing great personal charisma and high social standing, in confronting oligarchic rivals, appeals to dissociated mass publics with pledges of material redistribution, though with an intention of winning over clientelist loyalties rather than substantially levelling the socioeconomic order’. Where populism embraces accountability at all it is often, paradoxically then, through affording considerable latitude to the political authority of a charismatic leader. Populist movements that mobilize large numbers of people to make demands of an oligarchic elite may have democratic dimensions. However, such mobilizations are not necessarily a force for democratic accountability ideologies. Merely proclaiming the name of the people to demand accountability is not adequate to constitute the authority of the people; rather opportunities must be created for public deliberation in order for the authority of the people to be exercised. Recent populism in Latin America has been subjected to extensive analysis (Roberts 2007, 1995; Arnson and Perales 2007; Leaman 2004); there is also growing recognition of its significance for contemporary Southeast Asia (see Mizuno and Pasuk 2009). However, the findings here support the view that populism in Southeast Asia more often undermines than promotes accountability ideologies and institutions.

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The Politics of Accountability in Southeast Asia MORAL ACCOUNTABILITY

Clearly, there are important distinctions between liberal and democratic accountability ideologies. Yet the formation of coalitions around accountability reform, including the potential for strategic alliances among liberals and democrats, is often facilitated by a third category of ideological rationale for accountability: moral. The recognition of moral ideologies of accountability as a separate category does not imply liberalism and democracy have no moral foundations. On the contrary, liberalism is founded upon the moral position that individuals should always be treated as ends in themselves rather than as means to an end (Arblaster 1984: 64; Kant 1976: 32–47; Rawls 1971: 256). Therefore liberal theories of political authority focus on the conditions under which freely contracting individuals can make decisions that are binding on the political community. Democracy is based upon the moral imperative of self-rule on the part of the political community. Therefore democratic theories of political authority focus on the conditions under which individuals can have an equal say in community decision making (Dahl 2000: 10; Habermas 1996: 107; Goodin 2008: 6).8 Although these approaches reflect different moral emphases they both rely upon a rationalist foundation for political authority. By contrast, moral ideologies of accountability employ a conception of authority that may be grounded in metaphysical, charismatic, and/or traditional sources. Consequently, the defining feature of moral ideologies is that conformity to received codes of behaviour assumes pre-eminence in evaluating the conduct of power holders. Righteous conduct for moralists thus ranks alongside individual liberties for liberals and popular control for democrats. This moral category is capacious, incorporating a potentially infinite range of variants and hybrids, all of which ground accountability’s rationale upon a received understanding of correct conduct based upon an externally constituted authority. This may take various forms. In religious variants, ethical codes may be authorized by traditional institutions or by a charismatic spiritual teacher, or a combination of the two. Similarly, in monarchical or aristocratic variants of moral accountability ideologies, ideas about right conduct are handed down by a paternalistic elite again drawing on personal charisma and/or tradition. In nationalist, culturalist, or republican variants, the dead hand of custom or the civilizing impact of culture can provide a moral basis for authority—particularly when interpreted by charismatic

8

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See also Larmore (1999) .

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leaders (Hobsbawm and Ranger 1992: 1). Frequently these different variants have some overlap. For example, as Chapter 4 explains, in contemporary Vietnam the ethical writings and practices of Ho Chi Minh have been exploited since his death by a struggling Vietnamese Communist Party. These moral writings have been extracted from the broader context of Ho’s socialist theories in a process of reinvention which draws on memories of—and myths about—Ho’s personal charisma to serve the Party in its current crisis of political authority. Because the bases for moral ideologies of accountability are so diverse, there may be considerable contestation within this category. A prominent, but not exclusive, feature among moral approaches is political conservatism. This includes attachment to traditional institutions and social hierarchies as well as a view of individual human nature as fundamentally fallible. Consequently, conservatives have low expectations of what can be achieved through reason and government intervention (Wintrop 1983: 133–89; Heywood 1998: 66–102). The defining qualities of any moral ideology of accountability include: the idea that personal behaviour is core to the critique of the performance of political elites and public officials; and that poor performance by officials and elites is fundamentally the result of personal rather than political failings. Indeed, the character of the political system is frequently viewed as a product of the sum of different individuals’ morality, taking focus away from debates over political arrangements. Abuses of power are attributed principally to personal wrongdoing, not institutional arrangements. What distinguishes liberalism and democracy from moral ideologies of accountability is the capacity to separate the public and private spheres of behaviour in evaluating performance in public office. Corruption is not just personal theft, a lapse in the moral integrity of an individual. It has a wider significance: for liberals it undermines the efficiency of government; for democrats it erodes the relationship between voters and their representatives. Conversely, indiscretions in private life such as sexual misconduct are irrelevant unless they are linked to abuses of public power. Crucially, the moral emphasis on personal integrity can lay the basis for encompassing coalitions with both liberals and democrats. The moral rhetoric against wrongdoers in public office is easily understood as a common sense argument, avoiding detailed and potentially divisive debate over appropriate political institutions. Furthermore, such rhetoric is often instigated by powerful and well-organized civil society institutions, such as religious bodies and media organizations. For such reasons, both liberals and democrats are inclined to work in concert with moral ideologues to further mobilize support for action against a variety of abuses of public power.

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The most pervasive moral ideological basis for accountability is religion. According to this moralism, secular power must be held accountable to fundamental spiritual beliefs that are, in most cases, thought to embody divine authority. To be sure, there is continual debate and contestation within religious communities over the authentic interpretation of those beliefs. These differences can sometimes lead to major shifts in political implications of moral perspectives on the part of religious organizations or groups therein. An example is the 1963–5 Second Vatican Council’s emphasis on the need of the Catholic Church to direct more spiritual and doctrinal attention to the plight of the poor. This has been drawn on to foster grassroots links with, and on behalf of, many marginalized socio-economic groups. Within Islam, meanwhile, the concept of shura emphasizes how decision-making processes should be consultative in government, business, and other activities (Zafar and Lewis 2009: 261–2). Islamic scholars remain divided though over whether shura is necessary or obligatory and whether the sort of consultation prescribed involves top-down or bottom-up processes compatible with democracy (Esposito and Voll 1996; Bayat 2007; Khan 2010). Depending on which position prevails, then, moral approaches to accountability can either promote social conservatism associated with established hierarchies or radical change associated with new philosophical movements or ethical revelations. Even the latter, though, is likely to lead ultimately to the entrenchment of a new hierarchy, as a different set of moral guardians emerges. The key point is that these organizations promote powerful ideological positions which are significant in the politics of accountability. Another significant moral ideology of accountability emanates from classical republicanism, which has important distinctions from liberal and democratic ideas on the locus of political authority. In this perspective, authority flows to actors who exhibit their personal dedication and prowess in pursuit of the public good. Importantly, the public good, like scriptural truths, is not open to wide political contestation to define. It is the preserve of largely self-reproducing elites, albeit inculcated into a culture of civic virtue (see Plato 1993: 115–32). There are some points of convergence between classical liberalism and classical republicanism over emphasis on freedom from arbitrary rule and the utility of rule of law, separation of powers, and constitutionally embedded basic rights (Petit 1997). However, republicanism attaches an importance to active and virtuous citizenship not central to liberalism. It is through active citizenship— which can take a variety of non-democratic forms of political participation— that civic virtue is expressed and the corruptibility of public officials checked.9 9 O’Donnell (2003) and Kenney (2003) both distinguish between liberal, democratic, and republican traditions in relationship to modern accountability institutions. We differ in emphasizing liberalism,

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An interesting illustration of how elements of classical republicanism are harnessed to contemporary ideological positions on accountability is provided by the ruling People’s Action Party (PAP) in Singapore. It goes so far as to contend that the moral character and integrity of the elite is the primary check against abuses of public office and corruption (see Chapter 3).

I DEO LO GI C AL COA L IT IO NS Rarely, if ever, does any single ideological rationale for accountability enjoy absolute political ascendance within a coalition. Thus the challenge for political scientists is to understand the coalitions of interest producing these rationales. Obvious abuses of power bring together coalitions of actors concerned with a variety of political values. The rhetoric of accountability can employ ideas of liberty, justice, fairness, and rightful conduct that, when employed abstractly and not clearly defined, can appeal to a wide range of constituencies. However, the utility of distinguishing analytically between different ideologies of accountability within reformist coalitions is that it reveals something about: the nature of the coalitions of interests that are dominant; the social forces seeking to advance those interests; and the potential for underlying tensions within coalitions to be contained or not over time. Crucially, the attraction of accountability ideologies for reform coalitions can only be understood in the context of the wider political economy. Institutional frameworks for governance provide a focus for struggles over how social and economic power is politically distributed, accountability mechanisms periodically becoming an arena of such conflict. This is why, for us, which ideological notion of accountability prevails—that is, whose political authority is sanctioned—matters greatly for the political regime. A political economy approach offers an understanding of accountability politics linking ideological contestation to structural inequalities underlying the social order. As Chapter 2 explains, the contemporary Southeast Asian context within which varying accountability rationales are being promoted and contested is characterized by conflicts associated with attempts to consolidate or transform

democracy, and republicanism as ideologies informing, and being harnessed to, political struggles over accountability rather than as sets of prescriptions for the institutional design of political regimes. We consider that the core distinction between these ideologies centres on who has authority as a result of accountability. Furthermore, for us, republicanism is just one of a range of moral ideologies. Finally, and as a consequence, we contend that authoritarian rulers are not intrinsically hostile to all forms of accountability.

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particular variants of capitalism. The emergence of capitalist systems across much of Southeast Asia from the 1960s and their spread to Indo-China from the late 1980s instigated large-scale transformations reconfiguring political and civil societies. Our study locates struggles over accountability within historically specific social and economic structures and dynamic processes of development. These have different effects on the interests of various existing societal groups and can also lead to the emergence of powerful new groups, such as various types of bourgeoisies. In defending and promoting their interests, societal actors emphasize points of ideological convergence as a basis of forging political coalitions. Indeed, the very point of ideology is to portray a particular set of interests as beneficial for the general interest and thus to marshal support. Historically, the rise of new social forces has been accompanied by a new ideological ascendance. Liberalism, for example, was associated with the emergence of the bourgeoisie and middle classes during the industrial revolution (Moore 1993); and democracy with the rise of organized labour in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (Eley 2002). This prompted speculation that a growing middle class in an increasingly affluent Southeast Asia will inevitably demand liberal and/or democratic forms of accountability (Vatikiotis 1996; Anek 1997). Yet, as Bellin’s (2000: 179) concept of ‘contingent democrats’ elegantly highlights, different trajectories of capitalist development influence the political potential for relationships between social forces in pursuing their respective interests. Consequently, there is no deterministic relationship between particular social forces and ideologies. The ideological persuasion of any group of actors is constrained not only by their role and relationship in the productive process but also by their relationships to other social groups. It is this latter aspect that introduces contingency into the prospects of coalitions forming that will demand democracy or democratic accountability. Bellin describes two particularly important features of relationship between social groups: dependence and fear. Where capitalist classes depend on public bureaucracies for contracts or protection they are unlikely to challenge authoritarian rule; where they fear the power of organized labour they are unlikely to ally with workers for democracy (Bellin 2002: 152–3). In Southeast Asia, during the Cold War military regimes used the communist threat as justification for dismantling organized labour and creating authoritarian regimes. Subsequently, middle class pro-democracy activism has remained highly fragmented. Meanwhile, business-state relations have taken a variety of directions, prompting differing degrees of elite fracture across Southeast Asia. All of this generates a mix of opportunities and motivations for accountability reforms, resulting in coalitions of contrasting ideological complexions

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across the region. Thus, as the chapters to follow demonstrate, the relative balance of social forces aligned with differing ideological rationales for accountability is not uniform. Across our case studies, however, the category of moral accountability presents as a particularly important one in both facilitating and constraining accountability coalitions. Moral ideologies can bridge the differences between conservatives, liberals, and democrats, binding different social groups into an effective coalition. Moral ideologies are especially flexible because they are more likely to traverse different social classes in an unequal social and political order. In prescribing no particular institutional arrangements in resolving abuses of power, they can bridge the differences between liberals and democrats. In the process, the risk for democrats and liberals is a watering down of their agendas, not least because authoritarian elites and economic oligarchs have much to gain by exploiting moral ideologies to contain reform. Given the general absence of strong independent labour organizations in Southeast Asia, they often compete effectively with democratic ideologies for the allegiances of the poor. This further enhances their appeal to elites supportive of some form of accountability but apprehensive about broader political change. Of course, accountability coalitions are at one level always fluid and the boundaries between all three categories porous. This is especially so where abuses of state power are flagrantly in violation of all three ideological perspectives. In these situations points of political and ideological intersection are actively emphasized to cultivate and maintain a coalition. Moreover, for some activists, the demarcations between ideologies are vague, unclear, or not comprehended at all. However, this can quickly change, particularly when movements go beyond mobilization aimed at replacing or disciplining individual officials or passing specific reform acts that serve as gestures of accountability. More difficult is sustaining coalitions incorporating different ideologies when broader strategies for accountability reform have to be confronted. This is when contrasting political regime implications of different ideologies are cast into sharp relief. Consequently, ideological positions can polarize with coalitions subject to strain and even collapse. In a number of the case studies discussed in subsequent chapters, this took the form of liberal and democratic voices being marginalized while moral ideologues enjoyed political ascendancy by virtue of their greater favour with political elites.

AC C O UN TAB I LI T Y D E BAT E S Within existing debates over accountability much attention has been devoted to the establishment of formal definitions and categories. Our intervention in

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this debate is not concerned with arbitrating on these disputes but to understand how political actors are employing the term—with what purpose and to what effect. Do innovative accountability institutions reflect new constraints on power within Southeast Asia imposed by social forces? If so, what is the nature and intent of these forces? Are they indicative of the growing influence of democratizing forces or related to new defensive strategies by existing elites? These questions drive our re-examination of Mulgan’s concern over how broadly the term is being applied. Alongside the need to know what type of accountability is enshrined in a particular reform proposal we also need criteria to determine whether it is accountability at all. Some analysts insist that accountability cannot even exist without enforceable sanctions, or the prospect thereof, on those exercising power. Others underline the indirect political effects of institutions encouraging or enforcing answerability from authorities. These distinctions are important for understanding what, if any, changes to power relations may result from new institutions and ideas of accountability. This is not just an academic question of conceptual clarity. It is also a question of political practice: whether accountability is a component of the rhetoric and tactics of political struggle. If elites and other political and social actors are increasingly using ideas about accountability to justify and mobilize support for a range of institutional reforms and innovations this is significant regardless of whether any particular definition of accountability is accommodated. No less within an authoritarian regime as in a democratic one, the appeal and functional utility of accountability to different groups of actors warrants investigation into which notion of accountability is ascendant and what implications this carries for who exercises political authority and how. Mulgan (2003) is among the most emphatic and uncompromising on the sanctions issue. He grounds his position in the assumption that citizens in a democracy must have real ultimate power, as principals, to discipline agents meant to be acting on their collective behalf. Thus, for Mulgan (2003) agents must not only be called to account but also held to account. Accountability is incomplete without rectification through the account-holder’s right to impose remedies and sanctions. Viewed in this way, accountability is a different power relation from political responsiveness and political participation, both of which can occur at the discretion of elites on terms of their own choosing. Similarly, Mainwaring (2003: 7) limits political accountability to ‘relationships that formally give some actor the authority of oversight and/ or sanctions relative to public officials’. This excludes monitoring of public authorities taking place outside institutionalized frameworks involving agents formally charged with responsibility. Kenney (2003: 63) agrees that accountability without sanctions is a diminished form of accountability.

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By contrast, for Bovens (2007: 450), the essence of accountability is ‘the obligation to explain and justify conduct’ rather than to discipline behaviour through threat of sanctions. He defines accountability as ‘a relationship between an actor and a forum, in which the actor has an obligation to explain and justify his or her conduct, the forum can pose questions and pass judgement, and the actor may face consequences’. For Bovens (2007: 450), the obligation can be formal or informal, leaving open a wide range of institutional possibilities—inside and outside the state—through which this obligation can be given effect. In a similar vein, Peruzzotti and Smulovitz (2006b: 5) contend that accountability ‘refers to the ability to ensure that public officials are answerable for their behaviour—forced to justify and inform citizenry about their decisions and possibly eventually be sanctioned for them’.10 They have highlighted the contribution of creative forms of social accountability in embryonic democracies in Latin America towards such ability. It is the role of social activism ‘turning on the alarm’ to activate formal accountability that is emphasized here. Thus, while Peruzzotti and Smulovitz (2006b: 16) concede that social mechanisms may sometimes lack mandatory effects, they underline that they can still have ‘material consequences’.11 On closer inspection, then, at least some differences in this debate centre not so much on whether sanctions are intrinsic to accountability as by what means sanctions are activated, where authority rests for their enactment, and how protracted a process is countenanced. There have also been attempts to situate the issue of sanctions alongside other essential elements in a complex of power relations contributing to accountability. Fox (2007: 15), for example, asserts that: ‘At the broadest level, accountability refers to the process of holding actors responsible for their actions’ (see also Fox and Brown 1998). He invokes Schedler’s (1999: 14) idea that accountability incorporates three different ways of preventing and redressing the abuse of power, of which subjecting power-holders to the threat of sanctions is but one. The others involve obliging power-holders to be transparent in the ways they exercise power and forcing them to justify their acts. Similarly, Goetz and Jenkins (2005: 8) characterize accountability as a particular form of power relationship involving ‘the capacity to demand someone engage in reason-giving to justify her behaviour, and/or the capacity to impose a penalty for poor performance’. For them, therefore, accountability

10

This is a position linked to Schedler (1999). Other authors adopting a broad definition of accountability include Day and Klein (1987); Diamond, Plattner, and Schedler (1999); Fox and Brown (1998); Moncreiffe (1998); and Paul (1992). 11

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is not synonymous with ‘responsiveness’, however nor is the ability to impose sanctions the definitive feature of accountability but one important element (Goetz and Jenkins 2005: 12). Clearly, some concepts of accountability emphasize responsiveness, answerability, and explanation by power-holders rather than the capacity for immediately and legally enforceable sanctions. Such broad definitions of accountability encompass new modes of citizen engagement and new types of state agency scrutinizing governance. It is precisely the expansion of such arrangements across the democratic–authoritarian political regime divide that our analysis is especially concerned to understand. Consequently, we work with a weaker definition of accountability than what is acceptable to Mulgan, for example. For us, formal and informal processes of accountability are acceptable, so long as some form of sanction over power holders is possible. Sanctions could be strong and formal, such as involving criminal liability, or they may be weak and informal, involving officials in some public embarrassment carrying a political cost. Some form of power must be exerted over office holders for there to be any assertion of authority through the accountability relationship. This definition allows us to investigate whether new forms of accountability facilitate the enhancement of the political authority of citizens or, conversely, consolidate the exclusive authority of elites. It also renders the adaption and harnessing of accountability within authoritarian regimes no less important a political phenomenon than in established or new democracies. A further set of debates in the accountability literature focuses on the relative advantages and disadvantages of horizontal and vertical accountability. Horizontal accountability is generally associated with intrastate institutions that act to check power abuses by other public agencies and branches of government. By contrast, vertical accountability is seen to involve institutions through which citizens and civil society actors exert pressure on public officials. Precisely how horizontal and vertical accountability are distinguished is not a matter of universal agreement. The key point we inject into the debate is that it is not the type of accountability institution that principally matters to political regime directions, but who is harnessing these institutions and for what purpose. According to O’Donnell (1999: 39), horizontal accountability involves the existence of ‘state agencies that are authorized and willing to oversee, control, redress and/or sanction unlawful actions of other state agencies’. Kenney (2003: 67) broadly concurs but sees O’Donnell’s definition as too restrictive in focusing only on illegal behaviour and so submits instead that ‘horizontal accountability involves state actors and agencies willing and able to sanction other state actors and agencies for their acts and omissions, in accordance with

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the law and the constitution’. Goetz and Jenkins (2005: 11–12) also restrict the notion of horizontal accountability to intrastate relationships, ‘when one state actor has the formal authority to demand or impose penalties on another’. The principal proposition is that a network of independent state agencies preserves separation of powers between the executive and the state and is therefore a crucial supplement to vertical accountability—affected principally through elections—for emerging democracies (O’Donnell 1998; see also Schedler, Diamond, and Plattner 1999). In sharp contrast with these authors, Schmitter (1999: 60) submits a more inclusive definition of horizontal accountability, comprising a raft of non-state actors such as media organizations, party secretaries, trade union confederations, business peak associations, lawyers’ guilds, mass social movements— even large capitalist firms. It is precisely the activities of these actors that O’Donnell and others locate within vertical accountability incorporating the oversight and sanctions exercised by voters, the press, and civil society organizations (CSOs) including some kinds of NGOs. For Schmitter (1999: 59), though, vertical accountability is preserved for the formal political accountability between electors and their representatives which involves judgement by the former on the latter’s direct and indirect exercise of state power, including the performance of horizontal accountability agencies. Other analysts emphasize the interrelationship between horizontal and vertical accountability rather than differences between them. This is what Smulovitz and Peruzzotti (2003: 313) do in arguing that ‘indirect activation of horizontal mechanisms is possible because claimants organize and mobilize, but also because they reach the media or the media reaches them’. Fox (2007: 12) goes further in asserting that ‘the most relevant cleavage is not between an ostensibly dichotomous state and society’ but, instead, resides in ‘conflicts between contending forces embedded in both state and society. It matters when the forces for and against public accountability can be found on both sides of the state-society divide’. The critical question for Fox (2007: 34), then, is how these conflicts play out and what determines whether, in the horizontal and vertical dimensions of accountability, it is the path of ‘mutual empowerment’ or a ‘low accountability’ trap that results? Importantly, Fox steers analytical attention to the political coalitions within and across state and civil society and the competing reform agendas being advanced in the process. This, in our view, brings us closer to the core question of where political authority is located and why? The privileging of this question equips us to examine and compare complex variations unfolding in state-society accountability initiatives across established liberal democracies, emerging democracies, and authoritarian regimes to best understand their regime implications.

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The above theoretical debates have been especially significant in the light of new modes of accountability over the last two decades, prominently featuring social accountability. Emerging social accountability has been variously conceptualized in relation to the vertical/horizontal accountability distinction. For Peruzzotti and Smulovitz (2006b: 10), social accountability gives expression to: a nonelectoral yet vertical mechanism of control of political authorities that rests on the actions of an array of citizens; associations and movements and the media . . . [it] operates neither through the electoral aggregation of votes nor as part of an intrastate system of checks and balances.

According to O’Donnell (1998), though, drafting citizens onto state committees and involving NGOs in the work of state inspectorates blurs the conceptual distinction between horizontal (intrastate) and vertical (state-citizen) accountability. By contrast, Bovens (2007: 460) interprets societal accountability as horizontal because here the relationship involves giving account to various stakeholders ‘on a voluntary basis with no intervention on the part of a principal. The obligation felt by agencies to account for themselves to the general public is usually moral in nature (although in some cases there may be formal requirements as well in their charters)’. Goetz and Jenkins (2001: 364) coin the term ‘diagonal accountability’ to describe waves of protest meant to harness the power of horizontal accountability institutions, for example through public hearings or parallel budgeting exercises conducted by NGOs. For us, the critical question to ask about increasing ambiguity surrounding the distinction between horizontal state-based and vertical society-based modes of accountability is whose political authority is being advanced and how? What is at stake here is which social groups are able to exercise power through state institutions. This is not fundamentally about the design of accountability institutions but the politics shaping them. Understanding this requires not just an examination of the divisions and alliances within and across both the state and civil society over accountability, as Fox (2007: 12) rightly urges. It also requires consideration of how ideologies of accountability are harnessed to the process of forging, sustaining, and undermining accountability coalitions.

T HEO RET I C AL P RO P O S IT IO NS This book is intended to make original intellectual contributions through the development of a new conceptual framework for analysing accountability

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reform and by the prosecution of new arguments theorizing the political dynamics shaping the forms and impacts of accountability reform. The following five propositions are generated from this framework. First, moral ideologies constitute a distinct category from liberal and democratic ideologies of accountability. The conceptual framework’s originality lies mainly in the introduction and elaboration of moral ideologies of accountability alongside the more widely understood notions of liberal and democratic ideologies. In moral ideologies individuals are accountable for their conduct to guardians of a received moral code of some kind. While liberals and democrats may share concerns for moral behaviour, they regard this as politically significant only in so far as this threatens individual liberties, market efficiency, or representative government. Consequently, liberalism and democracy are better at separating public and private spheres of behaviour. For liberals and democrats indiscretions in private life are irrelevant unless they are linked to abuses of public power. Second, non-democratic ideologies of accountability have significant appeal and utility for a range of political actors. Liberal and moral accountability ideologies can be compatible both with authoritarianism and the consolidation of oligarchic rule within a democratic regime. Where liberal and moral ideologies of accountability dominate in Southeast Asia, they often privilege non-confrontational state-society partnerships. One tactic for doing this is to draw social activists into technical and administrative processes limiting political reform possibilities, marginalizing or replacing the independent political deliberation so crucial to the democratic political authority of citizens. This distracts from efforts to build stronger and more cohesive grassroots constituencies that can act as the fundamental loci of democratic authority. Even social accountability initiatives have been engendered with moral or liberal ideologies, as the case studies of Cambodia and the Philippines show. Third, only democrats seek to enshrine the political authority of citizens as the principal means of arresting the problem of abuses of state power. Where democratic ideologies are influential within reforming accountability coalitions, a wider range of interests and structures are potentially subjected to scrutiny and accountability than either liberal or moral ideologies advocate. The influence of democratic ideologies often peaks during phases of mass mobilization against state power abuses when more citizens have opportunities to articulate political demands emerging from broad civil society deliberation. Analytically, it is paramount to investigate whether or not this is the case to establish the political regime implications and potentialities of accountability reforms and movements. The importance of the relative influence of different ideologies within accountability coalitions, and whether that can be transformed over time, is especially pertinent to accountability’s democratic

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potential. It is important to note that not all democrats are equally interested in accountability. In particular, populist versions of democracy give priority to assertions of the popular will as represented by a responsive charismatic leader. Such leaders are characteristically given a large degree of discretion as to how this is achieved between elections. This tends to undermine nonelectoral ideas and mechanisms of accountability. Fourth, recourse to any particular rhetoric of accountability is not necessarily indicative of ideological conviction. Indeed, as is borne out in many of this book’s chapters, there are often tactical political reasons why some actors adopt such rhetoric. Most striking is the tendency of elites to harness elements of different ideological rationales of accountability to intra-elite power struggles. Moral ideologies can be particularly useful to elites attempting to divert public pressure for an address of structural biases to social or political power as part of accountability reform agendas. Yet this only further underlines the importance of ideology to the conduct and outcomes of struggles over accountability reform. Fifth, crucially, though, the moral emphasis on personal integrity can lay the basis for encompassing coalitions with liberals and democrats. The formation of coalitions around accountability reform, including the potential for strategic alliances among liberals and democrats, is often facilitated by the third category of moral ideological rationales for accountability. The moral rhetoric against wrongdoers in public office is easily understood as a common sense argument, bypassing potentially fractious debate over appropriate political institutions. In fact, ruling elites may ally with powerful and well-organized civil society institutions such as religious bodies and media organizations to strategically embrace moral accountability ideologies in order to co-opt or marginalize more democratic agendas. This is often successful precisely because the influence of moral ideologies transcends social class to a far greater extent than either liberal or democratic ideologies. The insights of this framework lay the basis for novel arguments about the political significance of accountability reform movements, as follows. Our foundational argument is that the relative influence of these different ideologies fundamentally matters not only to the prospects of achieving accountability reforms, but also to how accountability institutions operate—whose interests are advanced, protected, or attacked. Moreover, because of the different interests, accountability coalitions tend to be dynamic and the relationships between the varying elements of these coalitions variable over time. This book is organized around a series of strategically selected case studies of attempted or enacted accountability reforms. These case studies encompass initiatives in vertical, horizontal, and diagonal (social) accountability and incorporate authoritarian and post-authoritarian regimes of differing

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character. This enables us to test the varying contexts and conditions associated with the advocacy of, and opposition to, democratic, liberal, and moral ideologies of accountability. Thus, Chapter 2 explains the dynamic political economy context within which coalitions for and against particular accountability ideologies emerge. Towards identifying the main characteristics of such contexts, we draw out the political regime significance of historical legacies and contemporary capitalist and market relationships. While capitalist development has powerfully shaped the material interests of societal groups, the ideological expression of interests is constrained for some groups by the legacy of violent Cold War suppression of civil society. As Chapter 2 shows, the resultant highly fragmented or underdeveloped nature of civil society has implications for the types of political coalitions that can form. In Chapter 3, a comparison of human rights accountability in the two authoritarian regimes of Malaysia and Singapore indicates the significance of political economy factors for the possibility of reform. In Singapore a cohesive elite has kept liberal and democratic human rights accountability firmly off the agenda. By contrast, in Malaysia elite fractures have created conditions in which a coalition of moral, liberal, and democratic accountability ideologies have enforced concessions. Since the 1990s, authoritarian regimes in Cambodia and Vietnam have faced new tensions arising from the embrace of market relationships and the decline in the appeal of socialist ideology. Chapter 4 shows how in both countries the ruling parties have used administrative and political decentralization as a means to promote primarily moral ideologies of accountability, which serve as a prop to their continued rule. In Chapter 5 we turn our attention to social accountability mechanisms promoted by international aid agencies as part of their governance reform programmes. This involves a range of social activist mechanisms through which officials are rendered answerable to the public. In both democratic Philippines and authoritarian Cambodia liberal accountability approaches favoured by international agencies have tended to link with moral ideologies rather than specifically democratic ones. The outcome has privileged non-confrontational state-society partnerships, drawing activists away from democratic deliberation and into technical and administrative processes, limiting the prospects for democratic reform. Chapter 6 examines state-based anticorruption agencies in Indonesia, the Philippines, and Thailand. In these post-authoritarian societies accountability struggles have frequently taken the form of public contestation involving both state and civil society actors. Coalitions that have formed in support of horizontal accountability institutions illustrate both opportunist and ideological

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reform motivations. In particular, explanations rooted in the nature of civil society and its organizational capacities explain the varying dynamics of contestation between populists of differing complexions and groups promoting more substantive democratic transformation. This explains why oligarchic power is challenged by some accountability movements and yet endures in others. Our concluding chapter draws out the implications of accountability ideologies variously adopted by democratic and nondemocratic forces alike in Southeast Asia. Although ideas about accountability have been influential in recent episodes of contestation in Southeast Asia, they have rarely taken a democratic form. Instead, manipulation of moral ideologies in particular has served a political containment strategy by elites over accountability reform movements. New accountability institutions have been created and some prominent individuals abusing power have been convicted. However, redistributions of political authority towards non-elite groups remain elusive. Indeed, the tactic by elites of combating populist challenges by invoking liberal or, more commonly, moral forms and ideologies of accountability has been widespread and mostly successful elsewhere in Southeast Asia. A notable partial exception is in Thailand where, in the context of intra-elite struggles, populism has been used to mobilize mass movements that have subsequently proved more difficult to control. These movements became vehicles for broader deliberation and now incorporate radical groups pursuing more fundamental political transformation.

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2 Accountability Coalitions in the Southeast Asian Context I N T RO DUCT IO N Increased and diverse forms of accountability reform and rhetoric around the world in recent decades have occurred against the backdrop of the end of the Cold War and the consolidation and extension of economic globalization. Such profound geopolitical and international political economy dynamics have created new opportunities and motivations for different social forces to attempt to reshape governance institutions. This includes attempts to supplant, consolidate, and/or refashion elite economic and political control. Yet precisely which reform pressures emerge or prevail—including on accountability—is heavily influenced by the political coalition possibilities and dynamics linked to specific national histories and power relations. At one level, tremendous diversity in the social, political, and economic histories of different Southeast Asian countries renders questionable broad generalizations about the context of regional struggles over governance institutions in general and accountability reforms in particular. The region comprises: former colonized and non-colonized countries; countries where authoritarian regimes have taken military and civilian form, and where communist and non-communist parties have controlled state power; countries where new democracies have replaced authoritarian rule; countries where historical links between contemporary oligarchs and traditional rural landowning elites is seamless, while elsewhere new bourgeoisies or state capitalists have transformed elite structures; and the ethnic mix and importance of this to the way that struggles over political and economic resources are mediated across Southeast Asia also varies considerably (Robison 2012). Nevertheless, at another level, there are important themes and tendencies that can be discerned which shape potentialities for governance reform coalitions. In particular, none of the different historical experiences in Southeast

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Asia has been conducive to the emergence or survival of sizeable independent and cohesive civil societies. Social and political forces were suppressed under both left and right wing governments during the Cold War. Organized labour movements, especially those linked to reformist political parties, were prime targets. Neither the end of the Cold War nor even the overthrow of authoritarian regimes has dramatically changed this. Globalized capitalist production systems towards the end of the twentieth century were also enough of a challenge for powerful trade union movements in established democracies, let alone for fledgling movements elsewhere (Deyo 2006; Hutchison 2012). Meanwhile, middle and business classes in Southeast Asia often emerged under conditions fostering their direct or indirect dependence on the state for contracts, employment, or access to other resources. The net effect has been civil societies in Southeast Asia marked by much weaker independent labour movements and, consequently, much more atomization and fragmentation compared to civil societies historically associated with democratization in Western Europe (Luebbert 1991; Eley 2002). The social foundations for democracy are thus different in Southeast Asia, with the poor, in particular, generally lacking independent mass organizational bases through which they can press their claims. In the post-Cold War period, this political vacuum has been increasingly filled in many post-authoritarian societies by middle-class led non-governmental organizations (NGOs), often with funding support from multilateral aid agencies. Against the background of close state-business relations of varying complexions in much of the region, social forces with a perceived interest in either political or economic liberalism are also far from ascendant. Indeed, much of the international aid and development money directed to the region in the post-Cold War period is meant to help transform this very state of affairs (Carroll 2010; Harriss 2002). As capitalist market development continues to advance in Southeast Asia, then, contests over what sorts of governance institutions should prevail are affected by the nature and extent of the organizational bases open to competing social and political forces. In contexts of close state-business relations, where the poor is disorganized and much of the middle class dependent on the state, arguably the odds are especially stacked against powerful movements for democratic or even liberal accountability. Indeed, it is precisely the low risk of this happening that may help explain why many elites across the region have embraced accountability reform agendas. Meanwhile, these same social foundations of contemporary capitalism in Southeast Asia favour moral ideologies of accountability exerting a pervasive influence. Notwithstanding this broad context of struggles over accountability reform, capitalism is inherently dynamic and conflict-ridden and important variations also exist in exactly how state-business relations are organized in Southeast

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Asia. Differences in the nature and extent of spaces for political opposition vary too (Jayasuriya and Rodan 2007; Aspinall and Weiss 2012). The opportunities and strategies for how accountability reforms may be incorporated into democratic movements differ accordingly. Economic crises are especially important to this, posing challenges for the reproduction of existing power relations and strengthening the case for adapting policies and institutions. These challenges have been playing out differently across the region, with some elites more effective than others in devising new means for sustaining their power. The absence of powerful independent mass organizations through which democratic agendas are advanced has meant that even where authoritarian rule has collapsed, elite rule has survived and social democracy in particular has been a negligible force. Oligarchic rule in Indonesia, for example, has been effectively consolidated following the 1997–8 financial crisis and democratization. In some respects this mirrors the earlier achievements of oligarchs in the Philippines following the fall of Marcos. Mass uprisings there lacked the organizational capacity for sustained pressure to redistribute power, whereas oligarchs effectively adjusted to electoral politics by harnessing wealth and patronage (Winters 2011; Boudreau 2009b; Robison and Hadiz 2004). By contrast, in Thailand unresolved intra-elite fractures have included harnessing electoral politics and votes of the disorganized poor by Thaksin Shinawatra and his party political successors in a struggle over control of state power. Contradictions within Malaysia’s model of capitalism and attendant ethnic politics were also heightened by economic crisis, resulting in intra-elite tensions leading to Deputy Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim’s expulsion from the ruling coalition and emboldened social and political activism. Meanwhile, crises of state capital in Cambodia and Vietnam have also prompted elites to explore new institutional and ideological means for preserving their power in an expanding market economy. This has given rise to powerful state-party-business interests in both countries that have been effective in stifling the organization of either meaningful opposition political parties or independent civil society movements. The discussion to follow elaborates on and illustrates further the historical and structural contexts within which accountability coalitions form in Southeast Asia. The thematic argument is that both external and internal political economy dynamics have combined to make accountability reform and/or rhetoric an increasingly important dimension of Southeast Asian politics. However, while this includes opportunities for activists to prosecute democratic ideologies of accountability, the absence of strong independent mass organizations or cohesive social movements linking civil and political

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societies limits the influence of democratic forces within accountability coalitions. Similarly, the particular complexion of state-business relations and the dependence of middle classes on state patronage combine to undercut the attraction and influence of liberal accountability ideologies. Rather, the stunted and fragmented nature of civil societies has allowed a range of elite-sponsored moral ideologies of accountability to exert influence over reform directions.

C API TALI S M AN D E L IT E D O MINA NCE During the Cold War even the harshest and most autocratic political regimes could benefit from international aid and superpower support. Thus civil societies were suppressed—especially independently organized labour, civil liberties groups, and reformist social justice movements (Hewison and Rodan 2012). In less developed countries aligning with the West, even social democratic movements advancing political agendas of social redistribution—via land reform and state welfare—were often treated as indistinguishable from communism. This was despite social democracy’s inclusion in the political orthodoxy of advanced capitalist countries until the 1970s. Meanwhile, in communist countries the social redistribution agenda was divorced from democracy, invariably violently, to protect one-party rule. As it transpired, the demise of the Soviet Union and the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance left Western governments and agencies in a stronger position to subsequently dictate terms to former communist clients. However, where authoritarian regimes were weakened it didn’t simply follow that well organized and effective liberal democratic forces emerged. The legacy of decades of violence and suppression tended to result in highly atomized political oppositions and sometimes resort by elites to political mobilization through appeals to ethnic, religious, or other forms of identity. Consequently, following humanitarian disasters attendant upon efforts at democracy promotion in places such as Rwanda and the Balkans, an initial emphasis on democracy promotion by Western powers largely gave way by the mid-1990s to concern for good governance championing political pluralism linked to the functioning of markets (Gill 1998). In Southeast Asia, the diminished international support for, or tolerance of, authoritarian rule has given rise to a particular profile to the range of civil society organizations (CSOs) in Southeast Asia. CSOs are considered here to be organizations that act politically to further the interests ascribed to a social group. Such organizations may or may not be organically linked to groups

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purportedly represented. Whereas mass organizations have organic links with those represented, advocacy NGOs on the whole do not. Significantly, in Southeast Asia, independent labour organizations rarely recovered from Cold War suppression. This was in part a function of the scale of past repression directed at such organizations, and in some cases its continuity. It was also linked to the structural conditions of economic globalization and the strategic interventions of international aid donors, the latter exerting an inordinate influence over the ideological orientation of civil society movements. Consequently, in sharp contrast with the experience of earlier Western European democratization (Eley 2002), civil societies have been more fragmented and cross-class alliances between middle classes and the poor less evident in late industrializing and/or post-authoritarian societies (Jayasuriya and Rodan 2007). It is in this context that international aid agencies have encouraged the emergence of NGOs but these are almost uniformly vehicles for middle-class activism. Governance reforms to enhance transparency and accountability around issues such as corruption and service delivery have been points of intersection between neoliberal donors and liberal middle class activists. Such a direction is facilitated by the increasing professionalization of NGOs supported through donor funds and training. Increased access for NGO actors to transnational and domestic elite networks exerts an influence over their reform strategies. Meanwhile, advocacy roles have in many cases supplanted the representative functions of NGOs and the development of mass membership strategies to achieve reform (Edwards 2009; Hughes 2009; Gould and Ojanen 2005; Carroll 2010; Harriss 2002).

PRESSURES FOR NEOLIBERAL GOVERNANCE By the end of the Cold War, Southeast Asian economies were already deeply integrated into global markets and capitalist production systems. From the late 1980s, countries such as Vietnam and Cambodia began to head down the same path. Consequently, international pressures of a structural and ideational nature about governance institutions could be expected to assume a growing significance for the region. Nevertheless, Southeast Asian political regimes have not simply taken liberal directions. Understanding the effects of neoliberal globalization requires appreciation of how international pressures are mediated by regional and national social and political forces. The rise of neoliberal globalization in recent decades is manifestly a push for privatization and economic deregulation reflecting neoliberal ideology as

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described in chapter one. However, it has involved as much a political as an economic transformation, precipitating new forms of state and trans-state relationships. What issues can be contested, how, and by whom, has been affected, including the space for non-state political actors. According to Harvey (2005: 7), the neoliberal state imposes a narrowing of public policy priorities, principally facilitating profitable capital accumulation while diminishing the state’s role in social redistribution. This contrasts with the post-war era of embedded liberalism in advanced capitalist countries, where state intervention in pursuit of welfare and a ‘class compromise between capital and labour’ was standard (Harvey 2005: 10). In effect, social democracy and liberalism reached an accommodation in these decades, allowing an unprecedentedly high degree of social redistribution and regulation of capital. For Harvey (2005: 11), the neoliberal state is a political project intended to liberate capital from such social and political constraints. Importantly, by the early 1990s neoliberal theoreticians and ideologues had shifted away from market fundamentalism towards an increasing emphasis on the role of the state in facilitating the market. This led to growing attention to the kinds of institutions that would best serve capital (North 1994, 1995). Interpretations of this shift in emphasis include Jayasuriya’s (2005) notion of a transition from a ‘social state’ to a ‘regulatory state’, Cerny’s (1997) account of the ‘competition state’, and Gill’s (1998) notion of a ‘new constitutionalism’. These analyses capture how new governance institutions are both functionally and politically linked to neoliberal globalization. All observe that market-friendly governance has ruled out or diminished the redistribution of resources as a political goal, for example, through greater separation of public policy from the political process. Market-oriented values portray the public primarily as consumers of state services or as stakeholders in how state power is exercised (Jayasuriya 2005: 95–119). Attempts to advance the neoliberal state and its values have extended beyond the borders of advanced capitalist countries. This includes through global governance institutions such as the World Trade Organization and their impact on the policies and institutions of individual countries (Kahler and Lake 2003), conditionality and promotion of good governance models in aid practices on the part of both multilateral and bilateral agencies (Carroll 2010; Hout and Robison 2009; Harriss 2002), and state building practices as part of peacekeeping operations and, more recently, the war on terror (Klein 2007). A complex array of private and public organizations has participated in this process (Duffield 1998). The publication by the World Bank, a key actor promoting the good governance agenda internationally, of its World Development Report 1997: The State in a Changing World, represented a turning point in neoliberal reform

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strategies. As Gill (1998: 30) notes, this report was emblematic of increasing focus on the institutional preconditions for flourishing market systems— both in established capitalist economies and in economies emerging wholly or partially from various kinds of socialist planning. Gill (1998: 31–2) saw this report as ‘preparing the ground for liberal ideas and institutions to take deeper root in the former eastern bloc and parts of the Third World’. Yet this was not an uncontested phenomenon. Moreover, the contemporaneous end of the Cold War significantly influenced the nature and extent of contestation.

SO C I AL F O UN DAT I O N S O F G OV E R NA NCE IN CONTEMPORARY SOUTHEAST ASIA In Southeast Asia, complex historically specific local interests and forces would mediate the impact of international policies. Thus, while authoritarian regimes would fall in Indonesia, the Philippines, and Thailand between the mid-1980s and the early 1990s, there has also been a remarkable persistence in the acute concentration of elite control over economic and political power across the region. The legacies of earlier decimations of civil societies are among the reasons for this, as will be elaborated on later in this chapter. To be sure, there are important differences to how politics operates in Asia’s new democracies and the assorted authoritarian regimes in the region. However, in seeking to understand differential opportunities across the region to advance one or other rationale for governance reforms in general or accountability reforms in particular, let us begin by examining variations in the social and political organization of capitalism across the region. Capitalist development and its attendant crises have posed differing challenges for political and economic elites in Southeast Asia. Thus, in some cases serious intra-elite friction has surfaced; in other cases elite cohesion has been maintained. Either way this has implications for the sorts of alliances and opportunities open to different advocates or opponents of accountability reform. Indeed, Singapore powerfully illustrates how a wholehearted embrace of global capitalism does not inexorably translate into a convergence around either liberal or democratic governance institutions. It is a case of outstanding elite cohesion even in the face of periodic global economic crises. However, such cohesion and the durability of authoritarian rule in Singapore is a function of a particular form of state capitalism. The roots of this state capitalism lie in conflict between contending factions of the ruling People’s Action Party (PAP) that came to power at the 1959 elections for self-government. During the 1950s, independent student,

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cultural, ethnic, and trade union organizations were active, often in defiance of colonial authorities trying to moderate the nature and extent of political mobilization. Indeed, British concerns about the potential for communism or socialism through the ballot contributed to the alliance between these largely Chinese-language educated popular forces and the English-educated middle class nationalists led by Lee Kuan Yew that formed the PAP in 1954. The former provided the requisite mass organizational bases for effective electoral politics otherwise unavailable to Lee and his colleagues, while the latter offered the cover for leftists of respectability and political moderation in British eyes (Josey 1974). However, tensions inherent to this marriage of convenience imploded not long after the PAP came to office. Consequently, in July 1961 a breakaway faction formed a new political party, the Barisan Sosialis (Socialist Front) (BS), stripping the PAP of the vast grassroots organizational structures. In the short term, the PAP government set about harassing and intimidating political opponents and critics to undermine the social and organizational bases in civil society of competing political groups—especially organized labour (Rodan 1989; Deyo 1981). PAP leaders realized, though, that they also needed to develop the party’s own power base and towards this end a merger of state and party reshaping the political economy of Singapore was affected. This entailed not just a powerful new class of politico-bureaucrats, but also a form of state capitalism that rendered many Singaporeans directly or indirectly dependent on the state for economic and social resources, including housing, employment, business contracts, and access to personal savings. This structural relationship fostered vulnerability to political co-option and intimidation and further limited the possibility of alternative social and economic bases from which challenges to the PAP could be effectively mounted. As Singapore’s economy progressed, state capitalism flourished as vast sums of capital generated by government-linked companies (GLCs) bolstered the economic and political power of the PAP state (Rodan 2004a; Low 1998). Importantly, the emergence of this state capitalist class not only cultivated a strong nexus of material and ideological interests between state bureaucrats and political leaders. It also contained and circumscribed the domestic bourgeoisie’s development as a matter of political strategy, given suspected links in the early 1960s between elements of this class and oppositionists (Rodan 1989: 98). As a result, the domestic bourgeoisie’s economic opportunities have been heavily conditioned by, and dependent on, state capitalism—most recently through offshore investment strategies by GLCs (Rodan 2006). The political inclinations and capacities of the middle class have been no less influenced by the structural relationships embodied in Singapore’s state

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capitalism. Much of that class is either employed within the state in one or another of the government departments, statutory bodies, or GLCs, or indirectly derives its livelihood from servicing state capitalism through the provision of professional, legal, commercial, or other services. Moreover, this structural relationship to the state brings with it systematic exposure to an institutionalized ideology that champions the role of technocratic political elites at the expense of ideas of representation and citizenship rights. For those exercising power or enjoying some status as a result of state capitalism, this ideology can be seductive. Therefore, the PAP state capitalist model has thus far succeeded in generating the social foundations for the consolidation of the existing elite’s own reproduction. Periodic capitalist economic crises in 1986–7, 1997–8, and 2009 have precipitated reviews and re-evaluations of government policies and strategies, but these have resulted in refinements to, and consolidation of, the state capitalist model. This is not to claim that the model is completely devoid of tensions. Rising material inequalities, for instance, appear to be laying the basis for a growing public scepticism towards ideological pronouncements about ‘meritocracy’.1 However, organized civil society avenues through which to progress such concerns are not only constrained, but the absence of serious intra-elite frictions further limits opportunities to open up potential political alliances towards pressuring the PAP government for liberal or democratic governance reform. In contrast, capitalism in authoritarian Malaysia has involved the active cultivation of an ethnic Malay domestic bourgeoisie. The creation of this class was integral to the New Economic Policy (NEP) introduced following racial riots in 1969 amidst concerns of a widening socio-economic gap between ethnic-Malays and others. In the particular integration of political and economic power that ensued, state patronage has been selectively dispensed to promote a coterie of politically trusted private entrepreneurs. The public bureaucracy therefore needed to be sensitive both to the political objectives of the NEP and the executive’s interpretation thereof.2 Moreover, factionalism within the leading coalition party, the United Malays National Organization (UMNO), pre-dated the NEP, but the NEP gave it a new structural base and dynamic (Khoo 2003: 16–22). Importantly, quite unlike the PAP in the

1 Prior to the 2011 election, for example, the contentious issue of ministerial salaries intensified as government critics questioned the performance and competence of various individual ministers. 2 The NEP was formally terminated under Mahathir when the National Development Plan, 1991– 2000, was promulgated. The latter retained aspects of the NEP’s two primary objectives of ‘poverty eradication irrespective of race’ and ‘restructuring to abolish the identification of race with economic function’ (Khoo 2003: 19).

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state-party merger in Singapore, UMNO retained importance as a site for struggles over state patronage despite a similar merger in Malaysia. During buoyant economic times, tensions between contending factions over patronage spoils are politically manageable, but during economic downturns intra-elite friction has tended to intensify (Khoo 2003: 22). This creates potential opportunities for civil society activists and political opponents of the ruling coalition in pursuit of governance reforms and political change. The expulsion from UMNO and subsequent imprisonment of the then Deputy Prime Minister, Anwar Ibrahim, in the wake of the 1997–8 Asian financial crisis dramatically illustrated this point. An economic crisis translated into a political crisis, which arguably continues to play out and creates opportunities for alliances among advocates of governance reform not open in Singapore. When the 1997–8 Asian crisis broke, criticisms and exposures of official corruption, nepotism, and financial incompetence through NGOs and independent media were functional for those within UMNO seeking to arrest Finance Minister Daim Zainuddin’s strategic influence over the dispensing of state patronage. Factional tensions were not just being played out across a range of statutory bodies, government departments, and economic regulatory agencies, but also over control of state-run media. The subsequent persecution of Anwar triggered the formation of the breakaway Parti Keadilan Nasional (PKR)—or National Justice Party—attracting ethnic Malay support and the broader Reformasi movement (Hilley 2001). Despite extensive public demonstrations and some opposition electoral gains in 1999, this movement appeared to have collapsed following infighting, including around religious and ethnic sensitivities aroused by debate over the ‘war on terror’, and substantial electoral gains by the Barisan Nasional (BN)— or National Front—at the 2004 polls (Welsh 2005). However, as social and economic inequalities continued to widen, working class elements among ethnic Indian and ethnic Chinese communities became disillusioned with the ability of the Malaysian Indian Congress (MIC) and the Malaysian Chinese Association (MCA) to represent their interests through the BN. Despite a police ban, 30,000 people responded to a call to the streets in late 2007 by the Hindu Rights Action Force (HINDRAF) (Maznah 2008: 455). Meanwhile, liberal and democratic social forces operating through various middle-class led urban-based NGOs cranked up governance reform demands. These centred on arresting corruption and other abuses of power and a raft of repressive legislations compromising or blunting rights to political expression, organization, and competition. In November 2007, around forty thousand assembled in central Kuala Lumpur to demand electoral reform, following revelations of previous vote rigging. Organized by Bersih (Clean)—or Gabungan Pilihanraya Bersih dan Adil (Coalition for Free and

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Fair Elections)—it involved cooperation between various human rights NGOs and opposition parties, marking a heightened level of cross-ethnic participation in collective action (Case 2010b: 106–9). Links between opposition parties and these NGOs deepened so that a wide range of the latter not only campaigned for members of the revived opposition Barisan Alternatif (BA)— or Alternative Front—coalition in 2008, but various leading activists ran as candidates for the first time (Weiss 2009: 754–56). Although the BN was returned to government in the 2008 general elections, it suffered a major voter backlash. For the first time it lost its two-thirds parliamentary majority needed for constitutional reforms and lost government in five states.3 Moreover, the Bersih campaign continued to hold large public rallies in defiance of public authorities, including in July 2011 and April 2012.4 Post-election responses by Prime Minister Najib Razak’s government included recasting the ideological appeal to non-Malays through the 1Malaysia campaign, the Economic Transformation Programme meant to improve public service performance and boost employment and business opportunities, and the Political Transformation Programme supposedly to usher in political liberalizations. However, there were no plans to dismantle the structures by which ethnicity and race privilege access to, and control over, key resources and institutions. In effect, the Malaysian government was searching for a reform formula preserving essential political economy relationships underpinning existing concentrations of economic and political power. In the post-socialist countries of Southeast Asia, the process of opening up to greater integration in regional and global markets has engendered a radical reorientation of elite strategies to retain power. The emerging political regimes in Vietnam and Cambodia have both developed strong links between dominant parties, state agencies, and business. This occurred in contexts characterized initially by large and impoverished rural populations heavily dependent upon subsistence agriculture, and comparatively tiny urban working and middle classes. In both countries the embrace of capitalist development has prompted rapid urbanization and the emergence of new middle classes, but this is a very recent phenomenon. The private sector in both countries has developed in the shadow of dominant parties that have maintained tight control over state agencies.

3 The five states were Penang, Selangor, Kelantan, Perak, and Kedah. However, in February 2009, defections controversially handed government back to BN in Perak. 4 Estimates of the protester turnouts varied wildly between police and organizers, the latter claiming as many as 50,000 for the 9 July 2011 rally and 300,000 for the demonstration on 28 April 2012 (see de Cruz 2011; Pathmawathy 2012; Netto 2013; Asia Sentinel 2012).

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Vietnam is one of only two countries in Southeast Asia retaining a single-party system.5 The Communist Party of Vietnam (CPV), established in 1930, was effective in unifying the Vietnamese population under its banner during the fight for independence from France and reunification over three decades from the 1940s to the 1970s. During this time, the combined efforts of the CPV and its French and American enemies succeeded in removing most sources of organized opposition to communist rule, and following victory over the US-supported regime in the South in 1975, the CPV was able to establish control over the entire country. However, after 1975, the CPV began to lose both its reputation for effective action and its legitimacy amongst the vast rural population, as the economy floundered following the imposition of a Western trade and aid embargo following the invasion of Cambodia in 1979, and policies for the collectivization of agriculture failed to provide economic growth (Kerkvliet 1995). In 1986, in part in response to prompts from its key backer, the Soviet Union, and partly in response to discontent at home, the CPV announced new policies of ‘renovation’ (in Vietnamese, doi moi) which began to roll back collectivization in favour of household production, and awarded farmers tradable use rights to land. In 1992, following the Soviet Union’s collapse, Vietnam passed a new constitution which permitted private businesses to operate, although still awarding a privileged position to state-owned enterprises (SOEs) (Government of Vietnam 2001: Art. 15, 16). This development prompted a proliferation of joint ventures between foreign and domestic business and SOEs, leading to the rise of a ‘state-business’ interest within the Vietnamese government, initially at provincial level but, as provincial cadres were promoted to national level positions, increasingly at national level also (Gainsborough 2003; Dixon 2004). Vietnam’s development in the post-reform era has been dramatic, with levels of growth averaging 7% per year in the decade to 2008 (Vandemoortele and Bird 2010). However, this has prompted the emergence of new inequalities, rampant corruption, and unrest over land issues, as farming land is requisitioned by the state to serve the needs of special economic zones and urban expansion (World Bank 2009b: vii). In the context of this social and economic upheaval, the CPV has used strategies of coercion and co-optation to maintain control over rural and urban populations. Vietnam has recorded an impressive performance on poverty reduction, compared to other post-socialist countries, with spending on social services improving somewhat from the mid-1990s on. It has been argued that this is significant for the CPV’s hold on

5

The other is the Lao People’s Democratic Republic, which is not covered by this volume.

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power, given the political sensitivity of widening inequality in a country whose government still claims to be navigating the road to socialism (Fritzen 2002). Transparency is also increasing in the country, particularly thanks to reforms that have promoted the role of the National Assembly as a more active supervisor and critic of government activities (Painter 2003). However, the scope for ordinary citizens to criticize the government, form associations, stage protests, and demand changes in policy remains very limited. Where middle class activism has become apparent, for example on issues of environmentalism or urban planning, activists tend to take care to use state-sponsored ideologies to underpin their arguments and tend to seek change through forging alliances with people of influence within government (Wells-Dang 2010). The media have been encouraged to take a more active role promoting debates over policies and exposing low-level corruption; however, exposés of high-level scandals continue to land journalists in jail (Gainsborough 2004). Meanwhile, outbreaks of rural unrest have been met with heavy-handed repression, particularly against minority groups and religious organizations (Human Rights Watch 2002, 2004), and increasingly tight control of the internet, as evidenced by the arrest and sentencing of three critical bloggers to long jail terms in 2012 (Crispin 2012). In Cambodia, disillusionment with socialism set in earlier, following the horrific violence and economic collapse of the Pol Pot regime that took power in Cambodia in 1975, and was ousted by the Vietnamese invasion in 1979. The Vietnamese invasion revealed a country where more than a million people had died of starvation, sickness, and violence and where political, economic, religious, and social institutions had been systematically dismantled. The rule of the Vietnamese-backed People’s Republic of Kampuchea in the 1980s continued to espouse socialist principles, but these were gradually abandoned over the course of the decade in recognition of the difficulties of enforcing new programmes of collectivization following such spectacular failures in the 1970s. Furthermore, the main preoccupation of the Phnom Penh regime in the 1980s was defending itself from the insurgency on the Thai border, which comprised remnant Khmer Rouge, royalist, and other armies that combined with Chinese, Thai, and Western support to resist the Vietnamese-backed government. As the Cold War wound down, Vietnamese, Chinese, and Thai motivations to remain embroiled in the Cambodian stalemate declined precipitously. Consequently, the warring parties to the conflict were placed under pressure by their respective backers to conclude a peace deal that would lead to a United Nations peacekeeping operation and elections (Lizee 2000: 63–74). This occurred in October 1991, and the UN-organized election took place in 1993, giving rise to a coalition government comprising the royalist party Front

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Uni National pour un Cambodge Indépendant, Neutre, Pacifique, et Coopératif (FUNCINPEC)—or National United Front for an Independent, Neutral, Peaceful, and Cooperative Cambodia—and the party of the 1980s regime, the Cambodian People’s Party (CPP). This opened the way to the end of the aid and trade embargo of the 1980s and heralded an influx of foreign aid and investment into the country. Like Vietnam, Cambodia has experienced very high rates of growth over the past decade, albeit from a very low base. While the population remains overwhelmingly rural, links between rural households and migrant workers in Phnom Penh, or in other countries in the region, have increased as industries such as garment production and tourism have created opportunities beyond subsistence agriculture. Whereas SOEs remained an important part of Vietnam’s industrialization process, the Cambodian government divested itself of its role of economic command much more quickly. Land rights were awarded in 1989 and a mass privatization of state land, buildings, resources, and enterprises ensued. In Vietnam, opening of the economy to the private sector was partly regulated by the continued dominance of state officials in state enterprises, however in Cambodia privatization was used as a strategy to ensure the loyalty of state officials in the face of looming elections. The state apparatus constructed with Vietnamese and Soviet aid during the 1980s risked breakdown following the collapse of the Soviet Union, the withdrawal of the Vietnamese army, and imminent elections. The rapid and unregulated privatization of the early 1990s was a means of rewarding loyalists within the public service and shoring up informal networks of patronage and protection, essential for using the state as a vehicle for the CPP’s electoral campaigning (Gottesman 2003; Hughes 2003). During the 1990s, links between the CPP, the state, and the military were further cemented through use of slush funds amassed by the award of logging concessions and reconstruction contracts and from siphoning off international aid. The CPP also began the practice of taking loans from private businesses, secured against natural resources or state assets, to fund political campaigns and strategies (Thayer 2002). Although the CPP lost the first, UN-organized election in 1993, through maintaining control over local government, strategic positions within ministries, and the military, the CPP was able to out-manoeuvre its royalist rivals, presenting them as weak and ineffective. This culminated in a military battle between forces loyal to the two parties in Phnom Penh in 1997, followed by an election which the CPP narrowly won. Subsequently, with political stability secured, Cambodia enjoyed a ten-year boom which saw the exponential growth of the private sector.

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The dependence of business on the goodwill of the CPP for protection and contracts has engendered a situation where business tycoons contribute large sums of money to CPP-badged rural development schemes. The CPP outspends the state by a factor of 2:1 on rural development (Pak 2011), and this has proved highly effective in mobilizing electoral support. In return, however, the government has allowed its business cronies to plunder Cambodia’s natural resources, with an immensely destructive effect on forests, on biodiversity in rivers and lakes, and on livelihoods in the worst affected parts of the country (Hughes 2008). With a small middle class, a dependent crony elite, and a mass of rural voters desperate to capture a share of CPP funds, there are few social forces in Cambodia that appear capable of overturning the CPP’s grip on power, despite widening inequality and the frequent but sporadic unrest and violence sparked by widespread land conflict. Acute elite control over economic and political power is not confined to authoritarian rule. The Philippines has one of the longest histories of electoral democracy in Southeast Asia and, in 1986, also led the region in overthrowing Marcos’ authoritarian regime. Yet for over a century the power of oligarchs in one form or another has been unassailable.6 As Coronel et al. (quoted in Hutchison 2006: 55) observe: ‘Congress remains a fortress of privilege, its gates open to the new and aspiring rich, but closed—except for some narrow openings—to the poor and the powerless’. Periodic episodes of intra-elite friction present opportunities for democratic forces, but these have tended to quickly dissipate for lack of sustainable mass organizational capacity and cohesion. There have been changes to the economic bases of Philippine oligarchy. Capitalizing on political connections, the small land-owning elite founded on commercial agriculture diversified in the 1950s into import substitution industrialization. Rent seeking opportunities in finance, real estate, and construction also subsequently opened up. Naturally, there were some tensions between old and new elites competing for privileged state access during these times of economic restructuring. However, shared interests among oligarchs and political elites in capital accumulation and blocking social democratic reform agendas were more significant (de Dios and Hutchcroft 2003: 48; Hutchison 2006: 49).

6 Winters (2012: 54) makes the point that oligarchs can take various forms, each distinguished by the means deployed to defend the concentration of wealth. He identifies four basic forms across history— warring, ruling, sultanistic, and civil—with the last three predominant over the last century. However, the common ingredient to oligarchs is that ‘they are individually and as a group more powerful than the laws and the system of legal enforcement. They are able to use their material power resources to block, deflect, or minimize the impact of laws’ (Winters 2012: 58).

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To be sure, organizational space for political dissent under Marcos was never as thoroughly suppressed as under other dictatorships in Southeast Asia, such as in Indonesia under Suharto. Rather, moderate and radical critics of the regime operated through various legal and underground organizations in attempts to test and extend the limits of political space. This included peasant, worker, and student organizations (Boudreau 2009b: 134–51; Coronel Ferrer 2004). Nevertheless, the threat such resistance posed was effectively limited and contained. Marcos’ introduction of martial law in 1972, though, put an end to what Anderson (1988) referred to as post-War ‘cacique democracy’ under which oligarchy faced no serious challenges.7 According to Winters (2012: 59), Marcos ‘replaced a collective ruling oligarchy that defended property and wealth through shared norms with a sultanic ruler who amassed enough power to threaten the most wealthy and influential of oligarchs’. The cronies that Marcos favoured through preferential access to state licences, monopolies, and loans were not the traditional elite (Manapat 1991; McCoy 2009). This introduced a new political dynamic. Marcos’ challenge to traditional oligarchic power laid the basis for alliances with popular forces opposed to authoritarian rule. The 1983 assassination of Benigno Aquino, a senator of traditional elite pedigree intending to contest for power, galvanized oligarchic elements in opposition to Marcos (Winters 2012: 61). By the mid-1980s, these elements had joined liberal and conservative business and Catholic Church critics of Marcos as well as popular forces with more reformist and radical agendas in mobilizing against Marcos (Thompson 1995; Boudreau 2001). However, Marcos’ overthrow may have demonstrated the might of People Power in 1986, but subsequent developments highlighted its limitations. Oligarchs and their political allies minimized the prospect of radical reform by containing new popular aspirations for democratic participation (Boudreau 2009a). This process began with incorporation in the 1987 Constitution of the rights of ‘marginalized sectors’—including workers, farmers, women, urban poor, and elderly—to be represented in local governments. Subsequently, the 1991 Local Government Code mandated that one quarter of seats be reserved in all municipal, city, and provincial legislative assemblies for NGO representation of sectors. However, due to resistance from traditional political elites Congress has not enacted the proposed enabling law (Cuarteros 2005: 48). Meanwhile, the 1995 Party-List Act requiring up to 20% of the House of Representatives

7 Marcos was elected president in 1965 and 1969 before declaring martial law in 1972, thereby overcoming the constitutional limit of a maximum two terms as president.

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seats for marginalized sectors has fostered continued disaggregation of interests and policy issues among challengers to traditional political parties (Wurfel 1997; Reilly 2006). President Corazon Aquino also moderated agricultural land reform in the face of wealthy landowner resistance (Hutchison 2006: 57). More generally, the return to electoral democracy allowed the wealth and patronage systems of oligarchs to be re-exercised over political parties, ensuring personal rather than programmatic or ideological agendas continued to dominate. Where necessary, paramilitary and other coercive means could be utilized to supplement networks of influence over public bureaucracies and legal institutions to capture or block state power (Hutchcroft and Rocomora 2012: 104; Sidel 1999). The poor and marginalized, that had resorted in the past to the unsuccessful Huk Rebellion over land reform or joined the Communist Party of the Philippines, thus continued to lack effective political representation (Anderson 1988; Boudreau 2009a: 238–41). It would again be intra-elite conflict that provided the context for significant political mobilization of popular forces—this time to bring down a democratically elected president through extra-constitutional means. Against the background of the 1997–8 Asian financial crisis and economic liberalization programmes under President Ramos, former movie star Joseph Estrada resoundingly won the presidency in 1998 employing anti-oligarch and pro-poor rhetoric (De Castro 2007; Quimpo 2008: 51–2). In office Estrada aroused the ire of established oligarchs by combining patronage politics with market liberalization benefiting his own cronies. Much of the middle class that by now had warmly embraced the good governance agenda of international aid agencies joined established oligarchs in an anti-corruption campaign against Estrada. This culminated in the People Power 2 movement in which powerful business interests, the middle class, and Catholic Church leaders were instrumental in forcing Estrada from office in January 2001 (Hedman 2006). Significantly, many of Manila’s urban poor and squatters mounted an unsuccessful People Power 3 seeking Estrada’s re-instatement (Hutchison 2006: 63). It did not take long for Estrada’s successor, Gloria Arroyo, to also face allegations of corruption and for yet another president, this time Liberal Party Senator Benigno Aquino III, to come to power pledging to arrest corruption. His campaign slogan was ‘Kung walang corrupt, walang mahirap’ (‘If there is no corruption, there would be no poverty’) (BBC News 2011), yet it was not backed by policies of social redistribution or structural reform likely to trouble powerful oligarchs. A recurring theme to Philippine democracy, then, has been the control by, and occasional friction between, oligarchs over the spoils of capitalism. But while this friction has created new opportunities for political alliances around

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governance reform issues, and arresting corruption in particular, this hasn’t threatened oligarchic rule. Social forces with most interest in such a direction lack cohesive mass organizations or political parties to champion their cause. Indonesia provides another example of successful adjustment by capitalist oligarchs following the collapse of authoritarian rule. Indonesia was hardest hit of any country in Southeast Asia by the 1997–8 financial crisis. Deep-seated contradictions inherent in Indonesia’s political economy meant that there could be no more business as usual in the way that capitalism and political power were organized. Yet what transpired in the rebuilding of Indonesia’s economic and political regimes was a remarkable adaption by powerful oligarchs that secured their consolidation of power. As in the Philippines, the emergence of oligarchs in Indonesia was greatly aided by a context of weak legal institutions. However, unlike the Philippines, oligarchic roots lay not in commercial agriculture by landowning elites. Neither such a class, nor a powerful urban bourgeoisie existed at independence.8 Contending ideologies included petty bourgeois populism and social radicalism, with liberalism comparatively weak. Forces for economic nationalism and predatory oligarchy were to initially prevail in this context (Robison and Hadiz 2004: 43–6; Robison and Hadiz 2006: 118). However, oligarchy would undergo transformations as relationships between capitalist development and the organization of state power played out. Embedding of oligarchic rule effectively began with the advent of Suharto’s presidency in 1965. The command capitalism of the Sukarno era was replaced with state capitalism and a highly centralized military rule. In the Cold War climate, Western aid and investment was readily available to support import-substitution industrialization and resources-based economic activity. State capitalism flourished in the period 1973–82, facilitated by oil prices generating massive petrodollars for the Indonesian state. Interventionist foreign investment, trade, and banking policies also bolstered the importance of the state to capital accumulation (Robison and Hadiz 2006: 118). In this period, proximity to Suharto was established as crucial in determining protection and access to wealth (Winters 2012: 56).9 However, the collapse of oil prices in the 1980s exerted a structural pressure on the state and private interests it had been organized to serve. In a context of diminished state revenues, arguments from technocrats favouring

8

Independence was declared in 1945 and recognized by the Netherlands in 1949. Winters (2012: 56) explains that this situation evolved following an initial phase when Suharto concentrated his patronage on elites within the armed forces, often in partnership with ethnic Chinese entrepreneurs capable of translating monopolies and concessions into profitable ventures. Only at this initial stage was emerging material power tied to the capacity for coercion. 9

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economic liberalization gained political traction. During the mid-to-late 1980s, major reforms were enacted, including: abolition of steel and plastic import trade monopolies; tariff reductions; removal of banking sector restrictions on domestic interest rates and opening the sector to private companies; and selectively privatizing hitherto public sector monopolies in power generation, utilities, ports, roads, telecommunications, and television to private companies (Robison and Hadiz 2006: 120). This was no triumph of neoliberal ideology. Public monopolies were often simply handed over to politically well-connected private corporate interests, many of whom had outgrown the model of state capitalism that had nurtured them. Indeed, according to Robison and Hadiz (2006: 122): ‘The heavy hand of the state had become a constraint where it prevented their access to lucrative opportunities’ and ‘deregulation was a necessary step for these politico-business conglomerates’. Because the authoritarian regime had decimated all organized opposition and independent media (Heryanto and Hadiz 2005; Hill 2006), this phase in oligarchic rule was at one level politically unproblematic. Yet by the 1990s, Suharto’s children had joined the ranks of the oligarchs to complicate patronage processes for established conglomerates. Questioning of the favoured treatment of Suharto’s children increasingly came not just from students, intellectuals, and activists but also disgruntled oligarchs (Winters 2012: 57–8; Aspinall 2005: 78–85). Meanwhile, financial deregulation fuelled the burgeoning of non-performing loans to politically well-connected Indonesian capitalists (Robison and Hadiz 2006: 123). Contradictions inherent in the political economy of Indonesia’s oligarchic capitalism were brought to a head by the 1997–8 Asian financial crisis. Massive private debt, accelerated by financial deregulation, underscored the collapse of the banking sector and an imminent fiscal crisis. Thus, in October 1997, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) was invited to Indonesia. The result was a raft of loan conditions seeking to dismantle various forms of state protection and privilege underpinning the accumulation strategies of corporate conglomerates and politico-business families. By May 1998 Suharto had resigned, against a background of mass street demonstrations and his abandonment by oligarchs (Aspinall 2005: 213–38; Robison and Hadiz 2006: 125–6). For economic liberals and democrats in particular, IMF intervention and the subsequent collapse of the authoritarian regime naturally raised optimism. However, despite political decentralization advocated by the IMF and the reintroduction of elections in a context of greater media freedom and civil liberties, the social foundations of capitalism still favoured oligarchs. In the absence of a genuinely independent domestic bourgeoisie or an influx of foreign investment to mount economic recovery, structural dependence

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on established conglomerates would soon be evident (Robison and Hadiz 2006: 126–9). Moreover, to an even greater extent than in the Philippines, the destruction of trade unions and other independent mass civil society organizations limited the capacity for new political parties to quickly emerge to advance democratic reforms (Boudreau 2009b). Thus, by mid-2000, many of the old conglomerates managed to not just retain core assets but also to have their debt absorbed by government (Robison and Hadiz 2006: 127). They adapted quickly to electoral politics by harnessing wealth, connections, and extra-legal means (Hadiz 2003, 2012; Boudreau 2009b; Aspinall and Mietzner 2010). Furthermore, administrative and political decentralization resulted not in a diminution of oligarchic influence so much as a transformation in the way it operated. New layers of bureaucrats, party officials, entrepreneurs, and paramilitary interests were incorporated into revamped systems of patronage and corruption previously centralized through Suharto and Jakarta (Hadiz 2010). Crucially, oligarchs were no more subordinated to a rule of law or the authority of independent courts. Rather, they ‘appropriated the institutions of democratic governance’ (Robison and Hadiz 2006: 112). While oligarchs and elites made a smooth political transition to electoral democracy in the Philippines and Indonesia without surrendering significant power, the road has been bumpier for their counterparts in Thailand. In part this is the result of Thailand’s particular development trajectory. Like the Philippines and Indonesia, this trajectory was characterized between the 1960s and the 1980s by authoritarian government which protected national business groups while crushing civil society organizations of the left in the interests of combating communism. In Thailand, a military dictatorship established in the late 1950s assured stability for private investment in the context of ongoing war and intervention in neighbouring Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. Thailand’s membership of the South East Asian Treaty Organisation and its willingness to host American bases permitted the Thai elite to take advantage of significant American assistance in its own fight against the Communist Party of Thailand, located particularly in the poor and rural North East of the country (Girling 1981: 240). The anti-communist struggle was pursued not only by coercion but also by heavy and astute investment in a cult of personality that emerged surrounding the Thai king. The king personally patronized populist anti-communist movements such as the Village Scouts, who along with the military were mobilized against movements of the left (Bowie 1997: 107–10). Such mobilizations included the crushing of student pro-democracy protests in the mid-1970s and the massacre of students at Thammasat University in Bangkok in October 1976 which curtailed hopes for democracy in Thailand for a further fifteen years.

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Meanwhile, the repression of workers’ and farmers’ movements in a context of rapid private sector-led development resulted in uneven levels of growth across the country. Urban centres, particularly Bangkok, industrialized rapidly on the back of low waged labour migrating in from rural backwaters. This had complex effects for Thailand’s political economy. The business class expanded and diversified beyond the clique of families that had dominated the economy via a firm grip on the banking system from the 1930s onwards. The rise of new sectors including services and tourism, the diversification of manufacturing, the establishment of the Thai stock exchange as a new avenue for raising capital, and the influx of foreign investors all produced new political forces with distinct interests and, consequently, new forms of intra-elite political competition (Hewison 2006). At the same time, uneven development in a context of authoritarian repression produced high levels of inequality both between the elite and the mass of the population, between urban and rural areas, and within rural areas where the household incomes of the poorest were heavily dependent upon remittances from Bangkok (Glassman 2010). Once the Cold War began to wind down in the late 1980s and the threat of communist insurgency and/or invasion declined, a new interest in democratization emerged in urban areas. Protests in Bangkok in 1992 against military rule illustrated this, leading some observers to conclude that Thailand had successfully modernized during the boom of the 1980s, producing the socio-economic conditions for stable liberal democracy. That electoral politics was heavily influenced by vote-buying, pork-barrelling, and patronage in poor rural areas was regarded as evidence that rural Thailand lagged behind the capital not only in income and industrialization but also in its capacity for democracy. However, the political parties that emerged in the 1990s were exclusively oriented towards the urban elite and middle class, reflecting the repression of leftist politics during the Cold War era, and leaving the poor little to choose from when it came to electoral platforms (Montesano 2009). The Asian Financial Crisis of 1997 had cataclysmic effects upon Thailand’s political economy. The seriousness of the crisis for Thai capital, exacerbated by IMF policies accepted by the ruling Democrat Party, prompted a major political reorganization of forces. Thai business emerged from the crisis in disarray with assets disposed of to foreign investors at fire sale prices (Pasuk and Baker 2008), while the brunt of the aftermath was borne by the poor through a collapse in employment and incomes that reverberated through the remittance system into rural areas (Pasuk and Baker 2000). This was the context that spawned the Thai Rak Thai (TRT) party, meaning ‘Thais Love Thais’—a party that initially brought together business, the middle class, workers, and the rural poor on a platform of economic nationalism, welfarism, and opposition to IMF austerity. However, as economic recovery began in the

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mid-2000s, the interests of business and the middle class began to diverge from the personal interests of Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra (Hewison 2006; McCargo and Ukrist 2005). While Thaksin had discovered that massive rural relief programmes were highly effective in gaining re-election, and that landslide election victories allowed the unfettered pursuit of profitable family business interests, the wider business class and the urban middle class desired a return to the pre-Crisis order where the poor were left to fend for themselves. These conflicting ideas prompted the emergence of a deep divide in Thai society, a military coup, and a subsequent period of profound and protracted constitutional and political crisis.

C I VI L S O C I ET Y I N S O U T H E A S T A S IA According to Bernhard (1993: 308), civil society requires ‘the existence of an independent public space from the exercise of state power, and then the ability of organizations within it to influence the exercise of state power’. This insistence on the fundamentally political character of civil society distinguishes this approach from liberal pluralist understandings of civil society as comprising all manner of independent voluntary associations (de Tocqueville 2003; Putnam 1995; Ehrenberg 1999; Gill 2000). However, as Gramsci (1971) observed, the conception of civil society as involving inherently political action can reflect in both attempts to challenge and shore up state power. Notwithstanding considerable variation in the extent and nature of CSOs across Southeast Asia, nowhere in the region are there powerful CSOs successfully advancing liberal or democratic ideologies. However, a variety of vehicles are proving successful in propagating moral ideologies that protect the existing social and political order. The structure of capitalism and the degree to which this translates into intra-elite friction influence both the attraction of specific governance reforms to particular elites and opportunities for non-elite reformist forces. Yet the extent and complexion of civil societies comprising non-elite forces in Southeast Asia, while variable, are almost uniformly fragmented politically. The dismantling of independent oppositional mass—especially class—organizational bases during the Cold War continues to influence political links and strategies between social forces. In this context middle class-led CSOs and NGOs have become significant avenues for reformist and other political activism. At moments of intra-elite friction or economic crisis, incentives, and opportunities for cooperation between activists and their organizations are heightened.

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However, as we have seen above, middle classes across the region have often emerged amidst state dominance over, or strategic control of, key sectors of domestic economies. The generation of powerful bureaucracies and direct and indirect state control over access to employment and business contracts has not been conducive to substantial politically independent middle classes (Robison and Goodman 1996). Moreover, international aid is a source of funds for many middle class activists in Southeast Asia seeking to operate independently of the state (see Arroyo and Sirker 2005). This can foster a dependence of a different sort where access to resources is tied to aligning with reform agendas set by external agencies. Some of this funding also leads back to partnerships with authorities and risks of political co-option. This includes new opportunities for community participation in the implementation of poverty reduction programmes by the World Bank (Carroll 2010; Cammack 2004). Over the last forty years the social variant of democracy referred to in chapter one has been in decline in the established liberal democracies (Lavelle 2008; Callaghan et al. 2010), while the liberal variant has been consolidated and extended. Global production strategies and neoliberal policies and ideologies have challenged the organizational and political roles of trade unions and social redistribution in particular. In Southeast Asia, though, because trade unions were already greatly weakened during the Cold War, the climate for promoting social democracy has naturally been even more difficult. Cohesive reform movements with social democratic agendas have struggled to emerge even in the Philippines, which hosts the largest volume and range of CSOs in the region. Nevertheless, following the demise of socialist and communist movements of the poor across the region, to differing extents political spaces have opened up over the last few decades for middle class-led social activism oriented towards improving governance institutions, implementing development programmes, and advancing individual political and civil liberties. This has involved an expansion of single-issue organizations, including some NGOs where middle class activists have assigned for themselves the role of representing elements of the ‘underprivileged’ (Hewison and Rodan 2012: 34–5; Clark 1991). This emergence of NGOs advocating for the poor, rather than the poor taking direct political action for themselves, has partially filled a political vacuum, as in the case of human rights NGOs in post-war Cambodia and labour NGOs during the era of restrictions on labour unions under the New Order regime in Indonesia (Hughes 2003; Hadiz 1997; Ford 2003). By definition, the extent of independent CSOs is limited under authoritarian regimes, although increased individual and/or collective political participation may be encouraged through various forms of state-sponsored

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mechanisms. Most concerted such initiatives in political co-option are to be found in Singapore, including through nominated members of parliament and public feedback institutions. These represent attempts by the PAP to depoliticize concerns about social and environmental issues associated with rapid capitalist development, channelling them through PAP-controlled institutions rather than opposition political parties (Rodan 2009b; Rodan and Jayasuriya 2007). Meanwhile, the toleration of a small group of independent politically-oriented NGOs working in areas of the environment, consumer issues, women’s rights, migrant workers, and human rights, for example, is conditional on their political roles remaining overt and limited—with links to opposition political parties discouraged, subject to specific regulations, and generally considered ‘out of bounds’ within the prevailing political culture. Some space for individual activism, notably through blogging, has opened up and existing regulations on how formally registered political parties can use electronic media have recently been relaxed.10 Nevertheless, collective forms of civil society expression remain constrained and generally take a politically moderate tone. Options to activists thus include trying to exploit the various avenues of political co-option or the narrow spaces of civil society, or embarking on civil disobedience to contest existing strictures on political expression and organization.11 Authoritarian elites in Vietnam too have attempted to pre-empt the emergence of independent CSOs capable of providing collective representation, especially for citizens adversely affected by the momentous transformations and inequalities generated by the shift from a command to a market economy. As well as friction over the social impacts of these policies, a host of disputes has surfaced among competing elite interests within the state and between new private commercial interests and the state. In this context, mechanisms have been established by which citizens can voice grievances against the actions of particular administrative agencies. A major such mechanism is the Law on Complaints and Denunciations. However, while this involves scrutiny of administrative decision-making, the process obstructs collective action. For Vietnamese authorities, preserving the atomization of the complaints process is important to concealing the intrinsically political nature of what

10 Changes to the Constitution and election laws prior to the 2011 general election permitted the use of podcasts, videos, blogs, instant messaging, photo-sharing platforms, and various social media by political parties for campaigning purposes. 11 This civil disobedience route was taken by the Singapore Democratic Party (SDP)’s Chee Soon Juan, resulting in various imprisonments and fines. This strategy, however, has not been widely adopted.

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are currently portrayed as purely administrative issues (Rodan and Jayasuriya 2007: 807). Courageous and defiant attempts of independent individual, and occasionally collective, politics do occur in Vietnam. The main avenue for this is the internet, despite surveillance, intimidation, and even assault of bloggers critical of state officials or policy. This has included websites inviting individuals to upload photographs of lavish homes of government and communist party officials and an online petition against bauxite mining in the ecologically sensitive Central Highlands, which attracted thousands of signatures (CPJ 2011; Crispin 2012). However, personal risks remain high, as jail sentences ranging from four to twelve years to three citizen journalists in 2012 for allegedly spreading ‘propaganda against the state’ underline (The Guardian 2012). In the same year, the Vietnamese government proposed through draft decrees extended powers of authorities to censor content and prosecute bloggers (Poetranto 2012). Wells-Dang (2010) suggests that while ‘direct challenges to the single-party system remain taboo’, a variety of political spaces for debating and opposing government decisions are developing in a manner which potentially advances accountability. These spaces include government-sanctioned forums for public discussion of policies, such as village-level meetings; however, they also include civil society networks engaging in political advocacy in an attempt to enlist the support of state agencies; and demonstrations that publicly protest government policies, particularly over land issues. Wells-Dang (2010) points out that such spaces are tolerated by the government insofar as they represent forms of ‘rightful resistance’ (O’Brien and Li 2006), whereby citizens adopt the ideals of the party as a basis for criticizing corrupt or arbitrary practices. One authoritarian regime where independent political space has opened up significantly in recent times—including for collective organizational activities—is in Malaysia. Indeed, over the last decade and a half the growth in the number and range of NGOs and CSOs has translated into some significant episodes of social movement activism (Weiss 2006; Weiss and Saliha 2004). Most recently, this has even involved embryonic moves towards closer alignment between political parties, and CSOs. This constitutes a more hospitable environment for attempts to advance democratic reform agendas, but democrats do not enjoy a decisive influence by virtue of superior organizational bases to those available to liberals or moralists advocating for accountability or any other reforms. As we will see later in this book, the influence of democratic ideologies in Malaysia has been contingent and dynamic precisely because democrats rarely have superior organizational support bases at their disposal.

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In short, successful accountability mobilizations against government decisions and power abuses are difficult in authoritarian societies, making policy reversals and sanctions for official misconduct rare. In post-authoritarian societies, though, there is space for collective action and this is frequently used to mobilize against particular policy decisions and abuses of power. Consequently, politicians and their backers have to at least pay lip service to public opinion. Greater independent civil society space is of course to be found in the post-authoritarian societies of Indonesia, the Philippines, and Thailand. However, political fragmentation amongst social and political activists remains the norm, punctuated with periodic episodes of increased cohesion around one or other reform objective. This has included challenges to elected governments involving oppositional coalitions comprising, among other forces, development groups, women’s organizations, environmentalists, religious groups, unions, and human rights organizations. At the same time, we also see CSOs mobilizing against progressive reforms of a liberal or democratic nature. Throughout the Cold War, to varying degrees, CSOs were mobilized in all three countries towards that end. In the post-Cold War period, many of these organizations have consolidated and continue to play a significant role in shaping ideological contestation in civil society. The freedom to protest and politically mobilize is recognized as legitimate in these countries and has been harnessed in disputes over agricultural transformations, land expropriations, environmental degradation, human rights abuses, and electoral fraud, amongst other issues. Freedom of the press and political expression more generally has facilitated critical discussion of government policies and the unveiling of scandals on a scale and range that has no parallel in authoritarian societies in Southeast Asia. However, as was powerfully demonstrated during struggles that followed the 1997–8 financial crises in the Philippines and Thailand, elements of the middle class have at key moments aligned with conservative and reactionary forces, including from within civil society, hostile to democratic ideologies and institutions. Through CSOs, the elite and sections of the urban middle class linked up to harness street protests to bring down elected and popular politicians. In Thailand, various CSOs and NGOs not only opposed electoral outcomes regarded as ‘inappropriate’, but they also supported the repression of political movements associated with the poor and marginalized. These organizations and their middle-class leaders campaigned with royalists, the military, and assorted right-wing groups to overturn electoral outcomes and then defeat the United Front for Democracy Against Dictatorship (UDD)—or more commonly known as the ‘red-shirt movement’—which had the support of workers

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and small farmers. Class antagonisms were especially evident when the UDD began to mobilize around issues of inequality, injustice, class struggle, and opposition to an ‘aristocratic elite’. Such rhetoric was rejected by many CSOs, while grassroots organizing was labelled as left-wing or even communist (Kengkij and Hewison 2009; Hewison 2010a). Middle class-led organizations eschewed class politics in favour of local-level issues such as corruption (see Jacques-Chai and Chanida 2010). The aim was a reformist politics that tames and depoliticizes the UDD and its supporters (see Kengkij and Hewison 2009). The parallel in the Philippines was the middle class mobilization against Estrada, in combination with business elites and the Catholic Church. However, even more so than in Thailand, the experience of the Philippines highlights how mass movements are not necessarily calling for democratic governance. In fact, their demands can translate into populist rhetoric in which charismatic leaders mobilize mass support primarily as a means to prosecute intra-elite struggles. Thaksin employed populist rhetoric but actually delivered on promises of policies to alleviate some of the problems of Thailand’s rural and urban poor through health insurance and credit reforms (Ramesh 2008; Glassman 2010), for example. In Thailand, Thaksin’s emergence and peremptory ousting by the military has given rise to a movement that progressed beyond mere support for Thaksin, and constituted in part, at least, democratically organized groups calling for fundamental political and economic reform. By contrast, Estrada’s pro-poor rhetoric never translated into commensurate reforms or the emergence of a democratic movement of the poor that was independent of Estrada. Yet for lack of effective avenues for direct representation of the poor, many of the Philippines’ poorest remained strong supporters of Estrada despite charges of corruption against him. In the context of Indonesia, some observers have suggested that a process of ‘Philippinization’ may be occurring (Mietzner 2009; Tomsa 2013: 27), as increasing numbers of celebrities gain seats in the legislature and prominent individuals, such as former special army forces Kopassus commander Prabowo, form parties as personal vehicles for power. However, the results of the 2009 elections suggested that such personalized parties are not popular with Indonesian voters, despite tens of millions of dollars spent on them by their founders (Mietzner 2009). Yet President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono’s Partai Demokrat, or Democratic Party, was also described as a ‘shell’ for the Yudhoyono presidency (Mietzner 2009). While the tens of millions spent by Prabowo did not secure him victory in the 2009 polls, Yudhoyono was more successful. A massive cash-for-the-poor hand out programme that transferred billions of dollars from June 2008 saw the president’s and his party’s popularity soar just in time

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for the election. Mietzner (2009) regards this as the successful adoption of elements of ‘Thaksinomics’ in Indonesia. Whereas populism has been used in Thailand, the Philippines, and to some extent Indonesia to mobilize support in a democratic context, it has also proved successful in winning elections in authoritarian countries. In Cambodia, populist politics has been promoted by elites in a manner that has significantly undermined the democratic ambitions of the 1993 constitution. This was adopted following the United Nations peacekeeping process, in line with principles enshrined in the 1991 peace treaty. Throughout the 1990s, both government and opposition parties campaigned for mass support using strategies which powerfully promoted the personalities of leaders. On all sides of politics, claims that leaders were imbued with magical powers to bring rain, survive bomb blasts, or protect the country from invasion were promoted by political parties. Support was mobilized primarily by the dispensing of gifts, increasingly characterized as ‘rural development’ (Hughes 2003). Since the early 2000s, the political space for public protest mandated in the constitution has been inexorably narrowed, through a combination of violent policing and increasingly onerous regulations, while opposition parties have been harassed to the point that their leaders spend much time abroad, avoiding imprisonment on a variety of defamation charges. During this period, which coincided with an economic boom, the CPP consolidated its co-option of middle class and poor voters alike through cash handouts and public works, while cracking down ruthlessly on efforts by the disadvantaged groups to mobilize in protest to land expropriation, labour issues, and abuses of power. In short, political participation has increased substantially across Southeast Asia in recent decades. This includes within some authoritarian regimes where the search for more sophisticated forms of political co-option has emerged as a strategy to contain the scope for genuine political competition. In new democracies of the region, by contrast, expanded political participation has given expression to much greater political pluralism. However, in both sets of contexts, mass movements frequently take the form of populist mobilizations serving intra-elite competition. Even where mass mobilization reflects a genuine desire for reform, democratic ideologies have to compete with non-democratic ideologies for influence in debates over the nature of appropriate governance institutions. In contrast with the situation of their counterparts in established liberal democracies at a similarly formative stage of democratic institution building, democrats in Southeast Asia are less integrated with social movements encompassing mass organizations. This not only places a premium on coalition building with others from liberal and moral ideological perspectives on points of intersection in governance reform agendas, but also

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reduces the political collateral that democrats bring to the bargaining table. Meanwhile, underdeveloped and fragmented civil societies in Southeast Asia constitute an especially fertile climate for moral ideologies to exert a pervasive influence within such coalitions. This is because the kinds of mass organizations that propagate these ideologies were precisely those that elites found convenient to maintain during the Cold War: the Church in the Philippines, Islamic organizations in Indonesia (both complicit in anti-communist campaigns), and the communist party and Fatherland Front in Vietnam, for example.

C O N C LUSIO N In Southeast Asia, the legacy of state-building trajectories under Cold War conditions in the post-colonial era has had a profound effect on the nature of accountability politics. Throughout the region, powerful external backing for regimes that used extraordinary levels of violence against their own populations significantly weakened the ability of societies to hold their rulers to account in any way. In the region’s former communist countries, millions died during wars, revolutions, and violent processes of collectivization in waves of repression that reached their heights with the Pol Pot regime’s atrocities between 1975 and 1979. Meanwhile in Indonesia, the Philippines, Thailand, Malaysia, and Singapore the fight against communist insurgency visited upon the populations of these countries large-scale massacres, widespread practices of forced relocation, invasive surveillance, periodic conscription into a range of patriotic movements, and/or vigorous efforts at social engineering to produce new ethnic categories of depoliticized citizenry. This ‘disorganization of civil society’, as Heryanto and Hadiz describe it (2005: 254), meant that as the Cold War receded and political liberalization began in many countries in the 1990s, there were few organized social movements of the poor that could exert much influence on the activities of rulers. Exceptional instances include the Assembly of the Poor in Thailand, which in the 1990s represented the interest of rural farmers and prompted unprecedented policy changes on the part of the Thai government; and the impact of spontaneous movements such as the Thai Binh protests in 1998 in Vietnam which prompted the Vietnamese government to increase space for political debate at the grassroots. At the same time, the concern by international agencies such as the United Nations in Cambodia and bilateral donors in countries like Indonesia and the Philippines to promote greater democracy and better governance prompted

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the emergence of international programmes of funding for civil society activities. This led to the appearance of a range of professional organizations that took up the cause of the poor and marginalized and pursued this on their behalf. The result is a civil society that is primarily urban, middle class, and professional, with weak links to mass constituencies. In Indonesia, the Philippines, Thailand, and Malaysia, veterans of various pro-democracy student movements often staff the CSOs involved. At various times from 1986 to 1998, these student movements challenged or toppled authoritarian regimes. Their links to international agencies entail that they are subject to powerful liberal influences imposed by their donors. However, their links to the poor are weak and consequently, although they frequently affirm a commitment to social justice, such organizations struggle to act as facilitators of deliberation required for the formation of genuinely democratic movements, as we define them in this study. At the same time, both authoritarian and post-authoritarian governments in post-Cold War Southeast Asia have increasingly incorporated strategies of populist mobilization into their political activities, including as a means of competing with opposing elite factions for power. The profits of the frequent booms which had been experienced in Southeast Asia over this period have permitted the use of patronage to elicit the allegiance of the poor to programmes that may promise more or less redistributive policies, but which frequently end up concentrating power in ever fewer hands. In this context, accountability politics tends to take on a strongly tactical cast, with accountability institutions subject to politicization and manipulation by elites. As the case studies presented in this book will show, there are political economy foundations to ideological struggles over accountability institutions in Southeast Asia. These foundations are not very favourable to democratic forces and ideologies. Nevertheless, accountability may still be useful in bringing the occasional malefactor to account. The result is unlikely though to be a broader shift in state-society relations in which the democratic ideal of the paramount sovereignty of the deliberating public is significantly advanced.

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3 Political Crisis and Human Rights Accountability in Singapore and Malaysia I N T RO DUC T IO N Authoritarian regimes with many similar techniques of repression in Malaysia and Singapore nevertheless have different tendencies on accountability institutions, especially in the area of human rights. Malaysia not only has extensive independent civil society human rights watchdogs undertaking collective political action, but also a state-based human rights commission. Nothing comparable has emerged in Singapore. Why is this so? Two central arguments are submitted here, both of which relate to the underlying political economy of these regimes. The first argument is that structurally based intra-elite conflicts emanating from relationships between capitalist development and state power in Malaysia mean the merger of state and party is less cohesive than in Singapore and more prone to challenge.1 This translates into quite different political opportunities around which accountability coalitions potentially form. In particular, during economic downturns tensions over policies affecting patronage spoils intensify between contending factions within the United Malays National Organisation (UMNO)—the dominant party of the ruling Barisan Nasional (BN)—or National Front—coalition (Khoo 2003: 22). This is precisely what happened with the advent of the 1997–8 Asian economic crisis, when an UMNO power struggle led to former Deputy Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim’s detention under the Internal Security Act (ISA), beaten and expelled from the party. In the ensuing political crisis, and amidst widespread international condemnation of Malaysian authorities, broad

1 Since racial riots in 1969, capitalism in Malaysia has included the active cultivation of an ethnic Malay bourgeoisie through state patronage. Although UMNO factionalism pre-dated the New Economic Policy (NEP) that laid out the rationale and objectives of this affirmative action strategy, the NEP gave it a new structural base and dynamic.

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domestic coalitions incorporating democratic, liberal, and moral rationales for accountability mobilized to demand a raft of reforms to arrest a wide range of abuses of state power, many of which were endemic before Anwar’s political persecution. The government’s establishment in 1999 of a human rights commission, Suhakam—or Suruhanjaya Hak Asasi Malaysia (Human Rights Commission of Malaysia)—was meant to help contain such political fallout, supposedly demonstrating commitment to increased accountability of authorities. However, this did not mark the beginning of government moves to systematically discipline state power to independent scrutiny, including in human rights. Issues of accountability have thus continued to occupy centre stage in periodic mobilization by social and political forces—a pattern only exacerbated by authorities’ repressive responses. Crucially, despite ideological differences among these forces, they are united on key demands to protect freedom of political expression and assembly, a modus operandi for reformist political activism that has become pivotal in Malaysia. Significantly, over time, selective adoption by BN political leaders of accountability rhetoric amounts to recognition that this coalition of forces is making progress in the battle of ideas. In this context, despite its limited powers and generally disappointing performance, Suhakam has not been without its tactical utility at times for reformists—especially on occasions when it has taken quite different positions on human rights from the government. The second argument advanced below is that, not only are such intrastate tensions absent in Singapore to create similar opportunities for domestic actors to push for accountability reform, but one of the foundational myths rationalizing the People’s Action Party (PAP)’s power monopoly is at sharp odds with democratic accountability and, to some extent, even liberal accountability. As the myth goes, Singapore’s success is grounded in the meritocratic nature of its elite and the moral integrity it is imbued with—different from regime legitimation in Malaysia emphasizing affirmative action to achieve ethnically balanced development, which is not unrelated to state patronage networks and corruption (Gomez 2002). Concessions to the idea of institutionalizing extensive checks and balances on state power via horizontal accountability, let alone enhanced political authority to citizens through either conventional vertical political accountability mechanisms or social accountability, would contradict a core ideological rationale for elite rule. Instead, it is through the continued recruitment of talented and morally upright elites that the PAP sees itself securing Singapore’s good governance—including in human rights. In effect, the PAP has claimed

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the high ground of moral accountability, ideologically undercutting alternative democratic and liberal rationales. Importantly, the ability of the PAP to limit effective challenges to this ideological account is rooted in a political economy producing a more cohesive and unified merger of state and party than in Malaysia. Whereas in Malaysia state power has been integral to the fostering of a domestic business class aligned to the ruling coalition, in Singapore a virtual class of politico-bureaucratic state capitalists and managers with tightly shared worldviews and interests has emerged and consolidated. In the process, government-linked companies (GLCs) and statutory authorities have afforded strategic control over the domestic economy, with significant political consequences.2 Independent bases of power for business, labour, or professional classes have been undermined while heavy dependence on the state for access to housing, employment, business contracts, and personal savings has also been conducive to political co-option (Rodan 2008). Thus, not only has there been a relative absence of political crises within the ruling party or intrastate power struggles or tensions for reformist forces to exploit. These reformist forces are also much more fragmented and lacking in capacity for, and orientation towards, collective action on the scale and of the form undertaken by counterparts in Malaysia. This was abundantly clear when civil society advocates for human rights unsuccessfully attempted to use both the commitment within the ASEAN Charter to a regional human rights commission and United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC)’s Universal Periodic Review to persuade the Singapore government to adopt such an institution nationally. Significantly, in sharp contrast with their counterparts in Malaysia, civil society forces in Singapore are divided over the use of public demonstrations and mobilizations and generally eschew confrontation with authorities. Yet this modus operandi has been a crucial dynamic in Malaysia, exposing activists of different ideological perspectives to experiences that only reinforce their shared convictions that—by one means or another—state power must be held to greater account. Malaysia’s leaders have thus been unable to completely dismiss their human rights accountability critics in the way Singapore’s leaders have.

2 The internationalization of GLCs has also availed the PAP government of considerable capital that helps shore up the strategic political advantages of state control. See Rodan (2004a).

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The Politics of Accountability in Southeast Asia MALAYSIAN CRISIS AND ACCOUNTABILITY C OALI TIO NS

The 1997–8 Asian crisis precipitated unprecedented scrutiny of governance systems in Asia. There were calls from within international financial institutions in particular for economic actors and regulatory authorities to be rendered more accountable to the market, a theme that was especially directed at Malaysia’s so-called ‘crony capitalism’ and associated corruption (Rodan 2004b: 120–3). Such liberal notions of accountability not only resonated with criticisms within Malaysia, but were also joined by demands for greater democratic accountability by domestic opponents of authoritarian rule. Added to this was the alienation of many hitherto supporters of BN by virtue of Anwar’s treatment, amongst whom Islamic religious notions of moral accountability also enjoyed some influence. Malaysia’s economic and political crises thus set in train favourable conditions for new accountability coalitions. As Finance Minister and Deputy Prime Minister, when the Asian crisis broke Anwar (1998: 25) declared that: ‘The crisis has compelled governments to accept the need for transparency and the necessity of making adjustments and instituting reform, no matter how painful’. However, Anwar’s broad alignment with neoliberal reform prescriptions, particularly of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), generated understandable anxiety within the ruling party. It was not greater exposure to the discipline of markets and more robust domestic regulation that many of his colleagues favoured, but measures to defend the interests of various companies with political connections to UMNO. Publicly funded bailouts of these companies were among their preferred strategies in the ensuing struggle for control over economic policy (Rodan 2004b: 116–24). However, what unfolded was not just the political persecution of Anwar as part of the attempt to contain reform, but a selective adoption of good governance reform rhetoric in recognition of the power of international investor sentiment.3 Exposures by non-governmental organizations (NGOs) of official corruption, nepotism, and financial incompetence had their utility for sections of UMNO seeking to either arrest the influence of particular political figures in

3 Some concrete reforms were also introduced, including adjusting existing regulatory and supervisory institutions to formally strengthen the rights of small shareholders and enforce more exacting standards of financial accountability and transparency. However, investor concerns had always been about how power relations shape the adherence of state institutions to regulatory and supervisory obligations.

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dispensing state patronage,4 or to contain the extent of patronage as some elements of the bureaucracy desired. Here the selective good governance rhetoric of BN and state officials, no less than the critiques from within the international business community, could be exploited by civil society actors to project their criticisms as constructive contributions towards improved public policy and administration. However, the detention, beating, and political persecution of Anwar through the courts helped broaden both the social forces and the nature of reform demands linked to accountability in Malaysia. In particular, the blatant abuse by authorities of state power was now seen as necessitating changes to political and not just financial accountability institutions. This was only reinforced as the ISA was readily invoked against government critics and as police and other authorities attempted to suppress public demonstrations through water cannon and mass arrests. The net effect of treatment meted out by authorities to Anwar and social and political activists seeking to link such abuses to broader reform agendas was that calls for human rights accountability were integral to the demands for change. Asserting the right to freedom of expression and assembly was pivotal to the modus operandi for a broad and diverse range of reform agendas. Crucially, authorities’ treatment of Anwar ignited a reformasi movement that incorporated different social forces across ethnic lines, encompassing secular and religious elements (Weiss 2006; Abbott 2001; Lopez and Saliha 2004; Ahmad 2008). This included activation of various Islamic NGOs that hitherto had not linked with opposition forces. Among them was Angkatan Belia Islam Malaysia (ABIM, or the Muslim Youth Movement of Malaysia), which Anwar was a past president of and that had benefited from his patronage. Many ABIM leaders were subsequently arrested under the ISA during reformasi as a result (Marzuki 2004).5 Another important development was the formation of a new political party, Parti Keadilan Nasional (Keadilan, or National Justice Party), which was led by Anwar’s wife, Wan Azizah Wan Ismail. Keadilan offered an avenue for ethnic Malays traditionally aligned with BN to express their disillusion with Anwar’s treatment.

4 Among the most conspicuous of these intra-elite factional battles was tension between Prime Minister Mahathir and Daim Zainuddin, a former Finance Minister who had returned to public policy making roles in an apparent strategy to arrest and replace Anwar’s influence, including through his appointment as Special Functions Minister in mid-1998 and First Finance Minister later that year. 5 The Jamaah Islah Malaysia (or the Society for Islamic Reform) was another important Islamic NGO that embarked on independent political activism in this period. See also Saliha (2004) for a broader discussion of Islamic NGOs.

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In this context, religious morality became an even more significant influence alongside liberal and democratic reformasi rationales. For many Islamists in Parti Islam Se-Malaysia (PAS, or Pan-Malaysian Islamic Party) and affiliated organizations, corruption in particular had already been associated with failing to observe the moral responsibilities of leadership. But the abuses of state power exercised against Anwar and his supporters added another dimension and new subscribers to a moral argument. Reformasi, as Ahmad (2008: 220) observes, meant different things to the constituent elements of the movement, including depicting the Anwar–Mahathir friction as part of ‘the perennial struggle to establish righteousness against evil and corrupt forces which have led Malaysia into a state of moral depravity’. The reformasi movement in Malaysia did not result in a speedy collapse of the authoritarian regime, as had manifested in Indonesia a little earlier. Rather, there would be periods of greater and lesser cohesion and organizational strength to social and political coalitions comprising this movement.6 Yet two themes are discernible. First, accountability has only gathered momentum as a basis of coalition building against the authoritarian regime— precisely because it has resonance that traverses liberal, democratic, and moral ideological terrains. Second, whatever differences in reform visions there may be among coalition elements, there is unanimity on the desire to have rights to freedom of political expression and organization protected from abuses of state power. Human rights accountability appeals have thus been central for both ideological and tactical political reasons.

NAT I O NAL HUM AN RI GH TS B O DY E S TA BL IS H E D It was against the background of widespread international condemnation of Anwar’s treatment and the repression of reformasi protesters that one of the government’s genuinely new institutional initiatives in accountability occurred: the establishment of a national human rights commission. This concession to critics was inspired more by political pragmatism than a newfound appreciation by the BN government of liberal democratic horizontal accountability. However, if the government was hoping that this initiative would placate domestic critics of its human rights record it was to be disappointed. This

6 Among the many dynamics associated with this was the retreat of ABIM from reformist alliances under the presidency of Yusri Mohamad from 2005 (Ahmad 2008: 225–9).

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body instead provided a new institutional focus for civil society contestation over authorities’ abuses of state power. In March 1999, Malaysia’s Acting Foreign Minister, Syed Hamid Albar, announced the creation of Suhakam, an official human rights watchdog. By July the same year the Human Rights Commission of Malaysia Act 1999 was introduced to parliament. According to Hamid (quoted in New Straits Times 1999), the new commission was ‘testimony to the Government’s desire to protect and promote human rights of all Malaysians’ and would assist in the study of various international human rights treaties the government was yet to ratify. Yet although civil society human rights champions had long advocated a national human rights commission, the speed with which the government moved without consulting any of the established human rights NGOs aroused suspicions about official motives. What sort of accountability would Suhakam entail and how would it relate to the agendas of civil society campaigns in particular? Social and political forces pushing for human rights accountability have had a dynamic and ambiguous relationship with Suhakam: much of the time attacking the institution as a lackey of government but other times aligning with it to expose and highlight abuses of state power. Meanwhile, the government has periodically felt the need to both bolster effective curbs on Suhakam’s operations and to accede to pressures for the composition and processes of Suhakam to more closely conform to international comparators. As Whiting (2003: 76) points out, the functions assigned to Suhakam may have been couched in terms of the Paris Principles endorsed by the United Nations General Assembly in 1993, but the ability and willingness to substantively deliver on these was in question from the start. Suhakam was to: promote awareness of human rights; advise government in relation to human rights and international human rights instruments; and to enquire into complaints about human rights infringements. Yet it was initially located within the Foreign Ministry, its commissioners would be appointed by recommendation of the prime minister, and commissioners’ potentially renewable terms would be just two years.7 Suhakam’s advisory role was also heavily circumscribed and absent from the Act was any requirement of cooperation with civil society groups (Maznah 2002: 240). Not surprisingly, the government’s proposed commission was roundly criticized at the outset by precisely those domestic forces and interests it might have been intended to impress. A coalition of thirty-one human rights

7

In 2004 the jurisdiction of Suhakam was transferred from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to the Prime Minister’s Department.

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NGOs presented a memorandum to Suhakam shortly after its establishment, expressing concerns that it would have insufficient independence, resources, and investigative powers to protect and promote human rights and questioning the ‘truncated definition of human rights’ in the Act (quoted in Tan 2001). Opposition parties and the Malaysian Bar Council, representing a 12,000 member-strong independent professional lawyers’ association, raised similar concerns. Given such widespread scepticism about Suhakam, the complexion and performance of the inaugural commission would obviously be crucial if it were to have any chance of exerting an impact one way or the other. In April 2000 the government announced the appointment of Suhakam’s first chairman, former Deputy Prime Minister Musa bin Hitam, and twelve other commissioners. Between 1990 and 1991, Musa was Malaysia’s special envoy to the United Nations, leading the Malaysian delegation to the UN Commission on Human Rights from 1993–8 and elected chairman of that Commission in 1995. Musa’s appointment did not receive unanimous endorsement. Former Member of Parliament (MP) Fan Yew Teng (2000) reminded Malaysians that Musa was Home Minister when in 1985 police opened fire on demonstrating Memali villagers in Kedah State, resulting in the death of fourteen villagers and four police. Generally, though, the reaction was positive from opposition politicians and the NGO community who may well have been bracing for someone with even more questionable credentials. Musa was the liberal face of Mahathir’s administration as well as an opponent of Mahathir in the UNMO election of 1987. Furthermore, among the twelve commissioners were not only various former judges and academics, but also activists from the NGO community, including Zainah Anwar of the women’s organization Sisters-inIslam and the President of the Malaysian Nature Society, Salleh Mohd Nor. While reiterating concerns about the narrow scope and terms of reference of Suhakam, in parliament opposition Democratic Action Party (DAP) Chairman Lim Kit Siang described the commission as well represented while Keadilan President Wan Azizah Wan Ismail also welcomed Musa’s appointment (Star Online 2000a). Notwithstanding serious reservations (see Tan 2001), NGOs adopted the view that Musa and Suhakam deserved the chance to demonstrate their commitment to advancing human rights. Moreover, some NGO representatives argued that boycotting Suhakam, however flawed it might be, was politically problematic given that its establishment was something of a government concession after years of NGO demands for a human rights commission. Meanwhile, an early indication of the role some members of the government saw Suhakam playing was provided by Rais Yatim, Minister in the Prime

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Minister’s Department, when he tried to counter the findings of a report released in April 2000 by the International Bar Association (and other distinguished international legal bodies), Justice in Jeopardy: Malaysia 2000. The report condemned the lack of independence of the judiciary and the unnecessary repression of fundamental liberties, notably involving the government’s political adversaries (see Cowdery 2000). However, on human rights, Rais (quoted in Star Online 2000b) asserted that: ‘We do not have to follow the definition set out by the United Nations or by the Westerners,’ adding that, ‘[w]e have to come up with our own definition based on truth and justice’. Ominously, he declared that: ‘The important thing is that now we have a Human Rights Commission . . . ’ (quoted in Star Online 2000b).

SU HAKAM ’ S EARLY P OT E NT IA L During the first few years of the Suhakam’s operation it demonstrated greater preparedness to prosecute the causes of human rights than was anticipated— not least by the government. Through a series of reports and recommendations it exposed assorted abuses of state power, attempted to push the official boundaries of human rights beyond the narrow limits intended in the 1999 Act, and threw down the gauntlet to the government on international treaty obligations. In its first annual report, Suhakam expressed concerns about a range of laws providing detention without trial which commissioners believed infringed Articles 3, 9, and 10 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR): the Internal Security Act 1960; the Emergency (Public Order and Prevention of Crime) Ordinance 1969; and the Dangerous Drugs (Special Preventive Measures) Act 1985. It also urged expeditious ratification of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights; the International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights; and the Convention Against Torture. Suhakam also incurred the wrath of various political and bureaucratic elites following the mid-2001 release of its thirty-two page ‘Freedom of Assembly’ report into curbs on public rallies calling for the abolition of police permits for such assemblies. Prime Minister Mahathir emphatically dismissed the report on the basis that it ignored security considerations (Agence France-Presse 2001a). Musa also came under attack from government and UMNO Youth leaders for his related statement that the public should be allowed to congregate at the High Court when the verdict was given in the sodomy trial of Anwar (Abdul and Sajahan 2000). Shortly after, Suhakam released a report into allegations of police brutality against peaceful protesters who had gathered along the Kesas Highway

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near Kuala Lumpur on 5 November 2000, describing the treatment of detainees by police as ‘cruel and inhumane’ (Agence France-Presse 2001b). Mahathir lambasted the report as ‘Western influenced’ (quoted in Yusof 2002). The inquiry itself had faced serious obstruction from the police who failed to provide Suhakam commissioners with requested addresses of detainees (New Straits Times 2000). Thematic to the various other detailed reports and consultations by Suhakam in its first few years was a serious attempt to practically engage with the rhetoric espoused within UMNO about the importance of taking account of the need for social, cultural, religious, and economic protections and not just civil and political rights. In the process, a progressive agenda opened up that highlighted the indivisibility of these protections from civil and political rights. Hence, Suhakam inquired into the exploitation of foreign workers, customary land rights, indigenous rights, disability rights, women’s rights, housing problems for squatters, water access, and what a fair trial means in a syariah court (Whiting 2003: 81–2). No creative ideological counter-response from within the ruling coalition surfaced to put any substance to the idea of Asian values in human rights. The preparedness of Suhakam’s commissioners to question the use of the ISA and the legal process by which it was administered especially concerned the executive and its close judicial allies. Challenges to court rulings on habeas corpus applications by detainees received a stern rebuke from Justice Augustine Paul, who incidentally had earlier convicted Anwar in the first of his trials, describing a press statement by Suhakam on one of his decisions as ‘an unlawful interference with the lawful exercise of discretion of the detaining authority’ (quoted in Whiting 2003: 85). Yet Suhakam’s advocacy of human rights had black spots, notably involving breaches of rights involving minority ethnic Chinese or Indians. This was most conspicuous and controversial in the case of the 8 March 2001 riots that erupted in Kampung Medan on the outskirts of Kuala Lumpur resulting in six deaths and hundreds injured. Indian community leaders alleged that ethnic Malay police refused to intervene to protect those under attack (Prasana 2002). However, Mahathir’s portrayal of the riots as a strategy by his adversaries to destabilize his government and warnings by police that the Sedition Act would be deployed on criticisms of the handling of the riots suitably intimidated Suhakam’s commissioners. Ultimately one of its commissioners confirmed what everyone suspected: that Suhakam was taking account of the special sensitivity of the issue in the government’s eyes (Whiting 2003: 92–5).8 8

Other disappointments included the failure to pursue submissions relating to claims of cultural rights to a mother-tongue and community based education by ethnic Chinese and an alarming statement by Musa that as a consequence of September 11, ‘human rights must take a backseat’ (quoted in Maznah 2002: 244).

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REI N I N G I N S U H A KA M If the assessment of Suhakam’s performance in its first two and a half years was mixed among established civil society campaigners of human rights, the leadership of the BN government was less equivocal: Suhakam had to be reined in. Upon the expiry of Musa’s and his co-commissioners’ terms, in April 2002 what many saw as a more tame and predictable group was appointed. Abu Talib Othman, a former Attorney General under Mahathir who backed the controversial 1987 Operation Lalang ISA security sweeps detaining 106 people, replaced Musa. Abu Talib had also led the impeachment of various Supreme Court judges in the late 1980s, a critical element of Mahathir’s neutering of judicial independence. Commissioners most instrumental in Suhakam’s work irritating to the government were not reappointed.9 The new composition of Suhakam proved a tipping point for domestic NGOs, thirty-two of which collectively imposed a 100-day period of non-engagement with Suhakam in protest at the appointments and the government’s inaction on a long list of Suhakam reports and recommendations (Aliran Monthly 2002). But while engagement eventually resumed, the scepticism didn’t abate, although for lack of options many in the NGO community still periodically sought to use their criticisms to implore Suhakam into a more effective watchdog role (see Ramakrishnan 2003). However, whatever goodwill remained towards the Commission from NGO and political opposition communities, this largely evaporated as a result of Suhakam’s handling of public concerns about police actions during 2007 rallies organized by the Bersih (Clean)—or Gabungan Pilihanraya Bersih dan Adil (Coalition for Free and Fair Elections)—civil society elections watchdog calling for electoral reforms and abolition of detentions and a rally organized by the Hindu Rights Action Force (HINDRAF).10 At the first ceramah (political talk or lecture), on 8 September at Batu Buruk in Terengganu, police shot two people when they opened fire to disperse the crowd. It took more than two months of public pressure before Suhakam eventually decided to investigate. When police broke up another peaceful Bersih demonstration in central Kuala Lumpur on 10 November, Commissioner

9 This included Mehrun Siraj and Annuar Zainal Abidin, both of whom played pivotal roles in the inquiry into the Kesas Highway incident and the condemnation of police action. 10 Bersih originated in concerns about the 2004 general election and related allegations of assorted electoral irregularities including phantom voters, vote buying, questionable recounts, and physical intimidation at polling booths.

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N. Siva volunteered the view that this was carried out professionally and without violence. This was vigorously repudiated by assorted politicians and activists, including one of Malaysia’s leading human rights NGOs, Suaram or Suara Rakyat Malaysia (Voice of the Malaysian People), declaring: ‘That the commissioner had chosen to stand with the government instead of being independent and holding human rights principles is indeed appalling’ (Liu 2007), adding that for Siva to make his comments without first conducting an investigation, ‘only indicates that he had compromised the position of SUHAKAM on peaceful public assembly and is partial to the police’ (Liu 2007). Suaram called for Siva’s resignation (Yoges and Jaymal Zahiid 2007). Suhakam’s response to the arrest of five HINDRAF activists on 13 December 2007 following a 25 November rally involving 30,000 people in Kuala Lumpur protesting over the marginalization of and discrimination towards ethnic Indian Malaysians also came in for public criticism. Although more than sixty people were arrested following the rally, it was subsequent recourse to the ISA and the treatment of those detained that proved most contentious. HINDRAF claimed that one of the detainees, HINDRAF leader P. Uthayakumar, was not well and was being denied required medical treatment. However, a Suhakam report by Siva after visiting the detention centre but failing to interview Uthayakumar contradicted these claims. HINDRAF lawyers condemned the report, accused Suhakam of deceit, and called for Siva to resign (Jaymal Zahiid 2008). So serious and widespread were the concerns about Suhakam that in July 2008 the International Coordinating Committee (ICC) of National Human Rights Institutions put Suhakam on notice that it could have its current A status downgraded to B within a year for failing to comply, or demonstrate compliance, with the Paris Principles. Should this happen, Malaysia would be barred from sessions of the UNHRC and stripped of its membership and voting power in the ICC’s Asia Pacific Forum on National Human Rights Institutions. The ICC (2008: 5) indicated that retaining A status required the ‘independence of the commission . . . to be strengthened by the provision of [a] clear and transparent appointment and dismissal process’. It noted the ‘short term of office of the members of the commission (two years)’ and also underlined the ‘importance of ensuring the representation of different segments of society and their involvement in suggesting or recommending candidates to the governing body of the Commission’ (ICC 2008: 5). While considering the assessment of Suhakam unfair, Abu Talib also sheeted home responsibility for the Commission’s shortfalls towards the government and state institutions. On commissioners’ terms, for example, Abu Talib stated that: ‘We have recommended to the government as far back as 2002 to extend the period of appointment’ (quoted in Aniza 2008). Abu Talib

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(quoted in Aniza 2008) also pointed out that: ‘Year after year, our reports to Parliament detailing our activities and recommendations are never debated in Parliament, much less acted upon by relevant ministries. On the contrary, there is a tendency to undermine our independence by certain ministries’. Meanwhile, in a joint press statement endorsed by forty-four Malaysian NGOs, six changes to the Act were recommended to address the ICC’s concerns: direct reporting of Suhakam to the Parliament rather than the prime minister; establishing an independent and broadly representative search committee for appointing commissioners; the setting of clear criteria for commissioner eligibility reflecting human rights competence and independence; longer tenure for commissioners; wider powers and mandate to be accorded to Suhakam to promote and protect human rights, including amending the definition of human rights; and that Suhakam’s reports be debated in Parliament and its recommendations implemented (Group of Malaysian Human Rights NGOs 2008). Subsequently, forty-two NGOs boycotted Suhakam’s Malaysian Human Rights Day event on 9 September 2009, the tenth anniversary of Suhakam. A joint statement declared that ‘this date marks the establishment of SUHAKAM—an institution that has thus far failed in many counts in carrying out its mandate to promote and protect human rights’ (Suaram 2009).

SU HAKAM REFORMS AND NGO STRATEGIES Despite activists’ disappointment over Suhakam, the ICC review process instigated renewed attempts at harnessing it to a more independent watchdog role. The process also revealed that the government retained some sensitivity to the review’s potential impact for the BN’s international reputation. Activists thus exploited regional and international networks in an attempt to extract meaningful reforms to improve Suhakam. How resulting amendments to the Human Rights Commission of Malaysia Act 1999 are interpreted and implemented has since become a new focus of contention. The first batch of commissioners appointed since these changes have also been viewed more favourably by activists, leading to greater cooperation between Suhakam and human rights NGOs. That the government, on balance, had a preference for retaining rather than losing Suhakam’s ‘A’ status was evident when it rushed through amendments to the Act on 24 March 2009, just two days before the ICC’s scheduled meeting to deliberate on the matter. Under these amendments: a selection committee was created for appointing commissioners, comprising five members and

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headed by the Chief Secretary to the Government; commissioners’ terms of office were extended to three years with a maximum of two terms in office; and provision was made for the prime minister to determine suitable mechanisms, including key performance indicators, to assess commissioners’ performances. However, leading human rights NGOs Suaram and ERA Consumer argued these amendments were inadequate to address the ICC’s concerns about compliance with the Paris Principles. The ICC agreed and deferred the accreditation decision. What ensued was a protracted lobbying process wherein Malaysian NGOs adopted a three-pronged approach involving national, regional, and international networks.11 Nationally, Suaram and ERA Consumer worked closely with the Malaysian Bar Council on proposed amendments. Regionally, the Asian NGO Network on National Human Rights Institutions (ANNI), established in 2006 at a meeting of the Asian Forum for Human Rights and Development, was a key coalition partner. ANNI initiated the idea of a shadow report to the ICC and supported subsequent Malaysian NGO strategies to influence international opinion. ANNI’s secretariat was particularly useful in facilitating communications with the ICC. Malaysian human rights NGOs also held meetings with foreign missions in Malaysia in the lead up to the final decision on Suhakam’s status.12 This worked most effectively to ensure ICC delegates from European Union countries would be well informed and responsive to the need for further reforms.13 Consequently, the government further amended the Act on 22 June 2009 in two respects: specifying that three members of the selection committee be appointed from civil society, rather than three ‘eminent persons’; and the omission of the March amendments stating that opinions, views, or recommendations of the committee would not be binding on the prime minister. Acknowledging some progress but also the existence of outstanding concerns, the ‘A’ status was not finally awarded until 22 January 2010. How the first new commissioners were appointed in June 2010 under the amended Act nevertheless sparked trenchant criticisms from Malaysian NGOs. Suaram coordinator, John Lui, described the selection process as ‘flawed’ and ‘completely shrouded in secrecy’ (quoted in Rahmah 2010). A letter signed by twenty-nine NGOs to the chief secretary on 24 February 2010 that had urged

11 Interview by Garry Rodan with Ravin Karunanidhi, ERA Consumer Malaysia Secretary General, 21 June 2012, Kuala Lumpur. 12 Interview by Garry Rodan with Mohan Sankeran, former ERA Consumer Malaysia Secretary General, 21 June 2012, Kuala Lumpur. 13 Interview by Garry Rodan with Mohan Sankeran, former ERA Consumer Malaysia Secretary General, 21 June 2012, Kuala Lumpur.

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a transparent, participatory, and inclusive process in keeping with the Paris Principles had been ignored, according to activists. In particular, a request that the selection committee make the names and profiles of all candidates public and to hold interviews of them in public was not adhered to. Nevertheless, ERA Consumer’s Ravin Karunanidhi (2011) observed that ‘the membership of the Commission consists of a near satisfactory pluralism although a better gender representation would have been more favourable’. Indeed, the composition of the new commission appeared to represent an attempt to restore some of Suhakam’s earlier credibility with civil society critics. Hasmy Agam, a retired diplomat whose various senior posts included service as Malaysia’s permanent representative to the United Nations during 1998–2003, would chair the new seven-member commission. The other six commissioners included several with NGO or academic backgrounds not unrelated to human rights issues and/or the demonstrated ability to seriously engage with them.14 The broader political context of the government’s reforms to the Human Rights Commission Act and subsequent appointments to Suhakam is important to understanding these developments, and indeed the issues confronting the new commissioners. It included substantial electoral gains by the BN’s opponents at the 2008 general elections. With just 50% of the total vote in 2008, the BN retained 61% of seats largely due to electoral malapportionment, but even this could not protect its two-thirds majority needed for constitutional change in federal parliament. Anwar also regained a seat in parliament in a by-election within five months of the general election and the Bersih protest movement gained further momentum. Significantly, cooperation within and between opposition parties and civil society forces reflected what many saw as a breakthrough in multiethnic, and potentially non-ethnic, reformist perspectives in 2008 (Maznah 2008; Weiss 2009; Case 2010b). Growing material disparities within and between ethnic categories as well as inadequacies and political bias in regulatory, legal, and other institutions helped to strengthen and extend cross-ethnic coalitions. The BN’s model of capitalist development infused with ideologies of ethnicity

14 The new commissioners were: Vice Chairperson, Khaw Lake Tee, Dean of Law and Deputy Vice Chancellor (Development) at the University of Malaya; James Nayagam, who has a long history of professional work on behalf of abused children and the poor; Jannie Lasimbang, President of the Asia Indigenous People’s Pact; Muhammad Sha’ani B. Abdullah, Secretary General of the Federation of Malaysia Consumers’ Associations; Mahmood Zuhdi Hj. A. Majid, Deputy Dean of the International Institute of Islamic Thought and Civilisation at the International Islamic University of Malaysia; and Detta anak Samen, a native customary rights lawyer and advocate.

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and race rationalizing control of its governance institutions appeared to be under political strain. With a future change of government now presenting as a realistic possibility, the sense of urgency about electoral reform championed by Bersih was heightened. Hence, by late 2010 plans were afoot for another public rally, which were reinforced by controversy over electoral procedures in the April 2011 Sarawak state election. Bersih activists demanded a royal commission to probe allegations about irregularities in a number of states, including of a citizenship for votes campaign, and urged the adoption of indelible ink to prevent multiple voting and an electoral roll audit. Bersih was deemed an outlawed organization on 1 July,15 and a planned Bersih 2.0 rally for 9 July banned. Yet even pre-rally arrests did not prevent protesters taking to the streets, estimates of which ranged from 10,000 to 50,000, who were confronted with water cannon, tear gas, and other intimidation. More than sixteen hundred arrests were made (The Economist 2011b; Palani and Sukumaran 2011). Undeterred, a Bersih 3.0 rally on 28 April 2012 which some estimated involved more than two hundred thousand protesters demanded a cleanup of electoral rolls before the next general elections, resulting in more tear gas, brutality, and at least four hundred and seventy arrests (Hookway 2012a; Human Rights Watch 2012a; Channel NewsAsia 2012).16 Under Chairperson Agam and the other new commissioners, Suhakam’s approach to both some of the substantive demands of protesters and to Bersih and other public demonstrations shifted. On the former, in particular, Suhakam became more open to engagement on electoral issues. The commission embraced the proposition that a valid vote, uncompromised by electoral irregularities, is a human right that all Malaysians should be free to exercise. Agam’s view that dialogue with the Election Commission is necessary to support an important aspect of human rights—political rights—is something previous commissioners eschewed as ‘interference’ with another independent commission.17 On the latter, Suhakam renewed its much earlier calls for the government to recognize the rights on freedom of assembly under the UDHR and the Malaysian Constitution and displayed a new commitment to scrutinizing how police and other authorities conduct themselves at protests. This began with

15 This decision was successfully challenged in the High Court when on 24 July 2012 it was ruled that Bersih was a legal organization, although the Malaysian government was expected to appeal this decision. 16 Protesters also called for political parties to get equal access to government-controlled broadcasters and newspapers and for Malaysians living overseas to be entitled to vote. 17 Interview by Garry Rodan with Hasmy Agam, 19 June 2012, Kuala Lumpur.

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Suhakam sending an official monitoring team to the anti-ISA candlelight vigil at Petaling Jaya on 1 August 2010 and included Bersih 2.0 and Bersih 3.0 rallies. A Suhakam report into Bersih 2.0 found clear infringement of human rights by police, especially in firing tear gas in the vicinity of public amenities such as a hospital and the KL Central Train Station (Arukesamy 2012). Against this background, the Malaysian Bar Council and Bersih leaders refused to participate in a government appointed panel to investigate police violence at the Bersih 3.0 rally, raising concerns about the independence of the panel chief, Hanif Omar. Instead, they expressed confidence in Suhakam, which announced its own inquiry (Chooi 2012). Suhakam criticisms during 2011 and 2012 of aspects of the government’s Peaceful Assembly Act and Security Offences Bill for wide ranging powers to police and other authorities also earned it praise from human rights activists. Furthermore, Suhakam’s decision to hold a national enquiry into land rights of indigenous people, as well as its stands on refugees and sexual minorities were all described as ‘progressive’ by Suaram (2011). Thus, while BN supporters viewed some Suhakam initiatives as ‘anti-government’,18 human rights NGOs embarked on a strategy of encouraging and supporting Suhakam to consolidate and extend on this trajectory. Yet not all of the progressive causes taken up by Suhakam enjoy universal support among different elements of the accountability reform movement. On the one hand, therefore, PAS spiritual leader, Nik Aziz Nik Mat, declared it was compulsory for all Muslims to attend the Bersih 3.0 rally as all Muslims must ‘stand up against political parties not behaving in accordance with Islamic principles’—referring specifically to allegations of electoral roll discrepancies (Mahtani 2012). Yet, on the other hand, PAS Youth joined with pro-BN Perkasa and Hindu Sangam to condemn the annual sexuality rights festival Seksualiti Merdeka and called on the Malaysian Bar Council and Suhakam to resign for allegedly failing to uphold the law, ‘promoting immoral lifestyles and violating the federal constitution’ (Malaysiakini 2011). Such tensions within accountability coalitions are manageable so long as reform emphasis remains primarily focused on arresting abuses of power by the police and other authorities regulating political and economic governance. Such was the unanimity on these other issues among those arguing liberal, democratic, and moral cases for accountability reform, and the growing political impact of such views, that BN leaders felt it necessary to respond both rhetorically and through symbolic legislative initiatives. One of the first expressions of this was Prime Minister Abdullah Badawi’s attempt to

18

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Interview by Garry Rodan with Hasmy Agam, 19 June 2012, Kuala Lumpur.

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distinguish himself from his predecessor, Mahathir Mohamad, by invoking Islam in his ‘zero tolerance for corruption’ campaign in 2003 and declared commitment to increased public accountability. His failure to deliver on this cost him dearly at the 2008 polls. By contrast, Anwar proved adept at pitching his accountability appeals to all three ideologies, including linking concepts of freedom and democracy with Islamic intellectual traditions (see Rodan 2009a: 191; also Anwar 2010). In his appeal to economic liberals in particular, Anwar (2008) took blatant aim at the underlying political economy: ‘With transparency and accountability in place, cronyism and corruption will die a natural death thus immediately lowering transaction costs while enhancing improvements in service delivery’. Due to the efforts of the BN’s opponents and civil society critics, by the time Najib Razak took over as prime minister in April 2009, concepts of accountability, good governance, and transparency dominated political discourse. Najib couched his rhetoric accordingly, both by trying to project a vision of economic and political liberalism (see, for example, Najib 2009, 2010). Emblematic of the former was the Economic Transformation Programme, which projected a more meritocratic and pro-market society without abolishing ethnic Malay affirmative action (The Economist 2011a). Meanwhile, his Political Transformation Plan encapsulated his approach to the latter. Indeed, in the name of this plan, Najib enacted specific legislative reforms meant to take some of the wind out of the human rights accountability reform movement sails, or at least try to demonstrate responsiveness to concerns at home and abroad about political repression by authorities. In particular, against the background of Bersih 2.0, Najib (2011) announced in September 2011 that he would scrap the ISA. Its repeal via the new Security Offences Law passed in April 2012, stating that no person would be arrested ‘solely for his [sic] political belief or activity’ but still allowed for detention without trial for up to twenty-eight days (Mahtani 2012). The Peaceful Assembly Act passed in December 2011 was also linked to the Political Transformation Plan, but it introduced new restrictions on where and how public protests could occur, barring street rallies and availing police and the home minister with wide new discretionary powers.19 Then in July 2012 it was announced that the Sedition Act (1948) would be replaced with a National Harmony Act. According to Najib: ‘Basically, we want to create one Malaysia where the principles of human rights is [sic] upheld, the individual’s liberty to 19 Among these powers, police could impose conditions on the place, date, and time of assemblies and organizers would need to provide ten days advance notice of any proposed meeting. Critics also argue that the home minister’s powers to decide on appeals are not open to adequate judicial safeguards against arbitrary denial of freedom of assembly. See FIDH (2011).

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express opinions openly is welcomed, and the interest of the individuals and community is balanced’ (quoted in Malaysiakini 2012). This caveat about the need for a replacement act necessarily raised suspicions among human rights activists (Hafiz 2012). In effect, the BN government wanted to both project itself as seeking to accommodate critics from the accountability reform movement, but at the same time it sought, in particular, to impair that movement’s chief modus operandi for political mobilization: street demonstrations. Yet activists’ experiences through this modus operandi ensured human rights remained at the centre of their accountability reform agendas—whatever ideological differences were contained within this coalition. Breaking that nexus would be difficult for the BN.

SINGAPORE: MERITO C RACY VERSUS AC C O UN TA BIL IT Y In contrast with Malaysia, the city-state’s brand of state capitalism does not generate inherent intra-elite conflicts over economic and related power distributions that ignite the same governance concerns among investors and citizens, nor the same related opportunities for mobilizing ruling party opponents and critics. Moreover, while independent labour is weak in both countries, Singapore state capitalism has more comprehensively undermined other alternative power bases outside the state by either domestic business or middle classes (Rodan 1996b, 2008). Consequently, civil society is more limited, more politically fragmented, and lacking the capacity for collective action achieved by counterparts in Malaysia. This does not mean that state-society power relations in Singapore are static. On the contrary, the constant refinement of techniques and mechanisms of state political co-option is integral to attempts at containing independent social and political forces (Rodan and Jayasuriya 2007), amongst whom there are elements searching for ways to expand genuinely independent political space—including by harnessing the internet and social media (George 2012; Abbott 2011; Gomez 2008). However, the context within which accountability coalitions form is quite different from Malaysia. The contrasting scale, methods, and impact of collective action towards pressuring the Singapore government to introduce a human rights commission demonstrate this. Singapore’s political leaders do dabble in claims that accountability is a feature of governance in Singapore. However, in their view a meritocratic elite largely obviates the need for political accountability beyond

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general elections—including through meaningful horizontal accountability. Independent civil society watchdogs have no place. The fundamental importance of talent and integrity to the functioning of institutions and the overall social, economic, and political progress of Singapore has a long and consistent history in PAP ideology. As far back as 1971, Lee Kuan Yew (quoted in Josey 1974: 214) dramatically contended: ‘Singapore is a meritocracy. And these men have risen to the top by their own merit, hard work and high performance. Together they are a closely-knit and coordinated hard core. If all the 300 were to crash in one jumbo jet, then Singapore would disintegrate’. Although Lee Kuan Yew came to see Singapore as less vulnerable, this was because more people with the same talent and qualities became spread across the upper echelons of Singapore’s institutions. As Lee Kuan Yew (2003: 26) explained: ‘My colleagues and I have institutionalized honesty, integrity and meritocracy into the systems we have created. Each generation of leaders has the duty to recruit the people of integrity, ability and commitment as their successors’. Crucially, what has been institutionalized is still dependent on a continual injection of the right people: ‘The system is there, but the system cannot run with inadequate, mediocre men; you need top men, able men to choose able people to join you, to make sure that at every level you have the most able, the most meritocratic (people) in charge’ (Lee Kuan Yew 2008). These views were closely echoed by Lee Kuan Yew’s prime ministerial successor, Goh Chok Tong (1999b, 2006), and subsequent Prime Minister, Lee Hsien Loong (2003, 2007). Indeed, one of the latter’s pronouncements on governance helps clarify just how subordinate a role accountability institutions play in Singapore when he identified four broad principles guiding governance. After singling out leadership as key, the others mentioned were the need to anticipate change and stay relevant, to reward work and work for reward, and, finally, to create a stake for everyone and opportunities for all (Lee Hsien Loong 2004). Accountability didn’t feature at all. Elsewhere he acknowledged the importance of accountability, though to ‘stakeholders’ rather than citizens, in the context of cautioning against uncritically superimposing institutions adopted in other countries: In every country, leaders and institutions that uphold the rule of law, ensure accountability to stakeholders, and provide a voice for the people are critical aspects of good government. But unthinkingly importing institutions from other countries and grafting them into the local political system can end up doing more harm than good (Lee Hsien Loong 2005).

Accountability administered through civil society organizations is something the PAP is especially averse to. Transparency International (2006: 34) observed in its analysis of Singapore’s National Integrity System when specifically

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examining how corruption is combated that: ‘Members of CSOs [civil society organizations] have not been threatened or harmed for advocacy against corruption. However, the government is not supportive of NGOs’ involvement or monitoring’. As PAP leaders see it, it is through the institutions of parliament and elections that democratic accountability is enacted. Yet, leaving aside the question of just how fair electoral contests are in Singapore (Singaporeans for Democracy 2011; Rodan 1996a), no amount of PAP parliamentary dominance is seen by its leaders to warrant additional checks on power. As prime minister in 1999, Goh was asked whether, since there were just two elected opposition members in a parliament of eighty-one, ‘it might be important to have a robust press as a watchdog’? He responded that: I would not agree entirely with that. I mean, if things are wrong, the media can report it. I have no problem with that. But watchdog, meaning that they can investigate every matter, espousing views and setting their own agenda, I would not agree with that. My view is quite straightforward: if you want to set a political agenda for Singapore, then you have to be in the political arena. Otherwise you don’t have the accountability and the responsibility of looking after the place. We have got to face the people (Goh 1999a).

The PAP thus embraces a very centralized concept of horizontal political accountability that envisages little or no space for social accountability. There are assorted formal processes and procedures within the state that might be seen to constitute a layer of horizontal accountability. PAP leaders point to these at times to deflect criticisms about a lack of accountability. Thus, for example, the auditor general reports directly to the president and is a statutory appointment. There are institutions that are also described by the government as independent of the executive, including the Elections Department and the Corrupt Practices Investigation Bureau—neither of which have formally legislated independence and are technically located within the Prime Minister’s Office. But this ‘independence’ is problematic for a more general reason, namely the close, historical fusion between ruling party and state that has a pervasive effect on the culture within which power is exercised by authorities. As was observed by Transparency International (2006: 8), ‘the provisions in Singapore on public transparency of government agencies and personal interests of politicians are limited. The Singapore system instead reserves the oversight to the political masters’. Critical scrutiny of the meritocracy myth invites serious reaction from authorities—notably defamation suits, as opposition politicians J.B. Jeyaretnam and Chee Soon Juan in particular discovered (Rajah 2012; Seow

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2006; Lydgate 2003).20 The Singapore government has over many years been dismissive of criticisms from authoritative international legal and human rights organizations condemning the way that Singapore’s legal system has been deployed to curtail free expression and political engagement (Amnesty International 2006; Littlemore 1997; Asia Watch Committee 1989; Frank et al. 1991; IBAHRI 2008). However, both ASEAN Charter 2007 commitments on human rights and the United Nations Universal Periodic Review (UPR) process provided new opportunities for civil society actors in Singapore to try and advance the case not just for human rights accountability reform in general, but specifically for the city-state’s own human rights commission.

STIMULAT I N G AC T I VI S M : A S E A N CH A RT E R A ND U P R As with Malaysia, Singapore governments have ratified few international human rights mechanisms, among the outstanding being the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. However, Singapore chaired ASEAN from August 2007 until July 2008 following the organization not only specifying in its Charter the objectives of democracy, good governance, the rule of law, human rights, and fundamental freedoms, but also specifically committing to the establishment of a regional human rights body. Moreover, Article 1.13 of the ASEAN Charter stated that one of ASEAN’s purposes is to ‘promote a people-oriented ASEAN in which all sectors of society are encouraged to participate in, and benefit from, the process of ASEAN integration and community building’. This had implications for the process by which a regional human rights mechanism should be developed and refined. By October 2009, the ASEAN Intergovernmental Commission on Human Rights (AICHR) was formally established. Not all ASEAN-member governments were keen on the idea but growing international concern about brutal repression in Burma finally elicited this response. Member governments were also divided over key aspects of AICHR’s objectives and modus operandi (see Abdul 2007). What matters for this discussion is that both the inclusion of articles in the ASEAN Charter on human rights and the subsequent process of

20 For example, an article in the newspaper of the Singapore Democratic Party (SDP), The New Democrat, prior to the 2006 general election questioned the response time of the government and state regulatory institutions to problems over disclosures and uses of public funds by the National Kidney Foundation. Any chance of a robust debate about these issues prior to the election was immediately blunted when Lee Hsien Loong, Lee Kuan Yew, and Goh Chok Tong filed defamation suits against SDP politicians.

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implementing AICHR, while falling short of expectations and hopes of many civil society actors in the region and beyond, nevertheless provided a stimulus and rationale for greater collective action among Singapore human rights activists. Once the ASEAN Eminent Persons Group made mention in January 2007 of the need for a human rights mechanism as part of its recommendations for inclusion in the ASEAN Charter, the Manila-based Working Group for an ASEAN Human Rights Mechanism sought to play a role in galvanizing this commitment and refining the proposal. This Working Group was established in 1995, comprising representatives from government institutions, NGOs, parliamentary human rights committees, representatives of government institutions, and academia within the region. However, within Singapore there was an absence of organized activists to capitalize on this. Sinapan Samydorai, president of the small NGO Think Centre, initiated efforts in 2000 to facilitate a Singapore Working Group but it wasn’t until after meetings in September 2007 that two organizations emerged as possibilities. One of these was MARUAH (Malay for ‘dignity’), which became the Singapore Working Committee articulating with the Manila-based regional secretariat. This formative group’s seventeen-person committee included lawyers, doctors, academics, students, writers, and social activists. It was careful not to alarm the Singapore government, explaining on its website (MARUAH n.d.[a]) that it ‘appreciates that human rights is still relatively new in the Singapore context. As such we intend to approach the issue of human rights at an appropriate pace, with a PPP (public-private-people) model built around partnerships with multiple stakeholders’. It also declared that: ‘MARUAH will be mindful of the need for a non-partisan stance on human rights’. Its stated mission was to: ‘inform, educate and advocate on human rights; provide a Singaporean perspective on the establishment of an ASEAN human rights mechanism; formulate a process for Singapore civil society to establish space in the area of human rights; and increase the comfort between the state and Singapore civil society’ (MARUAH n.d.[b]). Despite this innocuous language, MARUAH’s ‘Position Statement on the ASEAN Charter’ critically evaluated the existing ASEAN Charter articles and cautioned against a toothless regional commission (MARUAH 2008). It prescribed measures to deal with non-compliance, to replace vague consensus-based decision-making processes with rules-based ones, and to adopt an unambiguous embrace of human rights universalism. Another group to emerge comprised just nine people, the ASEAN Charter Article 14 Project Group, also known as SG Human Rights. Its four objectives were to: engage Singaporeans on the ASEAN Human Rights Mechanism; promote human rights education; advocate for a national human rights commission;

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and campaign for ratification of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR). The size of the group was tactical, as ten or more people would have required seeking formal registration under the Societies Act entailing vague wording enabling restrictive conditions on political activities.21 Self-described as ‘a motley crew of individuals without political clout, organizational affiliations or government funding, who believe in human rights’ (SG Human Rights 2007), SG Human Rights also explained that it was ‘cognizant of Singapore’s link and influence to Burma and in solidarity with the Burmese community in Singapore’. It petitioned ASEAN leaders meeting in Singapore to act against the Burma regime and called on the Singapore government for a national human rights commission. However, SG Human Rights was disbanded in June 2008, explaining that: ‘There is space and need for self-organized and autonomous initiatives; for different lines of action to be taken and our preference is for direct action’ (SG Human Rights 2008). There was more to this statement than met the eye. Activists differed over the best way to engage the Singapore government on this and other human rights issues, not all believing that a combative posture and aligning with formal political actors was counterproductive. This necessarily placed limits on the extent and nature of coalition building among human rights accountability advocates. The Singapore Democratic Party (SDP) under Chee Soon Juan, in particular, had been the most vocal and consistent voice on human rights issues. Chee and his SDP colleagues had faced numerous court actions and even prison terms for conducting public assemblies without requisite licences in their efforts to confront what they saw as laws curbing basic human rights (Amsterdam and Peroff 2009).22 At a March 2000 meeting hosted by the Think Centre, Chee (2000) pronounced: ‘If we want a human rights commission in Singapore, the first thing we must do is confront our fear, and for any politically conscious Singaporean, the greatest nightmare is the ISD [Internal Security Department]’. Chee was not optimistic such fears among civil society actors would easily dissipate, including the fear of being viewed by authorities as acting in a partisan fashion in joint activities involving social and political activists.23 Human rights NGOs linking up with the SDP in defying curbs on street demonstrations seemed especially 21

This includes provisions for societies deemed to be used for purposes ‘prejudicial to public peace, welfare or good order in Singapore’ to be dissolved. 22 Defiance of the Public Entertainments and Meetings Act was central to the civil disobedience campaign led by Chee. This followed many experiences of lengthy delays and invariably the rejection of applications for licences to speak and assemble in public places on vague grounds of public order considerations. Amendments to the Public Order Act in 2009 giving police officers authority to deal with illegal assemblies also appeared designed to counter Chee’s civil disobedience strategy. 23 Chee (interview by Garry Rodan with Chee Soon Juan, 28 June 2012, Singapore 2012) recounted that his attempt to persuade NGO activists that there is a difference between being ‘political’ and ‘partisan’ in advocating human rights made no headway. For him, human rights advocacy should not be considered partisan unless the assumption is that not all political parties in Singapore support them.

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unlikely. Yet more than a decade later he reflected: ‘I keep coming back to this point that without the fundamental freedom of assembly and speech we’re not going to get anywhere’.24 Significantly, whereas strategies for progressing human rights accountability have divided activists in Singapore, in Malaysia they have tended to be a point of convergence regardless of other differences over the rationales and priorities for human rights accountability reform. The irony of Singapore chairing ASEAN at this juncture prompted Singapore’s Ambassador-at-Large, Tommy Koh, who chaired the ASEAN Charter High-Level Task Force, to publicly ask Minister Mentor Lee Kuan Yew in February 2008 if he thought the PAP might envisage such an institution or an ombudsman as part of the evolution of the ‘Singaporean system of democracy’ (quoted in Loh 2008a: 3). After stating that it was ‘a matter for the present generation to decide’, Lee Kuan Yew added: ‘The ultimate objective is clean, corruption-free, capable, effective, meritocratic, fair government. As long as we remove malpractices, I don’t see the need for more political policing’. Lee Kuan Yew (2000: 542) also asserted that in the past the electorate had adjudicated on what some of his critics viewed as malpractice, such as the political use of the ISA. This, in his view, was quite sufficient accountability. The prospects of Lee Kuan Yew’s carefully recruited younger PAP colleagues or other strategic members of the wider state-party establishment embracing the idea of a national human rights commission was also unlikely. Thus, the newly-appointed Attorney-General, Walter Woon, took the opportunity of his first public address in that capacity in early 2008 to attack what he described as human rights ‘fanatics’ for whom human rights had become a religion. Woon was addressing around one hundred lawyers and embassy officials at a law society gathering to launch its Public and International Law Committee’s lecture series. The first project of the new committee was to study the relevance of the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights in Singapore Law. Rejecting ‘a misconception that Singapore officialdom is against human rights’, Woon contended that, ‘[w]hat we are against is the assumption of some people that when they define what’s human rights that decision is the decision of the rest of humanity’ (quoted in Loh 2008b). The resistance to the concept of human rights universalism runs deep among Singapore’s politico-bureaucratic class. Cultural relativism also serves as an important ideological supplement to meritocracy in deflecting calls for liberal or democratic accountability in human rights. Despite MARUAH’s cautious approach in engaging the Singapore government over the AICHR and its implications, most of which was conducted

24

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Interview by Garry Rodan with Chee Soon Juan, 28 June 2012, Singapore.

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through meetings with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs Permanent Secretary Bilahari Kausikan, it was not averse to occasionally publicly challenging attacks on human rights from establishment figures. MARUAH committee members Siew Kum Hong and Constance Singam rebuked Woon’s remarks through letters to the press. Siew described the attorney-general’s reported statements as ‘regrettable’, adding that ‘[s]uch a dismissal of sincerely-held views, even those expressed immoderately, is not helpful to engagement between a government and its citizens’ (Siew 2008). Singam (2008) observed that ‘[c]onsidering the limitations imposed on civil society activism in Singapore and the official ambivalence over the term “human rights,” I applaud and celebrate the so-called “fanatics” of human rights for the work they do’. Woon (2008; see also Lim 2008) subsequently clarified that his comments were directed at outsiders, that this ‘is a debate for us, not for those who know nothing of our history, culture or values and who do not have our interests at heart’. The paraphrasing of the PAP position in this clarification betrayed the strength of Woon’s own cultural relativism. Moreover, one of Woon’s central examples of potentially dangerous imported human rights ideas was based on his observation that in some countries people assert the right to insult the prophet Mohamad, asking ‘is this what we want’? However, Article 20 of the ICCPR prohibits ‘advocacy of national, racial or religious hatred that constitutes incitement to discrimination, hostility or violence’, which means Singapore is at liberty to ban such speech (Tobin 1995). Of course, it is not this area where Singapore is criticized but in the suppression of media freedom, defamation suits to silence critics, and curbs on public assembly. What this exchange between Woon and representatives of Singapore’s incipient human rights NGO community highlighted was the continuing ambiguity among Singapore officialdom towards the concept of universal human rights. Similarly, in its letter responding to a report on human rights in Singapore by the International Bar Association Human Rights Institute (2008), the Ministry of Law (2008) explained that ‘[h]uman rights are interpreted and implemented according to specific histories, cultures and circumstances of each country. Every society must find and decide the appropriate balance between rights and responsibilities for themselves’. These cultural relativist views did not differ in essence from those held by Malaysia’s leaders who nevertheless opted for a national human rights commission. The difference was the context within which they were espoused. Singapore’s leaders felt less reason to appease domestic or international critics by way of rhetorical or institutional concessions on human rights. Human rights accountability had not been fused with wider political coalition building involving democratic, liberal, and moral reform aspirations. Nevertheless,

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another phase in the process of trying to forge more effective collective efforts to push for a national human rights commission, and other human rights reforms, was presented by the advent of the United Nations first UPR of Singapore, which was scheduled for 2011. Under the UPR mechanism, introduced in 2008, human rights practices of all states in the world were to be reviewed every four years. The announcement in 2010 that Singapore would be evaluated the following year precipitated a new degree of cooperation and focus among NGOs on human rights issues. Indeed, for the first time, something approximating meaningful political coalitions among NGOs surfaced for this exercise. Thus, the case for a national human rights commission, and other reforms, moved from a regional to an international context. However, as with the AICHR, converting this opportunity into effective pressure on the Singapore government for accountability concessions proved no less difficult. The opportunity to make submissions to the UNHRC under the UPR gave rise to the Coalition of Singapore NGOs (COSINGO). This comprised six organizations in addition to MARUAH which coordinated their collective UPR submission. COSINGO included groups advocating the rights of women, sexual minorities, people with disabilities, and migrant workers.25 There were also various separate submissions from COSINGO members and other NGOs. This included Think Centre and Singaporeans for Democracy— the latter established in 2010 under the executive directorship of James Gomez, a former director of Think Centre. To put this in perspective, the Coalition of Malaysian NGOs involved in Malaysia’s 2009 UPR comprised fifty-six different organizations. Nevertheless, the UPR provided an incentive for emerging human rights groups to explore avenues for collective and complementary action. Consequently, calls for a national human rights body were thematic and emphatic in the different UPR submissions. There were also arguments for the review or repeal of restrictions on demonstrations and public processions under the Public Order Act, preventive detention without trial under the ISA, and the need for reforms to enable free and fair elections.26 Heightened cooperation among Singapore NGOs was not without its tensions. The schedule for the UPR coincided with the lead up to the 7 May

25 The NGOs were: AWARE; Challenged People’s Alliance and Network (CAN!); Deaf and Hard of Hearing Federation; Humanitarian Organization for Migration Economies; People Like Us; Singaporeans for Democracy; and Transient Workers Count Too. 26 For the UPR submissions by COSINGO, individual NGOs, and the Singapore government see

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2011 general election.27 Gomez’s decision to run as a candidate for the SDP caused anxiety within COSINGO because of a view among its ranks that links between Singaporeans for Democracy and political parties could undercut the potential to engage and influence the Singapore government.28 Nevertheless, these proved manageable enough so that a unified and collective voice on the desirability of a national human rights commission was conveyed to the UN Human Rights Council for consideration and debate. The result was that, among the recommendations made by the Council was that the Singapore government establish a human rights institution in accordance with the Paris Principles (UNHRC 2011a). In rejecting the May 2011 UN Human Rights Council recommendations from other states arising out of the UPR to establish a national human rights body, the Singapore government’s addendum was brief and dismissive. It simply read: ‘Singapore notes that UN member countries continue to have different approaches to the idea of a National Human Rights Institution. Singapore prefers a decentralized, but interlocking and mutually reinforcing system of human rights protection. In Singapore’s experience, such a system has worked well’ (quoted in UNHRC 2011b: 3; see also Chang 2011). Not surprisingly, it continued to resist a wide range of other prescriptions, including on core civil and political rights issues and the establishment of an independent elections commission. Asia Director of Human Rights Watch, Phil Robertson, observed that: ‘Singapore commits to human rights reform only at the margins, well away from any measures that would ensure meaningful freedom of association, expression and assembly, which the government considers threatening to its unchallenged power’ (quoted in Chhoa-Howard 2011). Clearly increased activism in Singapore was still some way off applying comparable pressure on government to what counterparts in Malaysia had achieved. As per the AICHR initiative, external factors helped open up new regional and international networks of ideas and solidarity in the struggle to advance human rights accountability in the city-state. This included, for example, MARUAH links with the UK-based international NGO Article 19 that advocates freedom of expression and has attempted to pressure ASEAN foreign ministers on their adherence to the ASEAN Human Rights Declaration. Yet the utility of such networks is necessarily mediated by domestic factors. In the absence of internal ruling elite conflicts and with unresolved differences

27 The SDP did not make an individual submission to the UPR, the demands of the election campaign taking priority at that time (interview by Garry Rodan with Chee Soon Juan, 28 June 2012, Singapore). 28 Interview by Garry Rodan with Braema Mathi, MARUAH president, 29 June 2012, Singapore; personal email communication by Garry Rodan with Braema Mathi, MARUAH president, 8 November 2012.

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over the appropriate modus operandi for progressing accountability reform, NGOs in Singapore appear no closer to forcing the PAP government’s hand on a national human rights commission. Indeed, MARUAH president Braema Mathi concedes that a national commission remains a distant objective.29 Thus, while it continues to be a core aspiration, strategic thinking among activists has recently focused on the ISA as a way of possibly galvanizing public opinion and embarrassing the Singapore government into more serious engagement on human rights. This strategy attempts to capitalize on 2012 marking the twenty-fifth anniversary of Operation Spectrum under which twenty-two people were arrested for allegedly being ‘Marxist conspirators’ against the Singapore state. Many of these detainees were lay Catholic social activists, some of whom began exploring links with an opposition party to push for better migrant worker protections and conditions (Haas 1989; Barr 2010).30 A June 2012 rally at Hong Lim Park, Singapore’s regulated and only legal locus for free speech, launched this new campaign and attracted around five hundred people (Jacobs 2012). Yet even this issue gives expression to tactical differences among Singapore activists. MARUAH’s call for an inquiry into the 1987 detentions is premised on the claim that those arrested were advancing a social rather than a political agenda. According to Braema,31 though, ‘some groups understand where we are heading and they are trying not to cloud the issue by asking to abolish the ISA. Some do not understand’. The outright rejection of the PAP’s insistence on NGOs being confined to ‘non-partisan’ activities—also embedded in the distinction between social and political activities the ruling party emphasizes—remains something that only a minority of activists openly advocate.32 Even less of those have embraced defiance of Singapore’s restrictive laws on freedom of public assembly and protest as a modus operandi for human rights accountability reform. By contrast, that modus operandi has helped galvanize the ruling elite’s opponents in Malaysia.

29

Interview by Garry Rodan with Braema Mathi, MARUAH president, 29 June 2012, Singapore. Several former detainees have recently published reflections on their experiences. See Teo and Low 2012; Teo 2010. 31 Interview by Garry Rodan with Braema Mathi, MARUAH president, 29 June 2012, Singapore. 32 Despite MARUAH’s barring members of political parties from joining the organization and its general attempt to de-politicize human rights, in November 2010 it was gazetted as a Political Association under the Political Donations Act. This Act was introduced in 2000 according to the government to prevent foreign groups from interfering in domestic politics through donations to political associations. According to Braema (interview by Garry Rodan with Braema Mathi, MARUAH president, 29 June 2012, Singapore), the gazetting has had a crippling financial impact on MARUAH. 30

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The Politics of Accountability in Southeast Asia C O N C LU S IO N

The adoption of accountability rhetoric and institutional reform by the Malaysian government has been a defensive political strategy meant to placate critics and project a sense of commitment to reform. Indeed, to some extent domestic and international disenchantment with a wide range of state power abuses associated with state capitalism and related patronage systems imposed the concept of accountability on the ruling coalition. The establishment of a national human rights commission might even be viewed as a desperate measure in the face of widespread international criticism of Anwar’s treatment and broad mobilizations against the ruling coalition boosted by human rights concerns regarding Anwar. However, once established, Suhakam has become a new site of contentious politics that has at times been incorporated into the strategies of human rights activists to try and apply reform pressure on the Malaysian government and authorities. Importantly, the adoption of accountability rhetoric and reform in an attempt to appease critics of Malaysia’s human rights record, including the performance of Suhakam, is a response to a coalition of social and political forces that are variously inspired by democratic, liberal, and moral ideologies of accountability. What these forces share is a desire to arrest the arbitrary and politically biased exercise of state power, be it in order to facilitate more competitive markets, the liberties of individuals, the authority of citizens over their political representatives, or the moral basis of public decision-making. Moreover, recourse to street demonstrations and other forms of public mobilization have meant that many of these forces have directly experienced the repressive powers of the state. This has only reinforced the importance attached to human rights reforms to curb state powers and the legitimacy of defying authorities through public mobilizations. In Singapore, state capitalism’s consolidation and elite cohesion have provided few opportunities for accountability reform coalitions. Abuses and the political use of state power are more selective and not integral to the fostering of state-private sector alliances. Intra-elite frictions over the dispersing of resources are not a simmering or periodic problem. Furthermore, the considerable ideological investment in the myth of meritocracy does not sit comfortably with either liberal or democratic accountability. While meritocracy and liberalism are not intrinsically at odds, in a context of state capitalism the PAP has little interest in embracing ideas institutionalizing individual economic or political rights. Instead, it champions a moral concept of accountability emphasizing the integrity of PAP political leaders and those appointed by it to

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the bureaucracy. This resonates most plausibly with the reproduction of the existing political, social, and economic order. Coalition building around human rights in general and the goal of a national human rights body in particular has therefore been a much more difficult exercise in Singapore. The advent of the AICHR and the UPR have provided new incentives and opportunities for domestic human rights activism, but efforts here have been on a much smaller scale and lacking shared tactical approaches to advance reform objectives. Consequently, the Singapore government not only dismisses calls for human rights reforms but continues to exploit exchanges with its critics as opportunities to assert the moral superiority of the existing framework of political accountability.

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4 Decentralization and Accountability in Post-Socialist Cambodia and Vietnam I N T RO DU CT IO N Cambodia and Vietnam emerged from the socialist era in the early 1990s with their governments intent upon integration into a booming region, as a means to fast-track development in the aftermath of disastrous experiments with collective production. For Cambodia, beset by civil war and failing political as well as economic institutions, the new era began with a United Nations peacekeeping operation and continued with extensive international intervention in the form of intrusive donor attention to governance. This has prompted the emergence of a fragmented state apparatus, of which different parts have been more or less heavily influenced by a range of donor programmes, underpinned by a political party that is organized around extraordinarily powerful networks of loyalty and patronage, supported by donations from the growing Cambodian private sector. Vietnam, by contrast, emerged from the Cold War with political institutions intact and a party organization capable of steering the country through a far-reaching programme of political and economic reform with relatively little disruption to its grip on power. Vietnam’s political stability and its success in promoting both economic growth and poverty reduction has allowed it to deal with its international donors on a more equal footing, and constitutional changes have been initiated from within, in response to pressure from internal rather than external political forces. In Vietnam, as in Cambodia, the shift from socialist planning to private production has entailed the rise of a ‘state-business interest’ within the Vietnamese Communist Party (VCP), that is linked to various regional economies (Gainsborough 2003: 16–39). In both countries, the parties that dominated in the 1980s have remained in control. VCP remains formally committed to socialist ideology and has rejected the prospect of formal democratization of the political sphere. The Cambodian People’s Party (CPP), forced to accept multiparty elections as part of the 1991 peace deal brokered by the United Nations, has regrouped following

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an initial election defeat in 1993 and is now the dominant party in Cambodia. In both cases, however, the waning appeal of socialism has prompted the need to infuse state-society relations with new ideologies that can reduce pressure for more fundamental political reform, in the case of Vietnam, and maintain election-winning momentum, in the case of Cambodia. Consequently, both governments face pressure to maintain constituencies of support, not only amongst local and foreign investors and international aid agencies, but also amongst their own people. This chapter investigates the politics of accountability reform against this backdrop, with a particular focus on one type of reform that has been adopted by both countries: namely, decentralization of powers to elected local councils and the promotion of public deliberation in the exercise of these.

DECENTRALIZATION AND ACCOUNTABILITY During the 1990s, a trend for decentralizing governance produced what World Bank analysts described as a ‘fundamental transformation in the structure of government’ in East Asia and other parts of the developing world (White and Smoke 2005: 1; see also Bardhan 2002; Eaton 2001). International development actors such as the World Bank have enthusiastically endorsed decentralization as a way of boosting accountability and responsiveness, by unleashing local initiative and energy for service delivery at local level, while reigning in the potential for corruption, inefficiency, and abuse of power (White and Smoke 2005: 1). As such, decentralization reforms potentially constitute an important aspect of the new accountability agenda. Decentralization refers to any transfer of powers and/or functions from central government to a lower level. Broadly speaking there are three types. Political decentralization, often referred to as the ‘classic model’ of decentralization (Mawhood 1987: 10–22), occurs where local governments are selected locally and given discretionary powers to respond to local concerns over a particular set of issues. Administrative decentralization, often called deconcentration, occurs where local organs of the central government are given new functions to perform on behalf of the centre. Fiscal decentralization includes both the award of discretionary budgets from the centre to lower levels of government and the award of revenue-raising powers, for example through local taxation, to local governments. Many actual decentralization programmes incorporate more than one of these forms of decentralization. The enthusiasm of international development agencies for decentralization has stemmed from a potential connection between devolution of

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powers and a set of key governance goods, with a particular emphasis upon participation and accountability (Manor 1999; Blair 2000). According to Ribot (2002: 2), the ‘developmentalist logic of decentralization’ proceeds from the assumption that ‘local institutions can better discern, and are more likely to respond to, local needs and aspirations’ because they are better informed about and more accountable to local populations, particularly when elected and required to establish deliberative modes of engagement such as participatory planning exercises. As with the other modes of accountability discussed in this volume, a distinction between liberal and democratic understandings of accountability is evident in both the practitioner and the theoretical debate. In the liberal camp, decentralization reforms were promoted as part of structural adjustment programmes in Africa in the late 1980s and early 1990s, with a view to using decentralization to roll back the central state, and indeed, some theorists refer to processes of contracting out state functions to non-state agencies as a decentralizing move (Turner and Hulme 1997). Even where functions remain within the public sector, decentralization was associated with ideas about accountability that gave priority to two goals: efficient resource allocation, achieved via a more flexible plurality of state agencies and enhanced input of local knowledge; and better scrutiny over the actions of local governments, often conceptualized in terms of principal-agent models. These advantages entailed that local governments responded more efficiently to local market conditions. The World Bank (2004c: 45), for example, suggests that: decentralization can be a powerful tool for moving decision making closer to those affected by it. Doing so can strengthen the links and accountability between policymakers and citizens—local governments are potentially more accountable to local demands. It can also strengthen them between policymakers and providers—local governments are potentially more able to monitor providers.

This approach to accountability incorporates both political and market mechanisms, but the key is improving the efficiency of the market. An earlier World Bank (2000: 107) report made this concern clear: ‘Successful decentralization improves the efficiency and responsiveness of the public sector while accommodating potentially explosive political forces’. However, the World Bank (2004c: 45) also notes that local governments ‘should not be romanticized’ and are equally or more ‘vulnerable to capture’ by local elites. Democratic approaches to decentralization appeared on the donor agenda following the end of the Cold War as part of a broader push to enlarge democracy in former communist and authoritarian countries (Ribot 2002: 7). Democratic accountability focuses on the empowerment of the citizen,

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achieved through the ability to elect, and vote out, representatives and participate in debates over past and future decisions. For a democratic conception of accountability through decentralization to apply, administrative decentralization is insufficient and some kind of political decentralization is presumably necessary. James Manor suggests that two key attributes are necessary for local governance to give rise to specifically democratic forms of accountability. The local government must have a democratic mandate and discretionary control of a budget with which to fulfil that mandate (Manor 1995: 82). In line with the conception of democratic accountability employed in this volume, the election of local governments and the establishment of public mechanisms for deliberation represent at least a symbolic gesture towards the authority of the citizen. However, on their own, such symbolic gestures can mean very little, and are easily outflanked by centralizing moves that, for example, exclude from the local government mandate issues that are of key importance to voters. Where these counter-trends are evident, political decentralization as a mode of accountability is at best an irrelevance and at worst a distraction. The motivations for decentralization in the real world vary widely and encompass objectives that are quite different from, or even opposed to, those of either liberal or democratic accountability. For example, some reforms which ostensibly aim at decentralization are in fact tactical, having the purpose and effect of shoring up and enhancing the powers of central governments (Ribot, Agrawal, and Larson 2006). For example, administrative deconcentration without associated political and fiscal decentralization can considerably strengthen the central government, rather than weakening it, as one might expect (Crook and Manor 1998). Whether or not this occurs depends on the distribution of control between central ministries and local councils. Similarly, tactical political calculations to do with intra-elite competition may feature prominently in the decision to decentralize, or may cause the failure of decentralization initiatives (Eaton 2001). An accountability deficit can arise if there is ‘capture’ of decentralized powers or functions by elites at local level, and some analysts have argued that elite capture is more likely at local than at national level (Bardhan and Mookherjee 2000; Smoke 2001). Within the East Asian region, Cambodia and Vietnam have been relatively reluctant decentralizers, lagging behind fast-trackers such as Indonesia and the Philippines. The decentralization process has been drawn out over a decade, in the case of Cambodia, and two decades in Vietnam. The World Bank describes Vietnam, along with China, as taking an ‘incrementalist’ approach to decentralization, in which administrative and fiscal reform has proceeded unevenly and in steps. Cambodia is regarded by the Bank as a ‘cautious mover’, establishing an ambitious political, fiscal, and administrative decentralization

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programme in law, but failing to implement many aspects of it (White and Smoke 2005: 6–7). This raises the question of what utility decentralization was considered to have for the dominant parties in both countries. Concerns about accountability are central to answering this question and further raise the issue of how, in these two post-socialist, authoritarian states, accountability was framed ideologically and with what effects. Two sets of questions are thus raised by the phenomenon of decentralization reforms in Vietnam and Cambodia. First, what purpose did decentralizing moves in each country serve, and for whom? To what extent did advancing accountability feature as a key consideration motivating decentralization? Second, if accountability was advanced by the reforms, how was this framed ideologically by the different actors involved, and how did such framings affect the politics of decentralization? Were democratic or other forms of accountability advanced? What are the broader regime implications of these shifts? Analysis of the cases suggests that the accountability of local actors has been increased by these reforms, and with respect to local level issues there has been some advancement of citizen authority, thus suggesting at least a symbolic gesture towards democratic accountability in these countries. However, the overall democratic impact of this is entirely undermined by its embedding in broader development trajectories, orchestrated at national or provincial level, that are antithetical to citizens’ control over the most important issues determining distributions of wealth and power—in particular issues relating to livelihoods in a context of agricultural transformation and industrialization. This mismatch between the symbolism of local democracy and the reality of development processes that disempower local levels of government is increasingly obvious in both countries. Local elections and deliberation operate to an extent as a safety valve, permitting ruling parties to gauge levels of discontent and sometimes to discontinue policies or sanction abusive officials on a case-by-case basis. However, this effect is limited in its utility in cases where powerful national-level investors are concerned. In these cases, official ideologies have been promoted in both countries that equate corruption with moral failing, local dissatisfaction with ‘greed’, and compensation with ‘generosity’. This distracts attention from the public policy aspects of agricultural transformation by framing this as a matter of individual transactions rather than national development strategy. Combined with the continued use of violence and intimidation to silence dissident voices, the result is a fluctuating official ideological position, designed above all to prevent destabilizing challenges from ad hoc movements of disgruntled villagers, to reassert loyalty rather than accountability as the key to state-society relations at local level, and to protect state-business relations that have become the key political driver of politics at the centre.

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DECENTRALIZATION IN CAMB ODIA AND VIETNAM Decentralization in Cambodia and Vietnam formed part of a wider tranche of reforms to the political regime associated with reorientations of their economies following the end of the Cold War. In both countries, the subnational system of government consists of three formal levels—province, district, and commune—and a further, informal level consisting of the village. In the 1970s and 1980s, both had experimented more or less disastrously with centralized economic planning and collectivization of agriculture, and officials associated with agricultural cooperatives also formed part of the local governance apparatus. In Cambodia, collectivization occurred first under the auspices of the murderous Democratic Kampuchea, or Khmer Rouge,1 regime of 1975 to 1979. During these years, a brutally implemented forced collectivization brought about the deaths of hundreds of thousands from starvation, ill-treatment, and overwork. Villages and families were dispersed and urban areas evacuated, land was collectivized, and the population was organized into armies of labourers engaged in large-scale re-engineering of the landscape in pursuit of unrealizable productivity goals. Vietnam was divided into separate northern and southern entities from decolonization in 1955 to the end of the Second Indochina War in 1975. In the North, land redistribution and collectivization of production were pursued in a more tempered manner than in Cambodia from the 1950s. In the South, land redistribution was implemented by the Vietnamese communist forces in areas under their control as a means of eliciting peasant support in the war against the Republic of Vietnam regime and its American backers. Following reunification in 1975, steps were taken to pursue collectivization here also, but these were abandoned as unworkable at a relatively early stage. In the 1980s, following Vietnam’s invasion of Cambodia and ouster of the Pol Pot regime in 1979, enthusiasm for socialist planning in both countries waned rapidly. In Cambodia, the Phnom Penh regime set up with Vietnamese support inherited a population for whom socialist slogans and economic policies were anathema. In the famine of the early 1980s, collective farms were abandoned as thousands of individuals wandered the country searching for lost relatives or attempted to reoccupy their former private land. 1 Khmer Rouge is an anglicized term taken from the French Khmers Rouges (Red Khmers), and commonly used, both internationally and in Cambodia, to denote the Communist Party of Kampuchea, later renamed the Party of Democratic Kampuchea, led by Pol Pot, which held power in Cambodia from 1975 to 1979. The regime over which it presided was officially called Democratic Kampuchea.

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The new regime did not restore private land ownership, and in many places it re-employed Khmer Rouge cadres within local government, lacking alternatives. It continued to promote collective farming, although with less repressive measures than the Khmer Rouge had employed, through agricultural cooperatives called ‘solidarity groups’. These ranged from full collectivization to loose associations of households pooling tools and labour at busy times of the year (Frings 1994). However, in practice, local authorities were generally unsuccessful in enforcing these modes of production; over the course of the 1980s, households and village chiefs reverted back to older patterns of landholdings. Fully collectivized solidarity groups virtually disappeared, and ceased to be pursued as a matter of policy. In Vietnam, similarly, collectivization began to be quietly abandoned from the late 1970s. Once the war ended, dissatisfaction with inefficient modes of production, stagnating living standards, and overbearing officials led households to shift the focus of their efforts to household plots (Kerkvliet 1995). Informal contracting arrangements began to proliferate and households began to encroach on formally collectivized land, while local officials turned a blind eye. At the same time, in both countries and across the long land border between them, shadow economies, smuggling operations, and appropriation and sale of humanitarian aid donations were common, as entrepreneurial individuals, often occupying key positions in the state, took advantage of the regulation of the formal economy to make sometimes large amounts of money. The productivity gains from informal land privatization prompted the state in both countries to gradually concede in official policy what was already happening in practice. In Vietnam, in 1986, at the Sixth Party Congress, a programme of economic and political reform was introduced under the rubric doi moi or renovation. This led over the next few years to a reorientation of Vietnam’s economy towards private land use rights and private enterprise, although outright private land ownership was resisted and state-owned enterprises continued to be protected. The implementation of this process varied across the country reflecting the diversity within the Vietnamese political regime and the significance of territorially based party factions. In many cases, renovation did not occur particularly smoothly: Kerkvliet (1995: 77) documents a range of complaints and grievances from villagers across Vietnam, alleging that officials had abused the process for personal gain, awarding land to relatives and friends, or had sold land off and appropriated the proceeds. In some areas, this led to campaigns of civil disobedience such as refusal to pay taxes, mass protests, and confrontations between villagers and officials, as well as conflicts between villages over rights to particular tracts of land.

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In Cambodia, the formal abandonment of aspirations for collective farming occurred a few years later but even more dramatically. The Vietnamese army withdrew from the country in 1989, opening the way to a potential collapse of the state in the face of an ongoing Khmer Rouge insurgency, if peace could not be negotiated. In this climate, and keen to rapidly shore up key sources of support in advance of a peace process that was certain to include elections, the Phnom Penh regime introduced a radical programme of free market reform. This led to the allocation of possession rights for land to the tillers, titles for private housing, and concessional rights to cultivate surplus land. The state also disengaged from most areas of production, ending subsidies and privatizing many state-owned enterprises, and deregulated distribution. Although to a great extent the reforms simply recognized the de facto situation on the ground, the speed with which they were enacted in Cambodia unleashed both rampant inflation and aggressive profiteering. As inflation rendered public servants’ salaries virtually worthless, officials found themselves in a position to abuse the largely unregulated privatization process and embarked upon a selling spree, in which not only land titles and industrial plants but office furniture and supplies from Phnom Penh ministry buildings were sold off by whoever could appropriate them. The greater pace of privatization in Cambodia than in Vietnam was fuelled by awareness that a peace process was being negotiated which could potentially see the existing organs of the state in any case dismantled (Hughes 2003). In fact, the bureaucracy of the 1980s was retained largely unchanged in terms of personnel and structures into the 1990s and the 21st century, at both central and local level. In 1993, a new constitution enshrined principles of free market economics and multiparty democratic politics into Cambodian law. However, the legacy of the reform period that preceded the passage of the new constitution was strengthened networks of loyalty within the state apparatus, whose members were already engaged in new forms of predatory behaviour in the context of a free market economy. These networks of loyalty were subsequently exploited to form the power base of the CPP, which emerged from the ashes of an election defeat in 1993 to dominate Cambodian politics by the end of the 1990s. In both Vietnam and Cambodia, subnational government emerged from the 1980s to a greater or lesser extent undisciplined and out of control. Not only was socialist planning a failure, but local government officials were responsible for abuse and disorder in the process of liberalization. However, there were significant differences in the ability of ruling parties to address these difficulties. In Vietnam, reforms reflected a pragmatic response to the emerging problems ‘formulated and implemented by a system still functioning effectively’ (Dixon 2004: 18). The Resolution of the Sixth Party Congress in 1986 contained the following statement:

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[We] should restore order, discipline, in social, economic management. It is the management mechanism—with a heavy nature of centralization and red tape, that has restricted the lower levels and at the same time reducing the efficiency of centralized management which directly caused confusion in discipline and order. Therefore, it is impossible to overcome the confusion by returning to the old mechanism, but [we] have to implement decentralization of management resolutely in accordance with the principle of concentrated democracy (quoted in Vu, Le, and Vo 2007: 6).

Decentralization in Vietnam was thus regarded as a prop to socialist control and principles of democratic centralism and a way of promoting productivity within the economy. It represented both recognition of the difficulties of central planning and an attempt to find a new way of asserting the primacy of the state. Redistributing functions to promote greater responsiveness was regarded as a recipe for restoring discipline and centralized direction, rather than undermining it. In practice, the provincial level of government has taken the lead in forging new relations with international investors, and the centre has followed, turning successful provincial experiments into law (Malesky 2004; Sikor 2012). In Cambodia, the post-war economy featured extensive illegal and informal deals made by a variety of subnational actors without reference to central government. In the forested and heavily militarized Northern provinces, military commanders and provincial governors made illegal deals with both insurgents and cross-border interests, particularly with regard to the cutting and export of valuable timber. The proceeds from these trades kept the Khmer Rouge insurgency alive despite the withdrawal of foreign support after the end of the Cold War, but also paid for election campaigns by a variety of parties and defection deals for commanders wishing to surrender to the new government. When the CPP, following a military attack on royalist troops in Phnom Penh in 1997 and a subsequent narrow electoral victory in a dubious election in 1998, returned to power in 1999, it moved swiftly to consolidate control of the subnational level—particularly the unruly forestry industry. A crackdown on illegal forest concessions consolidated control of timber revenues in the hands of friends and family of the Prime Minister, Hun Sen (Global Witness 2007). Through a strategy of promoting key allies into leading positions in the police and army and rewarding private sector loyalists with lucrative concessions and monopoly contracts, Hun Sen built increasingly close alliances between his own party faction, key Cambodian tycoons, and the military. In both countries, then, the transformation of state-business relations following the collapse of socialist planning has promoted development strategies which key players in the state and private sector collaborate at national and provincial levels. In both countries this has given rise to economic growth and poverty reduction, on the one hand, but rampant corruption

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and widening inequality on the other. In neither case has this produced much accountability over national strategies for managing foreign investment and capitalist development. Rather, arrangements have been forged tactically so as to maximize opportunities for attracting investments, extracting rents, and massaging personal relationships. While in both countries state officials are increasingly responsive to profit motives, this occurs in a manner that is antithetical to liberal ideals of accountability, privileging backroom deals between well-connected individuals facilitated by large bribes rather than open contracts and transparent markets. This provides the setting within which decentralization to lower levels of government has been enacted.

DECENTRALIZATION AND THE LIMITS OF DEMO CRATIC ACCOUNTABILITY IN VIETNAM Decentralization in Vietnam from 1986 and in Cambodia from 2001 emerged as a response to two crises. The first was an economic crisis emerging from the impact of the new market economics on rural households, and produced a wave of land conflicts, causing tension between villagers and officials well placed to control land allocations (Sikor 2012; World Bank 2009b; Hughes 2008). The second was a political crisis emerging from the difficulty of combining the new development policies with existing regime ideologies. This produced a sense of declining legitimacy for ruling parties, taking concrete form in Cambodia as an electoral loss for the incumbent CPP in elections held by United Nations peacekeepers in 1993. In Vietnam, the state has remained ostensibly socialist in ideological orientation. However, the failure of collectivization, the removal of the agricultural collectives as a layer of control and source of welfare, along with the end of the war as a focus of national solidarity, prompted weariness with socialist sloganeering. Increasing corruption and inequality dented the reputation of the Party, giving rise to an urgent need for revitalizing Party practice and ideology in a way that could mobilize support. New modes of accountability implemented through decentralization have been used to deal with these issues. In Vietnam, the need for these policies became apparent following a wave of protests surrounding the doi moi reforms in the late 1980s and early 1990s. In 1998, unrest in Thai Binh province culminated in demonstrations by thousands of protestors in the provincial capital. The Party immediately drew a link between the riots and renovation policies, prompting an investigation by the prime minister’s ‘Research Commission on Renovation’. The investigation concluded that the Thai Binh riots had been caused by two sets of

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grievances: first, heavy and arbitrary imposition of taxes for local infrastructure projects; and second, misappropriation of the proceeds for the personal enrichment of local officials. The report pointed to the heavy burden of debt assumed by local authorities in responding to central planning directives over infrastructure development, and the hardship this caused for peasant families. It was also highly critical of the extent to which the high taxes imposed had allowed ‘prominent rural officials to grow extraordinarily rich over the past five years . . . these cadres live in big houses with all modern comforts, ride brand new motorcycles, their wives and children are ostentatiously dressed . . . The peasants were so exasperated by this blatant corruption that their anger finally overflowed’ (IFHRL 1998). The response of the Vietnamese government was twofold. The protests in Thai Binh were suppressed and forty people were sentenced to heavy jail terms for ‘taking advantage of the anticorruption struggle and abusing democratic rights to incite public disorder’—charges which both implicitly recognized the justice of the grievances that led to the protests while sending a firm message that public protest was not to be tolerated (IFHRL 1998). However, the government also recognized the broader threat posed by the demonstrations. Thai Binh was viewed as a communist heartland, and demonstrations there seen as presaging more serious and widespread unrest, prompting senior officials to speculate that ‘the Party would lose power if corruption was not eliminated’ (Abrami 2003: 98). Consequently, the government sacked officials at province and local level and in 1998 issued the Grassroots Democracy Decree (GDD), which detailed a new deal for state-society relations at the local level. Blaming peasants’ grievances on the wrongdoing of individual officials, required to undergo ‘self-criticism’, allowed use of the protests by the government as political leverage for imposing greater discipline on local levels of government. The GDD took the form of detailed instructions to the commune level of government as to how relations with the population were to be handled. Already, in response to the earlier failures of collective production, the passage of the 1992 Constitution had set in train a process of transferring responsibilities from party cells to state organs at all levels of government. Under the post-1992 system, institutions of commune governance comprise a directly elected People’s Council, which in turn elects the chairman and vice-chairman of the People’s Committee. The other members of the People’s Committee comprise line ministry and security officers. The People’s Council reviews the work of the People’s Committee, which operates as the executive organ of local government. The Committee is responsible for maintaining law, order, and security; requesting and executing budgets from higher levels; reviewing and approving local socio-economic development plans; and undertaking other

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duties assigned by higher levels. In 1996, the commune level of government was awarded powers to raise revenues through various local fees and taxes, compulsory and voluntary contributions, and aid from foreign organizations. Subsequently, the commune has also gained the powers to manage land use and register property transfers. This is significant in the context of rapid development, in which agricultural land is being converted to industrial use on a large scale and land conflicts are an important issue, constituting 70–90% of complaints against local authorities (Fforde 2003; World Bank 2009b: vii). From the 1990s, People’s Councils had been directly elected in competitive elections, although candidates had to be approved by the local branch of the Fatherland Front, a mass organization linked to the Communist Party. This provision theoretically allowed villagers to vote out unpopular officials and, in practice, independent candidates are regularly approved to stand, and sometimes actually elected to People’s Councils over Party candidates. However, gaining and maintaining the approval of the Fatherland Front implies demonstrating allegiance to the Constitution which enshrines the leading role of the Communist Party. Consequently, the existence of independent candidates does not translate into the emergence of oppositional political platforms. These provisions both enshrine a symbolic gesture towards citizen’s authority in new accountability provisions and immediately limit these by preventing the emergence of any political debate which might assist in evaluating candidates’ performances. Because independent candidates cannot dissent politically from Party orthodoxy, the possibility for active deliberation over alternatives is ruled out and, consequently, voters’ control is formal rather than substantive. Furthermore, the limiting of political debate over policy options in this context entails a refocusing of attention on the ‘conduct’ of cadres (Government of Vietnam 1998: Art. 12). This was elaborated in subsequent versions of the GDD to specify that voters should supervise ‘the moral quality’ of cadres (Government of Vietnam 2003: Art. 12). The GDD was issued in 1998 ostensibly to promote the ‘exercise of democracy in communes’. The Decree asserted democracy as ‘the nature of our regime and State’ and reflecting the ‘people’s mastery’ (Government of Vietnam 1998: Foreword), as expressed in the slogan ‘People know, people discuss, people do and people monitor’ (Duong n.d.: 16). The people’s mastery is specifically linked to the ‘Party’s leadership’ (Government of Vietnam 1998: Art. 2) and regarded as going ‘hand in hand with order and discipline’ (Government of Vietnam 2003: Art. 3), and hence the extent to which a real redistribution of power is envisaged must be questioned. The decree is organized into several sections, covering ‘works to be informed to the people’; ‘works to be discussed and directly decided by the people’; ‘works to be discussed or commented by the people and decided by the commune

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administrations’; ‘works to be supervised and inspected by the people’; and ‘building village communities’ (Government of Vietnam 1998; Government of Vietnam 2003). Issues to be directly decided by the people include the key issues at the root of the Thai Binh protests—namely, the level of public contributions for public works, and the establishment of boards of supervision for construction works built with people’s contributions. Local supervision and inspection is elicited with respect to budget execution, settlements of complaints and denunciations, land use management, construction projects built using people’s contributions, and social welfare policies. Consequently, the decree established clear local accountability for the local spending of money raised locally from local people. The people are also encouraged to decide on issues of cultural affairs, maintenance of security and order, and ‘abolishment of bad practices, superstition and social evils’; and to inspect the ‘activities and moral quality of the chairmen of the commune People’s Councils, and presidents of the commune People’s Committees, activities of deputies of the commune People’s Councils, officials of the commune People’s Committees as well as officials and public servants working in the localities’ (Government of Vietnam 2003). On questions related to larger processes of development, the Decree provides for local discussion, but reserves decision-making for the commune leaders. This includes the fraught issues of land use planning, clearance of land for development, and payment of compensation for this, as well as implementation of national targets and local employment schemes. Information is provided, but discussion is not sought about: government decisions at higher levels; taxes and local government accounts; outcomes of corruption cases involving local officials; and decisions about land use and public works. Consequently, the Decree distinguishes clearly between issues where direct democratic accountability is to be implemented and issues where commune officials are expected to explain and advocate with local people, but where their approval is not explicitly required. The mechanisms by which these various forms of oversight are supposed to occur are also spelt out in the GDD. Information is to be conveyed through meetings, the posting of documents in public places, through public announcements via public address systems, and sending documents to households or village chiefs. Where discussion is called for, letterboxes for public comments and distribution of ‘comment-gathering cards’ is envisaged, along with meetings of household heads. Where the people are required to directly decide upon an issue, polling cards can be distributed to households, or meetings of household heads called, and a vote taken either by secret ballot or show of hands. In each case, the Decree specifies that ‘the People’s Committee should coordinate with the Vietnamese Fatherland Front Committees of the same

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level in directing and organising the discussion of and decision on works . . . by the people’, enshrining the role of the Party-affiliated mass organizations in the process (Government of Vietnam 2003). Formally speaking, these provisions offer opportunities for villagers to be informed about and feed into development planning at the local level, and consequently form a basis for accountability. Villagers could use this information to make complaints or denunciations against local officials or decisions, or could decide to vote out the incumbents in competitive elections, and this does happen. In practice, however, there are safeguards in place, in the form of the role of the Party and its associated mass organizations, which impose limits on these forms of accountability, so that sanctions are imposed on officials only in extraordinary circumstances. Studies of village-level meetings describe, on the one hand, the possibility of villagers raising tough questions and having an input into decision-making on a range of issues defined as local; but on the other hand, a varying but generally effective ability of the Party to stage-manage discussion of sensitive issues. For example, Zingerli’s (2004) account of grassroots democracy in a village situated within the Ba Be National Park in the early 2000s suggests that a powerful attitude of paternalism pervaded village politics in this context, due to the belief on the part of National Park administrators that villagers would be incapable of understanding the science of biodiversity preservation and national resource management that drove administrative decisions. Although village meetings were organized in accordance with the GDD, these ‘merely informed villagers about their obligations, explaining the fines and sentences they would face when not behaving in accordance with the regulations’ (Zingerli 2004: 63). Tran Thi Thu Trang (2004: 143), similarly, observing elections of village chiefs in a Muong ethnic village in 2001, argued that manipulation of candidate lists and selective use of shows of hands rather than secret ballots undermined democracy and represented ‘not procedural sloppiness, but . . . a local authority power management strategy’. More recently, a research team examining the politics of a controversial village relocation project affecting a village displaced by a special economic zone in 2010 noted the coercion brought to bear upon villagers, who were by and large extremely unhappy about being relocated and with the level of compensation on offer and initially refused to go (de Wit et al. 2012). The relocation was characterized by an intense process of persuasion and pressure exerted on reluctant households. Village level meetings were characterized by heavy attendance by cadres from higher levels of state and party eager to use the meetings to advocate for the project and the compensation package on offer. These meetings were followed up by household visits from delegations from the Fatherland Front and other mass organizations in order to obtain their

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acquiescence. In one commune where the commune cadres themselves were unhappy with the plan, commune leaders were replaced and a new general secretary brought in to lead the local communist party branch. A range of sanctions was also imposed on recalcitrant villagers. The team reported, for example, that ‘as a last resort the Youth Union was ready to apply some measures, for example not to invite a young family member to participate in a class of understanding the Party (this, in effect, means that such a person can never become a Party member)’ (de Wit et al. 2012: 27). Some households were ultimately forcibly removed. Furthermore, villagers were informed that housing plots in the relocation area would be made available on a first-come-first-served basis, implying that those households who moved first would have the choice of the best plots (de Wit et al. 2012: 29). De Wit et al.’s study illustrates the way in which the co-optative functions of the Party and the mass organizations operate to prevent accountability provisions from taking a democratic form in which villagers are empowered to adjudicate decisively on the actions of officials. In practice, the People’s Councils and People’s Committees are dominated by members of the Party, as are the mass organizations. At the local level, this means in practice that all four organizations are dominated by a small and stable elite, key individuals of which sometimes hold more than one position, and whose status is ultimately in the gift of higher levels of government. Where key decisions are made, officials from the higher levels will come down to the village level to provide support to local cadres in their efforts to convince local villagers to support unpopular decisions. For local villagers, on their part, maintenance of good relations with local authorities is vital to their own prospects. Access to credit from the state bank, support from local authorities on issues of land rights, and potential access to paid state positions are all reliant upon maintenance of positive relations with local cadres (Sikor 2012; Le 2010; de Wit 2012). The 1998 GDD, and the revised version issued in 2003, provided an opportunity for villagers to make individual complaints and grievances about local level officials. However, the personal relationships with local officialdom upon which villagers depend again entails that such mechanisms are a last resort in extreme situations, rather than operating as a routinely democratic check upon power. Meanwhile, use of accountability provisions in a manner that results in an affront to public order remains a criminal offence. For these reasons, as Wells-Dang (2010: 101) comments with respect to activism on land issues in Vietnam, the most effective approaches to accountability emerge where local people engage in ‘creative use of the state machinery against itself ’. The ability to gain the personal intervention of officials from higher levels of government has figured prominently in successful campaigns against

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corrupt or arbitrary decisions regarding redevelopment of land in peri-urban areas. While the existence of such possibilities suggests that the Vietnamese state is developing an increasingly flexible approach to local grievances, it also points to significantly different opportunities for different groups in society to demand accountability. Groups which enjoy warm relations with personnel with a variety of different state and party actors are likely to have many more opportunities to successfully demand accountability than those who do not. Furthermore, Wells-Dang (2010) emphasizes that successful demands for accountability have not sought to challenge political relations more broadly, and indeed mobilize rhetoric that conforms to state ideology in pursuing accountability claims. Consequently, although the opportunities for accountability have widened in the context of decentralization, this is limited to a narrow range of issues. Citizens are formally in charge of local development, but they are forced to operate within a set of ideological, institutional, and material constraints that undermines citizens’ power. Because of this, overall the new modes of accountability bolster the power of the Party, rather than diffusing it. Decentralization has certainly increased the flexibility of the Party and its ability to control its own cadres reflecting a genuine concern to avoid destabilizing ruptures between party and society, such as that which occurred in Thai Binh in 1998. In so doing, it has contributed to ameliorating abuse of power at local level and securing better developmental outcomes for ordinary Vietnamese. It has done so by opening up opportunities for engagement in which higher levels advocate for acquiescence from the grassroots population and from which some opportunities for accountability emerge. However, ultimately advocacy can give way to coercion on the basis that although the people exercise mastery, the Party unequivocally leads.

DECENTRALIZATION AND ELECTORALISM I N C AM B OD IA In Cambodia, the political challenges facing the CPP following the end of the Cold War were rather different, as were the resources upon which they could draw to meet them. For one thing, after the peace agreements were signed in October 1991 to end the war between the Phnom Penh-based State of Cambodia regime and insurgent armies fielded by the Khmer Rouge, royalist, and republican forces, with Chinese and Thai support, the CPP faced the emergence of a multiparty system, a free press, a range of non-governmental

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organizations (NGOs), and general elections. The CPP also had to deal with regular and far-reaching interventions from international donors who took an interventionist stance in Cambodian affairs in the first decade after the peace agreements. Formulating and maintaining a winning electoral strategy, following its defeat in UN-organized elections in 1993, has been a key preoccupation for the CPP over the past two decades. In pursuing this endeavour, the Party has largely abandoned its former socialist ideology in favour of a politics that rests on three key relationships: the relationship between the Party and the military; the relationship between the Party and the private sector; and the relationship between the Party and local government. Cambodia’s decentralization process, then, has largely been informed by the concern to strengthen these relationships and particularly the last. From the early 1980s, the CPP controlled around 85% of the population through its network of local government officials which were established in the aftermath of the Vietnamese invasion. Insurgent royalist, republican, and Khmer Rouge armies controlled only refugee camps and small and sparsely populated enclaves around the country’s borders. The network of CPP local government officials awarded a huge advantage to the CPP in electoral contests against the popular but badly organized royalists, particularly since large areas of the country were in the 1990s difficult to reach due to shattered infrastructure and ubiquitous land mines. Prior to 2002, the local level of government had remained relatively unchanged since the early 1980s. Village and commune chiefs that were appointed or elected in the early years following the overthrow of the Khmer Rouge had largely remained in place. Some of these chiefs were former Khmer Rouge cadres who defected to the incoming regime, either during the Vietnamese invasion in 1979, or as the war drew to a close in the late 1990s. Others were new cadres put in place in the early 1980s, and subsequently cultivated as Party loyalists. From the early 1980s until 2002, the local authorities consisted of a commune chief and deputy, commune level police and militias, and village chiefs, whose functions were primarily oriented towards security tasks in a climate of insurgency and forced conscription. Consequently, local authorities tended to be heavily armed and feared by their constituents (Hughes 1998; Öjendal and Kim 2006). The shift to the electoralism that characterizes Cambodia today has required a recalibration of relations between the Party and local authorities. Local authorities have been pivotal players in the CPP’s political strategy at local and national level. The CPP has been concerned to retain and promote partisan loyalty within this level of government, and to use local authorities to maintain surveillance over the population and to significantly tilt the electoral

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playing field in the CPP’s direction. Equally, the CPP has sought to reduce the level of overt violence involved in this, as a means to pre-empt criticism from international donors and to prevent destabilizing upsurges of protest from either rural or urban populations. Decentralization has been introduced tactically to provide a partial solution to these problems. The introduction of local elections allowed the Party to identify and jettison abusive officials, and imposed discipline over elected councillors in their dealings with voters. This maximized the organizational advantage enjoyed by the CPP as a legacy of their statebuilding efforts in the 1980s. It also permitted a somewhat more flexible approach to the issue of natural resource governance, which in the 1990s had brought the CPP into confrontation with both villagers and key donors such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). However, although the electoral effects of privatization of natural resources have been muted by the decentralization strategy, there has been little accountability imposed with respect to these policies. In Cambodia, as in Vietnam, the introduction of elected local councils represents a gesture to popular sovereignty. Furthermore, in Cambodia, the introduction of a multi-party system under the terms of the 1991 peace agreements means that in most communes there is some organized opposition to the CPP and in most parts of the country it is possible to access information put out by opposition groups. Elections are conducted by secret ballot and scrutinized by local and international pollwatch organizations. In the three sets of local elections conducted so far more than a third of the vote has gone to opposition parties, while of the four national elections held since 1993 the CPP has gained more than 50% of the vote in only one. However, in Cambodia, as in Vietnam, the democratic symbolism inherent in electoralism, and hence the level of democratic accountability offered by electoral exercises, is significantly weakened by several features of the electoral environment. Democratic accountability does not feature in the ideology of the CPP, despite claims in official government documents that the government is promoting ‘democratic decentralization’. Although the level of political violence has reduced significantly since 1993, the Party has consistently promoted the politicization of the Cambodian armed forces and Prime Minister Hun Sen retains a personal bodyguard unit that reportedly numbers in the thousands (Human Rights Watch 2012b: 40), stationed in the centre of Phnom Penh. The CPP has consistently worked to ensure that elections are surrounded by a powerful sense of menace and intimidation. The role of local authorities in this has been clear since 1993. Unlike the VCP which still operates an exclusive membership policy, the CPP in the late 1980s transformed itself from a vanguard to a mass party as a means

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of claiming popular loyalties. Local authorities have been important in this, enrolling households automatically as Party members unless they are specifically identified as being ‘opposition’.2 This strategy engenders a powerful sense of exclusion and isolation amongst those remaining non-members. Mass coercive enrolment has allowed the CPP to develop modes of surveillance which encourage villagers to vote for the Party, even in a secret ballot. Local authorities campaign for the ruling party. In a context where villagers rely upon local authorities for information, and are reluctant to engage with state-organized processes without a specific invitation from the local authorities, opposition parties routinely complain that opposition households are excluded from voter information sessions and from voter registration drives. CPP members, by contrast, are rounded up and marched to registration and polling stations by local officials. Opposition parties complain further that complex bureaucratic procedures, in which CPP authorities complete on behalf of their own members but not for known opponents of the CPP, result in many would-be opposition voters being excluded from voting on the day. Furthermore, despite formal directives to the contrary, opposition parties frequently complain about commune and village chiefs hanging around in the vicinity of the polling station on election day, with potentially intimidatory effect. In the tense, partisan atmosphere of Cambodian elections, marginalized pro-opposition villagers find it difficult to claim their rights and contest this treatment.3 This pressure is intensified by the practice of excluding non-members from receiving Party gifts during regular gift-giving ceremonies. The Party offers significant material rewards to supporters in rural villages through its sponsorship of development projects and regular gift distribution drives. Senior Party figures, including ministers and secretaries of state, oversee these activities, which are often funded through donations from private businessmen. Where gifts of money, rice, or clothing are distributed to individuals, non-Party members are excluded. This is significant particularly because of the highly ceremonial nature of such occasions. When national politicians visit the village to distribute gifts of money, rice, and clothing, the local commune chief (or Party chief in the few communes where the CPP does not control this position) is responsible for staging the ceremony, organizing voters into lines, and calling them forward by name to receive their gifts. To fail

2 Despite the advent of the multi-party system, the term used for peaceful opposition supporters— neak prachang—is the same word that was used for armed insurgents in the 1980s and 1990s. 3 Interview by Caroline Hughes with opposition party leaders (names withheld upon request), 25 June 2008, Phnom Penh.

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to attend, or to be excluded from attendance, is to be marked as an opponent of the Party. This is a strategy that has been enormously successful in mobilizing support. For poor households in Cambodia, as in Vietnam, a good relationship with village or commune chiefs is important for survival in a context where the rule of law is weak and welfare systems non-existent. This is particularly important in situations where village livelihoods are threatened by nationally awarded land, forestry, or fishery concessions. If compensation is awarded, the commune authorities have a key role in determining who gets what. The commune chief is also a key figure in witnessing land transactions and overseeing security matters. Villagers who lack a good relationship with the commune chief find themselves on the margins of village affairs and with nowhere to turn for assistance if things go wrong. In the 1990s, the reputation of local authorities for violent and abusive treatment of the population, and the fear which pervaded intra-village relationships, entailed that the coercive elements of this strategy loomed larger than the co-optative elements. This caused significant image problems for the government, both at home and abroad, particularly since the relatively freer political atmosphere in Phnom Penh, where a range of human rights organizations and international donor agencies were headquartered, offered a refuge for rural dissidents. The tendency of the rural dispossessed to build protest camps in parks in Phnom Penh while waiting to petition the king about their plight was a constant blight on the CPP’s claim to be the party of economic development in rural Cambodia. Post-election demonstrations in 1998 were significantly boosted by the arrival in Phnom Penh of hundreds of opposition supporters from the provinces, who feared to go home in case they were subject to reprisals from pro-CPP local authorities reportedly engaging in celebratory drunken rampages (Hughes 2003). The presence of these groups in a large makeshift camp in the middle of the pro-opposition capital city during the precarious period when votes were being counted and recounted, complaints assessed, and pronouncements made by international election scrutineers created a significant problem for the CPP. In the period following its successful repression of these demonstrations, the CPP took a range of steps to rein in local authorities and recalibrate local governance to better manage rural discontent in situ. Commune level elections offered the key to this problem. This reform was discussed specifically in terms of promoting greater accountability. The Royal Government of Cambodia’s 2005 Strategic Framework for Deconcentration and Decentralization, which articulated post hoc the rationale for the introduction of commune elections and set out further aspirations for devolving central government functions to various subnational levels, stated:

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The Royal Government will develop management systems of provincial/municipal, district/khan and commune/sangkat levels based on the principles of ‘democratic participation.’ This system will operate with transparency and accountability in order to promote local development and delivery of public services to meet the needs of citizens and contribute to poverty reduction within the respective territories (Royal Government of Cambodia 2005: 4).

This language has resonated powerfully with Cambodia’s international donors who between 2002 and 2005 had already donated more than US$170 million to various schemes intended to support decentralization.4 As in Vietnam, however, the electoral system was designed to play to the strengths of the ruling party and virtually assure a CPP victory across the country. New institutions of governance in Cambodia’s 1,621 communes were to comprise a council of between five and eleven members. The electoral system used is a party list system, and any party wishing to stand in a particular commune was required by law to put up a full slate of councillors, plus a complete reserve slate. Consequently, in the largest communes, each party had to find a slate of twenty-two candidates. For the CPP with its massive rural organization this is relatively easy but for other parties it is a struggle, with the result that only the CPP stands in every commune of the country. The party that wins the greatest share of the votes is awarded the commune chief ’s position, preventing the possibility of a coalition of opposition parties installing an opposition commune chief. The result of this system has been that the CPP controls the commune chief ’s position in all but thirty of Cambodia’s communes.5 Furthermore, against the objections of election observer NGOs citing specifically democratic concerns about accountability, independent candidates were excluded by law from the election process, and only candidates representing political parties were allowed to stand. This gave political parties immense power over the system, ensuring that CPP commune councillors were answerable to the relevant District Working Group of the CPP as well as to the voters, on pain of losing their position on the candidate list in the next election. In the light of this experience, election observer NGOs organized a protest campaign against the proposed party list system in advance of the passage of legislation in 2000, but they were unable to gain much attention for

4 Figure supplied to Caroline Hughes by Partnership for Local Governance, Phnom Penh, 9 February 2005. 5 In local elections, the result has remained remarkably stable at 61% (2002); 61% (2007); and 62% (2012) (COMFREL 2007: 58; COMFREL 2012: 56). In national elections the CPP’s share has grown from 38% in UN-organized elections in 1993 to 41% in 1998; 47% in 2003; and 58% in 2008 (COMFREL 2008: 66).

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their concerns, in the context of an international donor community in Phnom Penh who were anxious not to slow the pace of the reform. The introduction of this electoral system consequently considerably enhanced the Party’s control over its commune chiefs. Through the holding of commune elections, the CPP has entrenched itself more firmly in the local political landscape and legitimized its position internationally, while ensuring that the commune chiefs would be loyal primarily to the Party and not to the voters. This has produced pressure for commune chiefs, who find themselves stuck in the middle between the sometimes-conflicting demands of their constituents and local Party bosses, particularly in areas heavily affected by land conflicts arising from national decisions to award vast tracts of land to private companies to establish plantations. Land activists suggest that commune chiefs are rarely able to represent their constituents’ interests effectively in such cases, even if they wish to, because of the close relationship between private investors and higher levels of the CPP and the weight of Party control over their position.6 Furthermore, the most important form of funding available to commune level governments is precisely money donated by private business to the CPP for use in highly politicized rural development schemes. Party funding for development outstrips state rural development budgets by a factor of two or three to one; more if funding for the rehabilitation of pagodas is included (Pak 2011). Party development funds are deliberately portrayed as ‘gifts’ by ‘saboraschon’ or ‘meritorious benefactors’, making disinterested donations in their efforts to help rehabilitate the nation and restore it to greatness (Pak 2011; Hughes 2006). These donors are rewarded for their contributions through an elaborate and formal system of titles and medals that accrue for each US$10,000 donated. Emphasis in pro-government media on the generosity of such donors frames out of consideration the fact that donations are made out of profits gained from state contracts and monopoly franchises. Accountability to citizens in recipient villages is not very evident in this mode of operation. For one thing, despite formal requirements to engage in public deliberation over the formation of local plans, commune and village chiefs tend to consult within a narrow circle of leading and trusted households to develop socio-economic plans.7 Furthermore, although local plans create a framework for eliciting donations, the rhetoric and ceremony surrounding the giving of Party development funds deliberately emphasizes the contingent 6 Interviews by Caroline Hughes with land activists (names withheld upon request) at Licadho, COHRE, and Adhoc, 9–25 January 2009, Phnom Penh. 7 Interviews by Caroline Hughes with village and commune chiefs, 25 June 2007, Kraceh; and 10–15 April, 2004, Kompong Cham, Kampot, and Takeo. See also Malena and Chhim (2009).

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nature of the gift. Emphasis is placed upon the charitable nature of the giver, framing out of the picture any notion of authority on the part of the recipient. Rather, acceptance of the gift is regarded as imposing on the recipient obligations of gratitude and loyalty. Where, then, does accountability feature in this regime? For villagers, the advent of a multi-party council at local level does allow for protest voting at election times, an opportunity that is grasped by almost 40% of voters. Opposition commune councillors are consequently elected to commune councils, but have few opportunities to intervene decisively in local decision-making because of the significance of CPP funding to rural development programming (Hughes et al. 2011). However, the ability of villagers to register such a protest through electoral means has had an impact on the nature of local governance. Surveys suggest that commune councillors are less violent and abusive than previously, while village and commune militias have been disbanded. Commune councillors interact more frequently with villagers, consult more often, listen more, and are expected to help resolve villagers’ problems (Kim 2012: 92–4). This represents a considerable softening of state-society relations compared to the 1980s and 1990s (Öjendal and Kim 2006). There is some limited evidence to suggest that warnings about societal discontent are conveyed up through the system by this means, particularly when elections loom. In March 2012, for example, three months before commune elections, Prime Minister Hun Sen announced the cancellation of commercial fishing lots on the Mekong River, citing evidence of irregularities in the bidding process and hardship for Cambodian families, and subsequently ordered the release of Cambodians imprisoned for poaching fish in commercial fishing lot areas (Kong 2012). The announcement represents a minor concession to public opinion in a broader context in which rural livelihoods are routinely destroyed by corrupt licences awarded to commercial interests. Nevertheless, the fact that such concessions are made at significant points in the electoral cycle suggests that elections have some effect in promoting democratic accountability. This works only to temper the most disastrously exploitative policies: surveys suggest that villagers are still reluctant to express their opinions to commune councillors unless expressly invited to do so, and that there is ‘a very low sense of citizen empowerment and a strong sense that only government, and especially highly placed authorities, can bring about change’ (Malena and Chhim 2009: 32). Villagers thus have few expectations with respect to local government: the best result in terms of commune development and livelihoods is for the commune to become attached to a concerned and generous external patron who can provide resources for development. The worst result is that the resources—land, fishery, or forest—on which commune livelihoods

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depend will be granted to private investors, in which case commune councillors are neither capable of defending the interests of their constituents nor granted much of a say in the way the project is rolled out, and may ultimately find it easier to accept payoffs from developers rather than intervene.

SO CIALISM AND MORALITY IN VIETNAM AN D C AM B O D IA In both Cambodia and Vietnam, then, the extensive social control inherent in a collective production system has been abandoned in favour of aggressive and often dislocating forms of private production. A class of business tycoons, wealthy officials, and foreign investors has emerged in both countries, with interests in amassing wealth through control of land and natural resources at the expense of local rural livelihoods. The interests of this class are served at national level, in both countries, requiring new means for ensuring that local discontents do not coalesce into destabilizing and embarrassing protest or opposition movements requiring a violent response. Alongside the institutions described in the previous section, a new ideologically informed narrative of state-society relations provides the setting against which accountability provisions play out. Although this narrative has developed along different lines in Cambodia and Vietnam, in both countries it has taken on a specifically moral cast. Within Cambodia, the CPP has deliberately cultivated a pervasive moralism in its development activities which draws upon both 1980s socialist tropes about solidarity between rich and poor and an older set of ideas associated with monarchic rule in the 1950s and 1960s which sought to link Buddhist cosmology with ideas about righteous leadership and social modernization. This is particularly evident in the language used by the Party in relation to its widespread and highly organized development sponsorship and gift-giving system. The ceremonial aspects of this system incorporate elements of ritual pomp and Buddhist morality, recalling the extravagant and charismatic style of rule and the ‘Buddhist Socialist’ ideology of Cambodia’s pre-war King, Norodom Sihanouk. The self-conscious appropriation and award of honorifics and traditional titles used in the monarchical era by the post-socialist government of Prime Minister Hun Sen—official title Samdech Akka Moha Sena Padei Techo Hun Sen, Prime Minister of Cambodia—and the return of traditional forms of greeting that were frowned upon in the socialist era explicitly recalls monarchical forms of rule (Marston 1997; Hughes 2006).

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Equally, the use of the term saboraschon to describe Party donors is an appropriation of Buddhist terminology. The original use of the word was to describe individuals who made merit by donating to temple construction projects. An issue which contributed to the unpopularity of the 1980s socialist regime was its limited tolerance of efforts to re-establish the Buddhist religion in Cambodia, following the wholesale destruction of temples and the forced defrocking of monks by the Khmer Rouge regime. In the 1990s, monks were prominent in anti-government protests following the release of controversial election results in 1998. From the early 1990s, the CPP had engaged in patronage of temple projects as part of its development strategy but this activity has escalated, and the term saboraschon has been appropriated to secular development projects also, imparting the suggestion that investment in these is a merit-making act on the part of the donor that has little to do with the worldly concern of winning votes in democratic elections. There is no room, in this specifically moral framing of the rationale for development funding, for any critical engagement on the part of the recipient (Hughes 2006). Rather, accountability is diverted upwards: local authorities are accountable to the benefactor for the appropriate and honest use of donated funds, and citizens themselves are held accountable for discharging their debt of gratitude via support in elections. Equally, in Vietnam, where VCP has remained avowedly socialist in its ideology, the shift away from socialist economic planning models towards liberal legal frameworks has not been accompanied by abandonment of socialist ethics (Gillespie 2005: 60). Indeed, the Party has periodically reasserted moral justifications for its dominant position in society, linking ideas about clean government to the iconography surrounding the cult of Ho Chi Minh whose espousal of a simple lifestyle and writings on revolutionary ethics are still regularly celebrated and cited in official documents. Moral approaches to accountability at local level citing Ho as an exemplar of official behaviour have become increasingly important for Party building, as a substitute for promises to end exploitation and redistribute wealth. The Party Plenum in January 2012 produced a resolution entitled ‘Some urgent issues of the current Party building’ (Nhan Dan Online 2012) which give priority to ‘putting the check on and pushing back the degradation in political ideology, morality and lifestyle of cadres and Party members, first of all, the leading and managerial cadres’. This position was reported as reflecting ‘the loyalty to Hố Chí Minh thought by taking revolutionary morality as the everlasting root of cadres and Party members’ (Nhan Dan Online 2012). In line with other moral ideologies described in this study, the Fourth Party Plenum in 2012 identified ‘self-criticism and criticism’ as ‘primary solutions’ (Ha 2012) to moral failings within the Party, and accelerated a 2007 Party

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campaign entitled ‘Learn and follow the moral example of Ho Chi Minh’. Underlying the campaign was concern that: Due to the impact of the negative side of the market economy and the process of globalization, coupled with a lack of self-education and effort, a number of our youths and adolescents have shown worrying negative manifestations. They have diverged from decent ideals and led a self-indulgent life. They are lazy in their learning, their moral educating and working. They have hedonistic tendencies and are interested in unhealthy or counter-cultural activities, drug addiction and even breaking the law. These negative practices will, first of all, constitute a threat against their own future, while preventing them participating in our society’s healthy development, progress and civilisation. Meanwhile, hostile forces are ‘waiting’ and will try to make the most of these phenomena to carry out a ‘peaceful evolution’ strategy in order to undermine and hinder the Vietnamese revolution from further development (Nguyen 2007).

The campaign required different levels of government throughout Vietnam to undertake education drives to inform the population about Ho Chi Minh’s moral teachings, and to issue codified sets of moral standards for cadres and Party members at all levels to follow. Compliance was monitored by citizens as well as by Party inspection teams travelling throughout the country to ensure that local authorities were implementing the campaign. This approach to accountability awards the authority to adjudicate on behaviour to Party and people as the adjudicators of moral behaviour, but with reference to standards set out in Ho’s writings and applied by Party committees. Such an approach is reflected also in the accountability provisions in the GDD. The GDD awards genuine accountability to villagers with respect only to local level issues of intra-village security, money management, and morality. Local officials have to account to the people over the spending of local contribution to development projects; and villagers have the right to supervise ‘the activities and moral quality’ (Government of Vietnam 2003: Art. 12) of local cadres, including through scrutinizing budgets and overseeing results of complaints and corruption cases. This emphasis serves two purposes. It is ideologically acceptable in terms of building Party discipline, and has the convenient effect of focusing attention on distribution of resources within villages, rather than between the growing ranks of the urban capitalist elite and the rural poor. In line with the socialist ideology of party leadership, supported by mass organizations, the moral quality of cadres becomes an intense focus of scrutiny, and displaces wider concern with the impact of capitalist development on, for example, the cost of living or the income gap between urban and rural populations. The significance of moral ideologies in dealing with destabilizing issues of economic transformation is illustrated by the evolution of official discourse on land conflicts, as reflected in the Vietnamese press. Annette Kim (2011)

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reports that the level of compensation paid to households displaced by economic development in Ho Chi Minh City increased considerably over the period 2003–9, as local governments became less willing to coerce residents to move. The government-controlled media in Ho Chi Minh City has played an important role in this, engaging in a trend of critical editorializing over the actions of local government officials in mediating land deals, ‘portraying them as greedy and corrupt individuals who took advantage of their position and did not follow the official regulations’ (Kim 2011: 502). As in the response to the Thai Binh protests in 1998, Kim argues that central government officials have permitted these attacks on local level officials as a way of deflecting any broader criticism of the processes of capitalist development over which the Party has presided. Criticism becomes focused on the way in which the procedure is implemented and the amount of compensation paid, rather than on the larger question of the concentration of landholdings in the hands of property developers. Indeed, Kim notes central government intervention on behalf of farmers to override local level decision-making on issues of compensation was heavily covered in the Vietnamese press. Kim also notes a number of stories in the newspapers about ‘greedy farmers’ demanding unrealistic levels of compensation, but a peculiar silence on the role of private developers or the impact of new forms of land use on widening inequality in Vietnam (Kim 2011: 502). Moralist accounts of corruption as prompted by individual greed allow attribution of the dislocations of capitalist development to fall on individual local officials accused of betraying the people and disgracing the Party through their greed or nefarious activities. Public outrage over corruption is considered to be the key legitimacy challenge for the Communist Party.8 The central government has veered tactically between clamping down on corruption in an exemplary manner and suppressing coverage of it. For example, the government has encouraged detailed media coverage of some high profile corruption trials (Gainsborough 2004) but imposed news blackouts on other cases where central interests are threatened, such as the reported misappropriation of funds in a World Bank road-building project in 2006. In the latter case, two journalists were jailed for reporting allegations of corruption which prompted a temporary suspension of World Bank funding and a World Bank investigation.9

8

This view was expressed in various confidential interviews conducted by Caroline Hughes, June 2010, Hanoi. 9 Confidential interview by Caroline Hughes, 18 June 2010, Hanoi.

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While a moral approach may be effective in dealing with misbehaving local officials, it becomes less convincing when applied to the highest levels of government. In 2012, scandals over financial management in a major bank and a state-owned shipbuilding company threatened the job of the Prime Minister, Nguyen Tan Dang, at the Central Committee Plenum, as a wave of critical blogging challenged the government to respond decisively (BBC News 2012). The Party’s response was a televised self-criticism session, in which the prime minister and other Politburo members for the first time publicly admitted errors on the part of the Party. As reported by Voice of Vietnam radio: Party General Secretary Nguyen Phu Trong pointed out recent major shortcomings of the Politburo and the Secretariat. They have failed to prevent moral lapses in some cadres and party members and have not paid adequate attention to promptly attending to negative developments in personnel matters . . . Party leader Nguyen Phu Trong’s speech at the closing session made it clear that through self-criticism, criticism, and listening to the opinions of the cadres, party members and people, the Politburo, the Secretariat, and each member of the Politburo and the Secretariat have a better awareness of their strong points and shortcomings. Members of the Politburo and the Secretariat clearly understand, and regret their shortcomings, and mistakes, and recognize the need to be stricter with themselves, continue to study and practice to improve their knowledge, reform their working style, and be a model of morality and unity. Many cadres have reviewed themselves and initially adjusted some behaviors in their work and daily life (Voice of Vietnam 2012).

The claim that accountability is best served by a practice of cadres ‘reviewing themselves’ makes sense in a context where conduct is evaluated not by award of democratic authority to the people, but by wrongdoers themselves conducting ‘self-criticism’ in line with ‘Ho Chi Minh thought’ (Voice of Vietnam 2012).

C O N C LUSIO N In both Cambodia and Vietnam the imposition of moral ideologies in which greed is decried as the source of corruption and conflict has been effective in a context where the political regime precludes more assertive positions on the part of villagers. Elected local governments lack the power to challenge higher-level decisions but they are both crucial and highly partisan in the way they deal with local-level issues. This produces an accountability trap. Villagers cannot use local representatives to challenge issues such as the disposal of land concessions, the award of monopoly contracts for key infrastructure developments, or the privatization of natural resources, although local governments can advocate for a better deal for villagers around these

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issues. Voting out local governments for doing a bad job of such advocacy is difficult, particularly in Vietnam, and counterproductive in both cases, since party forums (or Fatherland Front forums in the case of Vietnam) are the only powerful forums for advocacy anyway. At the same time, local councils represent an integral part of the dominant party machine in both countries and villagers are constrained to maintain warm relations with local officials, in order to receive their share of whatever development benefits might be made available. Consequently, the ability of villagers—particularly poor villagers—to take an assertive or critical stance vis-a-vis local officials is highly constrained. Moral ideologies of accountability may be taken up as a weapon of the weak in such contexts (Scott 1985). For Cambodian villagers, focus on the moral qualities of the commune chief reflects not only the ideology propagated from above, but also a strategic choice in a context of limited options. The commune chief is a figure whom they can feasibly influence. Villagers know that the commune chief has the possibility to advocate on their behalf with more powerful figures, but little independent power beyond this. They also know that many commune chiefs choose not to advocate for villagers but to take payoffs and bribes from external investors. Emphasis on the moral quality of commune chiefs reflects a potentially effective and politically safe strategy for exerting pressure. A vote against the Party which could usher in an opposition chief is not only politically risky but also less useful since an opposition chief has no power at all. However a complaint about the morality of a commune chief does not necessarily imply political disloyalty and may be effective in gaining attention from higher-level Party patrons and donors who are concerned that local government play its role in representing Party policy as benevolent to the poor. Surveys of villagers’ attitudes in Cambodia have found that voters substitute performance-related criteria for a focus on moral substance in evaluating their commune representatives. Villagers report that the key to good commune governance is a chief who cultivates good and loyal relations with both villagers and superiors. The ability to act in loco parentis, mediating wisely in local disputes, and having the requisite moral fibre to refrain from corrupt or abusive acts has been found in a variety of studies to be the key criteria for ‘good’ leadership in Cambodian villages (Kim 2012; Hughes et al. 2011). In a climate of political intimidation, and in the context of decentralization initiatives designed to defray discontent while retaining political control at higher levels, moral ideologies become the only possible means by which marginalized groups can achieve any kind of redress for abuse of power.

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5 Social Accountability in the Philippines and Cambodia I N T RO DUC T IO N Since the mid-2000s, accountability has become a central element in governance reform advocated and supported by international aid agencies, with social accountability a major plank of this new agenda. Social accountability involves various forms of civil society activism intended to hold public officials answerable for their behaviour—something that aid agencies are now promoting not just in emerging democracies but also in authoritarian societies. This raises crucial questions. Do social accountability mechanisms represent an intrinsic opportunity for democratic forces and/or outcomes? If so, what factors facilitate or obstruct the realization of this potential? Alternatively, could the accountability agenda be used by elites to insulate policy making from substantive contestation by substituting administrative mechanisms for democratic politics? We focus on the Philippines and Cambodia—both members of the World Bank-supported Asian Network for Social Accountability, which holds the Philippines as a model of social accountability for Cambodia. These cases offer an ideal opportunity to compare impacts on different political regimes of common techniques of political organization for accountability promoted by international aid agencies. Notwithstanding the presence of significant democratic forces in the Philippines and a comparative absence of such in Cambodia, there are striking parallels to these cases. To varying degrees, social accountability mechanisms have been subordinated to liberal and/or morally based ideas of accountability that help preserve existing power hierarchies and limit the scope for critical evaluation of prevailing reform agendas. Where these ideologies dominate accountability coalitions, they also often privilege non-confrontational state-society partnerships, drawing activists into technical and administrative processes limiting political reform possibilities by marginalizing or replacing independent collective political action crucial to the democratic political authority of citizens.

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The discussion below briefly examines arguments about the significance of social accountability for democracy. Historical and structural factors shaping the way particular coalitions have embraced social accountability in the Philippines and Cambodia are then identified. This is followed by examination of major social accountability initiatives in the case-study countries: the Government Procurement Reform Act (PRA) in the Philippines and the Demand for Good Governance (DFGG) programme in Cambodia. We demonstrate the potentially broad and flexible appeal of social accountability techniques to coalitions traversing a range of ideologies, actors, and political regime types—authoritarian and democratic. We also highlight the strategic importance of moral ideologies in both cases. In the Philippines the moral ideology promoted by the Catholic Church is successful in linking constituencies that are more commonly pitted against each other: the Makati Business Club and the Manila poor. In Cambodia, World Bank officials promoting efficient service delivery conveniently conflate language drawn from socialist morality of the 1980s with liberal good governance ideology.

SO CI AL AC C O UN TAB I LI T Y A ND P O L IT ICA L R E G IME S Chapter one indicated that social accountability mechanisms range widely. They include independent civil society watchdogs on standards and practices across political, social, and economic governance, with a view to activating more formal accountability mechanisms. Other mechanisms of social accountability involve drawing civil society actors onto bodies within state or government, including advisory boards, commissions of enquiry, and policy implementation bodies (Peruzzotti and Smulovitz 2006a). But what are the political regime implications of various forms of social accountability? Three key arguments about the political significance of social accountability are discernible in the literature. The first is that, by complementing and supplementing existing accountability institutions between elections, social accountability is essential to the scrutiny of power and political competition required for emerging democracies to consolidate. Consequently, the diversity of social organizations and movements involved in mechanisms of accountability in Latin America in particular over the last decade has given rise to new democratic optimism (Mainwaring and Welna 2003; Peruzzotti and Smuvolitz 2006a). While many such initiatives lack directly enforceable sanctions, writers have emphasized their indirect effects in ‘turning on the alarm’ and ‘material consequences’ (Peruzzotti and Smulovitz 2006b: 16; Fox

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2007: 15). As Peruzzotti and Smulovitz (2006b: 26) assert: ‘Social mechanisms constitute an alternative mechanism for imposing costs on political actors and are a necessary condition for the operation of those institutional mechanisms that have mandatory sanctioning capacities’. Theorists placing a premium on checks and balances against state power view such pressures from civil society as integral to the maturing of liberal democracy. The attraction of these checks and balances may extend to those whose interests are more tactical and material than ideological in pursuing or supporting institutional reforms. The second argument concerns the broader regime transformative potential of social accountability. Fox (2007: 9–11) maintains that, through collective social action and innovations in accountability and participation, social foundations for democratic transitions can be laid even before electoral institutions exist. He emphasizes not the dichotomy between state and civil society, nor the role of the latter in simply checking the power of the former, but the nature of the political relationship between the two. The cleavages Fox (2007: 12) highlights are those within and across state and civil society and the attendant coalitions, which may entail support or opposition to public accountability. A third argument, emerging from international aid agencies, focuses on citizens’ rights and empowerment, especially for the poor. According to the World Bank (2004a), social accountability involves the right to know, question, and participate; to better services; to stop corruption; to end poverty; and to demand that commitments are respected. Similarly, for the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), social accountability is ‘the cornerstone of good governance and a prerequisite for effective democracy’ because it enhances citizens’ voice, elicited through ‘dialogues and consultations between policy makers, service providers and citizens, to improve service delivery’ (UNDP Pacific Centre 2010). Although resonating somewhat with democratic arguments, the notion of voice substitutes for, rather than enhances, a democratic conception of citizens’ authority over government decision-making via elected representatives or mobilizing coalitions. World Bank promotion of social accountability has become closely associated with the Bank’s anticorruption agenda, for example through incorporation of social accountability into the Governance and Anti-Corruption Strategy (World Bank 2009a). The foregrounding of corruption amongst the broader range of issues affecting state-society relations narrows social accountability’s political potential. Moreover, this third approach contrasts sharply with Fox’s view that accountability emerges from conflict between contending forces. The World Bank in particular has seized on social accountability as a less confrontational approach to making demands: ‘Across the world, we find citizens are mobilizing, often locally, to demand better services. Not by shouting, but by counting.

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Making sure their governments spend effectively, and keep their promises’ (World Bank 2004a: 3). While the Bank has not entirely dismissed the utility of political conflict (see World Bank 2004b: 10–11; Ackerman 2005: 11–13), the attraction of social accountability is in large part the opportunity for ‘engaging with bureaucrats and politicians in a more informed, organized, constructive and systematic manner’ (World Bank 2004a: 5)—a process that can be aided through the education and training of civil society (Ackerman 2005: 18). In short, citizens’ rights are regarded as appropriately expressed through technocratic and non-confrontational means. The Bank also sees the need to incorporate individuals and the ‘unorganized majority’ into this new state-society relationship (World Bank 2010; World Bank 2004b: 38). It views the unorganized poor as the ‘most reliant on government services and least equipped to hold government officials account’ (Malena, Forster, and Singh 2004: 5). It matters greatly for the political regime impact of social accountability movements whether such widening of political participation represents an alternative to, or support for, collective, ideologically based forms of political organization. New mechanisms of accountability help forge links between the currently ‘unorganized majority’ (World Bank 2010; World Bank 2004b: 38) and wider social and political movements; but they can also obstruct the formation of such links where the substantive content and forms of political conflict permissible through new mechanisms of social accountability are narrowed. For example, emphasis on local service delivery and ‘partnerships’ with government and state authorities has the potential to bolster the authority of citizens as market consumers, but it may do so at the expense of conceptions of citizens as collective actors operating in the name of group interests. Such emphasis thereby entrenches a neoliberal understanding of politics and governance as activities suffused with market values, instead of understandings based upon ongoing conflicts between structurally defined groups. This neoliberal ordering of reform movements may render citizens groups less, rather than more, powerful, with significant implications for chances of success in promoting particular reform agendas, especially in societies where the existing political regime is not organized around liberal values.

T H E S O C I AL AC C O UN TA BIL IT Y CO NT E XT In both Cambodia and the Philippines, historical and structural factors— especially the Cold War legacies of fragmented or stunted civil societies—are

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important to social accountability’s form and prospects. In the Philippines, during the period of martial law and authoritarian rule under Marcos (1972– 86) civil society was decimated, with independent collective organizations of the working class and peasants particular targets of repression (Hilhorst 2003; Abinales and Amoroso 2005). The notable exception was the Catholic Church whose conservative leadership came to some accommodation with Marcos. Shared hostility toward communism and Marcos’ desire for regime legitimacy in a predominantly Catholic country resulted in what bishops described as ‘critical collaboration’ with the state (Barry 2006: 158). In Cambodia, the legacy of American intervention in Indochina was decades of severe repression of leftist groups, from independence to the mid-1970s, followed by the violence of forced collectivization, conscription, and insurgency from 1975 to 1991. By the end of the Cold War, there were few civil associations remaining in the country; even the Buddhist establishment was severely diminished in influence, while mass organizations associated with the ruling communist party struggled to elicit compliance from subsistence farmers to socialist policies. The closing stages of the Cold War saw the beginnings of change. By the mid-1980s, the decay of Marcos’ crony capitalist regime in the Philippines reached such a point that urban mass mobilizations could not be prevented, while business and middle class anxiety mounted over state corruption and disintegrating political order. Against this background, the Church hierarchy abandoned Marcos. It threw support instead behind the politically moderate and devout Catholic presidential aspirant Corazon Aquino, playing a pivotal role mobilizing People Power (also known as Edsa) support for army rebels that precipitated the regime’s collapse (Abinales and Amoroso 2005: 221–6). Subsequently, ‘an avalanche of foreign support’ fostered a proliferation of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) (Constantino-David 1998: 37). In Cambodia, the 1989 withdrawal of the Vietnamese army and the impending cessation of Soviet aid prompted parties to the civil war to accept a United Nations peacekeeping operation, which incorporated international support for democratic institutions such as elections and new civil society organizations (CSOs). In addition to substantial foreign aid, civil society re-emergence in both countries was supported by new constitutional and legislative guarantees. Yet, in the Philippines, ‘the progressive NGOs increasingly fragmented into multiple communities and non-communities’, and the Catholic Church, consequently, remained a dominant force (Hilhorst 2003: 14). In Cambodia, NGOs were largely urban-based, and lacked significant memberships. Many oriented their activities to a great extent toward attracting foreign funding. More so than in the Philippines, repeated threats of political repression against activist trade unions, journalists, and NGOs entailed continued restrictions on freedom to engage in criticism of government policies.

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In both countries, political parties lacked meaningful social bases or programmatic reform agendas. Conspicuously absent was a strong social democratic party aligning labour and middle class groups, as had been characteristic of earlier democratic movements in Western Europe. In the Philippines, the legacy of Marcos’ labour repression combined with the rise of neoliberal globalization pressures to render this unlikely (Rodan and Jayasuriya 2009: 25–6). Deep ideological and tactical divisions between moderate reformers, radical reformers, and revolutionaries were also crucial obstacles in post-Marcos Philippines to the forging of more coherent collective democratic forces including the labour movement (Franco 2001: 201– 67). In Cambodia, opposition party efforts to build a support-base within the nascent trade union movement in the garment industry were inhibited by international intervention from agencies such as the International Labour Organization, which sought to depoliticize Cambodian trade unions (Hughes 2007). In rural areas, in both countries, the power of oligarchs and tycoons helped ensure that party politics represented principally a vehicle through which patronage could be dispensed (Silliman and Noble 1998: 281– 2; Hughes 2003: 60–7). Against these backgrounds, it is unsurprising that intra- and inter-elite conflicts over state power continue to dominate political reform debates. Concepts of democratic reform that could empower labour and the poor struggle for pre-eminence amid a plethora of liberal and morally based critiques. Since the late 1990s, ideas about democracy have in both countries become conflated with notions of good governance promoted by international aid agencies and international business. These ideas have been harnessed by elites attempting to use foreign aid interventions to entrench existing power hierarchies. The Church’s role in the 2001 People Power II mobilization that culminated in an extra-constitutional coup against the democratically elected President Joseph Estrada in the Philippines was self-portrayed as ‘an extension of the continuing relevance of the Church as a facilitator of good governance’ (Bautista 2009: 9). Yet the show of almost exclusively working class and poor Filipino support for the populist Estrada in People Power III was precisely a function of the absence of effective collective organizations to advance these people’s interests. Estrada’s ability to exploit this vacuum was as unsettling for the established oligarchs and the middle class as his penchant for corruption (Hutchison 2006; Hedman 2006: 171). Similarly, the Cambodian People’s Party (CPP)’s resurgence on the back of expansive programmes of rural patronage in the 2002–8 boom years reflects a lack of alternatives in the countryside, as middle class NGOs focus on good governance rather than democratic reform and business groups have retained close relations with the government. It is in these contexts that social accountability movements have

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been founded in the 2000s, with profound effects for both their ideological framing and political regime impacts.

PH I LI PPI N E S O CIA L AC C O UN TAB I LI T Y: AN T ICO R RU P T IO N A ND PRO C UREM EN T R E FO R M The extent of social accountability initiatives in the Philippines is such that it has been proclaimed, alongside India, as the Asia-Pacific regional leader in social accountability (Arroyo and Sirker 2005: vi). Consequently, Filipino trainers and activists, particularly associated with the School of Government at the University of Ateneo in Manila, have been exported under World Bank programmes to countries such as Cambodia to spread information and build capacity for social accountability. The passing of the PRA in 2002 was a landmark Philippines social accountability achievement, institutionalizing national civil society-state partnerships including incorporating societal actors onto the Bids and Awards Committees (BACs) responsible for awarding public sector contracts. Crucially, while democratic notions of accountability were significant within the transnational and national coalitions supporting the PRA, they were also often subordinated to, or articulated in conjunction with, liberal and moral rationales. Thus, although the political authority of citizens to scrutinize state power is advanced through the PRA, this has largely been, particularly in the implementation phase, on the basis of directing civil society energies toward demanding technical and administrative tasks to improve governance. While helping consolidate coalitions between domestic business and middle class critics of corruption and attracting support from external funding agencies, this orientation also places limits on the scope for critical evaluation of the reform agenda by diverting efforts for building stronger and more cohesive grassroots constituency representation so fundamental to democracy. The key coalition involved in social accountability initiatives associated with the PRA was the Transparency and Accountability Network (TAN), formed in November 2000 in the context of the middle-class People Power II revolt against President Joseph Estrada. Comprising nineteen NGOs, TAN included elements of the private sector, academia, and assorted social and religious organizations who shared concern about the lack of transparency and the prevalence of corruption in the Estrada administration. TAN’s strategy to foster improved governance included embracing social accountability, support for which has come from several international donors, including the

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Asia Foundation, US Agency for International Development (USAID), World Bank, UNDP, International Foundation for Electoral Systems, Friedrich Stiftung, AusAID, and the Millennium Challenge Account. While TAN was involved in efforts resulting in the passing of the PRA, another alliance of NGOs, the Coalition Against Corruption (CAC), was formed in 2004 to monitor compliance with the Act. CAC’s (n.d.) goals are to ‘strengthen public participation in governance and ensure proper use of public funds’, reflected in a set of anti-graft agreements with seven government agencies signed by CAC in 2005. Accordingly, it is involved not just in procurement monitoring immediately associated with the PRA but also textbook and medicine monitoring, monitoring of internal revenue allotments for local government, Priority Development Assistance (Pork Barrel) monitoring, and lifestyle checks on public officials. CAC membership is a Who’s Who of social accountability in the Philippines, overlapping with, but extending on, the TAN network by incorporating even stronger Church involvement.1 Although CAC contains diverse ideologies and interests, members appear united in the view of its chairman Jose Cuisia Jr (quoted in Isip 2009) that ‘corruption is the gravest threat to Philippine democracy and society today’. From a liberal perspective, corruption in procurement contract awards, and corruption more generally, obstructs market competition and distorts prices. However, depicting anticorruption governance reform as simultaneously the most effective assault on poverty has also been this coalition’s hallmark. CAC member the Management Association of the Philippines (MAP), for example, asserts: ‘Corruption in public service is anti-poor. The public money that goes to private pockets could have otherwise been used to build schoolhouses, buy textbooks, and train the teachers of our public schools’ (MAP 2008: 5). As we will see below, in the establishment and implementation of the Government Procurement Act, the notion that corruption is the principal political and social malady afflicting the Philippines has been the abiding basis of national and transnational coalitions who variously see in social accountability the prospect of advancing liberal, democratic, and/or moral reform agendas. Important as arresting corruption is to eradicating poverty, its portrayal as the primary solution has ideological effects, diverting attention from wider issues of wealth and power distribution resulting from market relations and from consideration of whether socio-economically disadvantaged groups

1 Church membership includes the Bishops-Businessmen’s Conference for Human Development and the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of the Philippines’ National Secretariat for Social Action, Justice, and Peace. Other CAC members are: Ateneo School of Government, Barug Pilipino, Caucus of Development NGO Networks (CODE-NGO), Integrated Bar of the Philippines (IBP), the Makati Business Club (MBC), National Citizens’ Movement for Free Elections, and TAN.

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have adequate political representation. Furthermore, the use of social accountability to combat corruption has steered NGO energies away from coalition building among the poor toward technical work of monitoring compliance. The initial driving force to enact the PRA comprised a coalition of state bureaucrats and international aid agencies. At one level, this coalition embraced a standard contemporary liberal critique of corruption as rooted in state capture by narrow interests and maladministration by officials, the solution being better governance through more transparency and accountability within which competitive market forces are central. At another level, a concerted political strategy to champion and implement reforms was hatched that included engaging and harnessing social and political forces (Campos and Syquia 2006). And coalition building did not stop with the passing of the PRA. Instead, the Church, which had hitherto channelled its fight against corruption elsewhere, became heavily involved in implementing social accountability mechanisms for public procurement. Its vast organizational networks have been crucial to the recruitment, training, and authority of the societal involvement in the BAC. Broadly, stages in the conception, mobilization of support for, and implementation of the PRA corresponded with the respective primary influence at the time of liberal, democratic, and moral approaches within accountability coalitions. First moves toward public procurement reform can be traced to the efforts of the US-trained economist Benjamin Diokno, appointed in 1998 to head the Philippines Department of Budget and Management (DBM). His concerns about the budgeting system and procurement prompted him to seek help from USAID, resulting initially in two US-based procurement experts working within DBM for six months to produce a draft on requisite legislative reforms. By early 2000, an extensive USAID technical assistance programme was funding workshops, short-term consultancies, and other activities linking DBM with support and advice from USAID and other donors as part of a Technical Agreement (TA). An early TA team priority was to ensure officials from DBM and other key Philippines agencies supported a new comprehensive procurement law. Toward this end, a Technical Working Group (TWG) was established to work with the Budget Reform Task Force (BRTF) and the TA team. The resulting parliamentary bill was endorsed by the House of Representatives. However, the Estrada imbroglio and imminent election concerns of senators resulted in the 11th Congress concluding before any further progress (Campos and Syquia 2006: 11). At this point, members of the TWG, the BRTF, and the TA team also concluded that links with civil society were needed to knit together the expertise and organizational ingredients for social accountability. Accordingly, in

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February 2001, the NGO Procurement Watch Inc. (PWI) was formed, funded by a grant from the World Bank managed by the DBM.2 PWI described itself as a ‘non-profit, non-partisan, civil society organization created by a group of concerned and seasoned individuals from government, academe, the legal profession, and the private sector’ (Campos and Syquia 2006: 39). PWI was to specialize in procurement training and monitoring but it soon became clear that its advocacy role would be critical. Estrada’s removal represented a hiatus in the anticorruption movement, the challenge now was to ensure President Arroyo and other parliamentarians still saw the urgency of procurement reform (Thornton 2006; Campos and Syquia 2006: 16–7). PWI targeted TAN in attempting to galvanize civil society support. Before long, TAN had prepared a manifesto endorsing the passage of a new procurement law containing ten principles, including the incorporation of NGOs onto BACs. TAN urged the Chairman of the Committee on Constitutional Amendments in the Philippine Senate to give priority to these principles and the procurement bills in the new Congress. Meanwhile, PWI was invited to join TAN. While PWI sought to cultivate various other smaller civil society groups, it was the TAN alliance that was most significant in connecting reformist elements of the state bureaucracy and their supporters among aid agencies with Philippine civil society. What ensued was a sustained and well-coordinated political campaign resulting in the PRA becoming law in January 2003 (Campos and Syquia 2006: 25–30). This was the democratic highpoint of the movement: the assertion of civil society authority as the imperative for change. Central to the pitch by PWI and its coalition partners for RA 9184 was the claim that the government was losing an average of P21 billion (US$402 million) annually from corruption in the public procurement process, or about 15% of all government contracts (Ferriols 2002). In supporting the legislation, Senator Edgardo J. Angara asserted that: ‘The evil of corruption is robbing our people of essential services such as schooling, health, food and housing’ (quoted in Philippine Star 2002). Edgardo, who observed that ‘the stench of corruption is the only constant in our public life today’, described RA 9184 as ‘the biggest and the boldest initiative ever taken by the Senate to help stamp out the menace of corruption’ (quoted in Santos 2002). Once the PRA was passed, though, emphasis shifted from the rights of the poor, to the technical concern of monitoring compliance with detailed and complex regulations and processes. The PRA covers any procurements 2 Those credited with the idea of PWI were: members of the TA team, Ed Campos and Teresa Taningco; Jacinto Gavino, a professor of public management at the Asian Institute of Management; and Patricia Santo Tomas, who was subsequently Secretary of Labor (Campos and Syquia 2006: 16).

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involving infrastructure projects, goods, and consulting services in national and local government departments, agencies, bureaus, and offices. The declared principles embedded in the legislation include the desire to ensure competitiveness and equal opportunity for private contracting parties, transparency and uniformity in the application of the procurement process, accountability of public officials, and public monitoring of the procurement process and the implementation of awarded contracts to ensure compliance with the Act. The composition and powers of the BAC are critical to accountability of officials and monitoring of the procurement process. The BAC’s roles include determining the eligibility of prospective bidders, evaluating bids, and recommending the award of contracts. The BAC, comprising a minimum of five and a maximum of seven members, is chaired by a senior official of the procuring entity (other than its head) but, in addition to including a representative of the Commission on Audit, is required to have at least two observers sitting in on proceedings: ‘one from a duly recognized private group in a sector or discipline relevant to the procurement at hand, and the other from a non-government organization’ (Congress of the Philippines 2003: 9). In recognition of the technical demands on observers, and indeed procuring entities and others, the Government Procurement Policy Board (GPPB) is tasked with ensuring suitable training programmes for all involved. As subsequent proposed amendments to the Act clarified, observers should have: ‘Knowledge, experience or expertise in procurement or in the subject matter of the contract to be bid’ (Escudero 2007: 18). Where observers believe the procurement process does not comply with the Act, they can submit a report to the Office of the Ombudsman, copied to the GPPB, explaining how. The technical expertise and organizational capacities of civil society groups are integral to the training and recruitment of observers on the BACs and the monitoring of compliance with the Act. Accordingly, PWI’s task has been both enhanced and narrowed, as it plays a pivotal role in training other NGOs, state officials, and individual volunteers about the procurement process. PWI’s work has included the joint project with the Office of the Ombudsman to produce a manual for handling BAC feedback and complaints (Office of the Ombudsman and PWI 2006), an exercise funded by USAID and The Asia Foundation. Its role has thus changed from a confrontational, overtly political, and explicitly democratic one in the campaign to get the Act passed, to a mainly technical role. According to PWI’s Supervising Technical Officer, Caroline Belisario,3 the principal question now is whether ‘procurement is 3 Interview by Garry Rodan with PWI Supervising Technical Officer, Caroline Belisario, 17 August 2009, Manila.

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efficient and is it based on good quantification process’. Belisario also explained that civil society-government relationships introduced under the PRA must be ‘non-adversarial and non-confrontational partnerships’.4 Another change following the passage of the Act was the role of the Church. The Church’s formal organizations had not been integral to the coalitions that secured RA 9184; at that stage, the Church declined overtures from PWI to either meet or produce a position paper advocating support for the proposed reform.5 However, the Church became pivotal to the Act’s implementation. Church disinterest in the political campaign for RA 9184 stemmed not from indifference to corruption—far from it. Rather, many in the Church hierarchy saw the problem as first and foremost a moral and cultural one that needed to be addressed accordingly, and the Church now brought this ideological framework into the anticorruption movement in the implementation phase of the Government Procurement Act. Support of the urban poor for Estrada in particular had shocked Church leaders: Swayed by demagogues with deceitful political ends, the involvement of many of the poor in ‘Edsa III’ was a grim reminder that efforts to understand and alleviate their plight and communicate with them are still very much wanting (CEC 2003: iii).

From May 2003, the Jesuit order’s Committee on the Evangelization of Culture embarked on a major campaign of moral education to arrest corruption and bolster accountability through the Ehem! programme (CEC 2003: xii). The emphasis was heavily on the need for a sense of civic and moral duty within both public institutions and civil society. This included a detailed manual for public information seminars and workshops, serving as ‘a tool for making people more seriously sensitive and bothered about corruption and more deeply involved in combating it at the individual, group and institutional levels’ (CEC 2003: xii). Whereas many other anticorruption measures concentrate on monitoring power holders, it was explained at the Ehem! launch that this was ‘more geared toward changing the mindsets of ordinary people, who appear to have become tolerant, if not downright supportive, of corruption’ (Araya 2003). Corruption was thus portrayed as part of humankind’s broader moral fallibility. Speaking at the Bishop-Businessmen’s Conference General Assembly of 8 July 2004, President Arroyo requested the Church’s assistance to implement the PRA. By late 2004, not only was the Church involved in helping to train

4 Interview by Garry Rodan with PWI Supervising Technical Officer, Caroline Belisario, 17 August 2009, Manila. 5 Interview by Garry Rodan with PWI Supervising Technical Officer, Caroline Belisario, 17 August 2009, Manila.

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BAC observers, through the Council of the Laity of the Philippines (LAIKO) and the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of the Philippines (CBCP), but it had also become an important CAC member. Arroyo’s motives for enlisting Church support are open to interpretation. Certainly, the breadth and depth of organizational structures across the Philippines rendered the Church’s involvement imperative to a comprehensive RA 9184 implementation. Indeed, the World Bank was of the view that only the Catholic Church had the organizational capacity to ensure the training of observers for the BACs of local government units and the 42,000 barangays in the Philippines—a point underlined in meetings between the GPPB and CAC sponsored by the Bank (LAIKO 2009: 45). Yet by cultivating the support of conservative bishops and acknowledging their political importance there may have been the aim as well of keeping the emphasis in RA 9184 firmly on the ‘partnership’ with government rather than more challenging agendas of political accountability for the Arroyo administration. Whatever Arroyo’s motivations, the desire to address the moral basis to accountability emphasized in Ehem! is at the fore in the CBCP-LAIKO approach to training BAC observers. For example, when requested by the Social Security System (SSS) to train its BAC and support staff, LAIKO’s Advocacy for Good Governance Committee designed a module that was infused with moral values education. The result was a two-day Holy Retreat in October 2007 for members of the BAC and TWG of SSS which included a presentation on ‘The Moral Responsibility of Public Servants’ by Bishop Gabriel V. Reyes, LAIKO National Director, and a mass and homily citing a gospel parable to draw out implications for those seeking to get rich through corruption (CBCP News 2007). Meanwhile, particularly through the work of Jesuit academics at the Ateneo University, Catholic activists were involved in a range of social accountability watchdog mechanisms and CAC criticisms of authorities over corruption. By 2008, much of the latter was targeted at Arroyo (Quimpo 2010: 55–7). Significantly, while this included aligning with democratic forces and ideologies, CBCP President and Archbishop of Jaro, Angel Lagdameo (2008), explained that democracy must be morally and spiritually based and centred on the defeat of corruption: It is through internal conversion into the maturity of Christ through communal and prayerful discernment and action that the roots of corruption are discovered and destroyed. We believe that such communal action will perpetuate at the grassroots level the spirit of People Power so brilliantly demonstrated to the world at EDSA I. It is People Power with a difference. From the grassroots will come out a culture of truth and integrity we so deeply seek and build.

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In effect, citizens’ political participation through social accountability mechanisms and institutions—whether inspired by liberal or democratic ideologies—cannot combat corruption (the central political problem) without the right individual moral ingredients. Here the Church positions itself as the preeminent authority on, and guardian of, Filipino morals: a claim to political and not just religious authority. In the context of increasing preoccupation of civil society groups with monitoring PRA implementation, concern has emerged about co-optation. Indeed, the possibility of co-optation is one that NGOs in the Philippines constantly face (Hedman 2006; Reid 2008). Some civil society participants refer to the risks of being used as ‘deodorizers’ of smelly deals, helping to give the appearance of close and effective scrutiny of public procurement.6 This was particularly evident in the reaction of civil society groups to President Arroyo’s creation of a Procurement Transparency Group (PTG) in late 2007, headed by the GPPB and involving five government agencies and five NGOs. With a brief to evaluate and monitor procurement activities, the purpose of PTG aroused suspicion among activists who saw this as duplicating the roles of the Ombudsman and existing BACs. Indeed, TAN Executive Director, Vincent Lazatin,7 was of the impression from discussions with authorities that the real motivation behind PTG was to ‘ensure that procurements don’t hit the headlines’. TAN, the Asian development Bank, the World Bank, and Japan International Corporation Agency jointly wrote to the Office of the President arguing that if transparency provisions within RA 9184 were strengthened the PTG would not be necessary. It was only after concessions boosting civil society representation, abandoning the idea of only examining procurements of a hundred million pesos, and agreement to publicly release the same information available to the PTG that TAN agreed to be involved in the PTG.8 Similarly, civil society actors have reservations over restrictions implicit on their monitoring of corruption under the PRA. Observers are invited to the procurement process starting at the pre-bid conference up until the opening and evaluation of bids. Yet as Lazatin observes, ‘you can have a perfectly clean procurement between those bookends’.9 Meanwhile, ‘there are practices that

6 Interviews by Garry Rodan with: TAN Executive Director, Vincent Lazatin, 29 August 2009; LAIKO Chairman, Advocacy Against Graft and Corruption, Jose B. Lugay, 18 August 2009; PWI Supervising Technical Officer, Caroline Belisario, 17 August 2009; former Coordinator, Government Watch, and Network Coordinator, the Affiliated Network for Social Accountability in East Asia and the Pacific, Dondon Parafina, 19 August 2009; all in Manila. 7 Interview by Garry Rodan with TAN Executive Director, Vincent Lazatin, 28 August 2009, Manila. 8 Interview by Garry Rodan with TAN Executive Director, Vincent Lazatin, 28 August 2009, Manila. 9 Interview by Garry Rodan with TAN Executive Director, Vincent Lazatin, 28 August 2009, Manila.

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happen prior to the pre-bid conference where decisions are made amongst bidders—sometimes including government officials with regards to how that procurement will proceed and so, even before the pre-bid conference, the result is in sight’.10 Echoing this view, LAIKO’s Jose B. Lugay contends that: ‘An outside representative, like the NGO observer of the BAC, must have a sharp eye to detect circumstances conducive to collusion’.11 However, a high degree of technical knowledge, or access to it, may sometimes be needed to sense such possible circumstances. Costing for road construction, for example, includes prices for soil, cement, and equipment but, according to Lazatin, ‘you have to be a very technical person to reverse engineer that calculation and see if it’s okay’.12 To be sure, the roles of BAC observers and recourse to the PTG have produced some significant instances of arresting corruption. For example, LAIKO acted on behalf of the Church-based NGO Dilaab Foundation in a successful appeal to the PTG of Malacanang. This followed observers’ concerns about irregularities being disregarded by the BAC presiding over heavy equipment procurement worth P1.4 billion (US$29.7 million) for irrigation projects of the National Irrigation Administration (NIA) office in Cebu. Two companies, with alleged backing from the Presidential Palace, had been awarded the contract after lower-priced competitors were ruled ineligible under a hastily introduced requirement that only firms with thirty years’ experience or more (rather than the usual three) were eligible. Alongside this appeal there was press reporting on a privilege speech by Senator Manuel (Mar) Roxas attacking the NIA decision as rigged to favour presidential cronies (LAIKO 2009: 35–6), adding pressure on the PTG to demonstrate its responsiveness to BAC observer complaints. However, the challenges of ensuring adequate numbers of observers sufficiently equipped technically to serve on the BACs, let alone lodge reports on concerns about the procurement process, are considerable. PWI estimates that of the 8,000 trained observers needed only about eight hundred existed by the end of 2009 (IBP 2009). Added to this is the logistical problem of matching requisite technical expertise among trained observers with the geographical location of BAC meetings. Meanwhile, local government institutions in particular that do not invite observers to BAC meetings cannot easily be disciplined since the GPPB is unable to satisfy all requests for trained observers.

10

Interview by Garry Rodan with TAN Executive Director, Vincent Lazatin, 28 August 2009, Manila. Interview by Garry Rodan with LAIKO Chairman, Advocacy Against Graft and Corruption, Jose B. Lugay, 18 August 2009, Manila. 12 Interview by Garry Rodan with TAN Executive Director, Vincent Lazatin, 28 August 2009, Manila. 11

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Preventing government institutions inviting observers from ‘friendly’ organizations is difficult for the same reason. Moreover, many serving as observers representing civil society or professional groups are retirees or on low incomes, whose lack of administrative and secretarial support can impede lodging reports about suspected corruption. In short, while the PRA has opened up avenues for increasing accountability, the practical demands consume a disproportionate civil society effort in technical rather than political exercises. An even more pervasive aspect of this is the ideological framing of corruption as the principal political and moral problem confronting the Philippines to be rectified through better-designed governance institutions. Those institutions are intended, above all else, to ensure the forces of market competition are not blunted but maximized to curb corruption. With the problem of, and solution to, corruption defined in this way, alternative reform priorities are either subordinated or marginalized altogether. In particular, conceptions of corruption as symptomatic of structurally rooted social conflicts and consideration of the implications of this for mechanisms of political accountability and representation do not resonate with the non-adversarial state-civil society partnership model ascendant among the Philippine middle class. Consequently, although there is now an external check on the exercise of state power, this is a check that must, by its nature, be performed by technocrats and experts, rather than by citizens per se. The effect is to contain the political space for contestation and reform imagination.

SO C I AL AC C O UN TAB I LI TY IN CA MB O D IA : FRO M ANTICORRUPTION TO RU RAL DEVELOPMENT Within Cambodia, social accountability’s preeminent influence is in government rural development programmes. Significantly, despite the interests and influence of international agencies, anticorruption has not been a social accountability focus, as in the Philippines. Unlike in the Philippines, where business interests played an important role, social accountability in Cambodia has been primarily donor-driven. Business groups are unwilling to promote an anticorruption agenda, since they regard the predatory and patronage-oriented CPP as key to political stability and a continued flow of lucrative state contracts. Consequently, efforts by local NGOs working with international agencies to promote moral, liberal, or democratic agendas with respect to corruption have been successfully repressed by the government. As the Cold War wound down, privatization of land and other natural resources disadvantaged the subsistence sector of the economy in favour of

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well-connected investors. From near equality in 1989, the distribution of wealth in Cambodia has become one of the most unequal in Asia (Guimbert 2009). During the 2002–8 economic boom, the CPP, under Prime Minister Hun Sen, awarded tracts of land and forest to Cambodian tycoons and foreign investors prepared to support the Party’s platform. In return for preferential treatment, businessmen made large donations to Party-sponsored development projects across the rural heartland, building schools, roads, and irrigation schemes. Spending on these projects outstripped state development budgets, and boosted support for the CPP, despite high levels of economic misery and political contestation in both peripheral and urban areas. This political model, combining predation with neopatrimonialism, differs substantially from liberal prescriptions for good governance. Eliciting donations from businessmen and spending these on politicized development projects requires maintenance, by political leaders, of absolute discretion over procurement contracts and budgets. It militates against the emergence of authoritative regulatory regimes. Consequently, corruption has not figured prominently in the social accountability agenda: quite the reverse. The government recently signalled its displeasure over international efforts to boost civil society movements against corruption in Cambodia. In 2005 the US Agency for International Development, via the international NGO PACT Cambodia, began funding civil society activities to encourage citizens’ participation in anticorruption activities. This led to a civil society campaign called the Clean Hands campaign, which culminated in a televised music and comedy concert held in the national Olympic Stadium in front of 50,000 people in 2009 to spread the anticorruption message. The concert prompted a political backlash after the US Ambassador, Carol Rodley, in the opening speech made at the event, claimed that corruption cost the Cambodian Treasury US$500 million a year (Rodley 2009). This comment attracted strong criticism from the Cambodian government—the Ministry of Foreign Affairs wrote to the US Embassy claiming that the accusations were ‘politically motivated and unsubstantiated’ and anticorruption NGOs were derided on pro-government television channels (Campbell 2009). The backlash against advocacy on the corruption issue indicates its sensitivity for the government. An anticorruption law was finally passed in early 2010, following fifteen years in the drafting process, perhaps reflecting a perception that international and Cambodian public pressure were building on the issue. However, certain provisions in the law—such as the article mandating up to six months imprisonment for whistle blowers making accusations that ‘lead to fruitless investigations’ (Royal Government of Cambodia 2010a: Art. 41)—seemed certain to render it ineffective.

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In other issue areas, the political coalition that dominates CPP has been more accepting of international social accountability promotion. The World Bank in 2008 launched a US$20 million ‘Demand for Good Governance’ programme in Cambodia, with the collaboration of the Cambodian Ministry of Interior (MoI), that is intended to promote citizen involvement in holding the government to account in a range of areas. In a press release announcing the project, the World Bank (2008a), in line with the liberal approach underlying its similar programmes in other countries, explicitly linked it to the anticorruption agenda, remarking: Good governance is increasingly recognized as a fundamental prerequisite for sustainable development. Its opposite—corruption—is also recognized as a major impediment to efficient and effective government, with a disproportionate impact on the poor. Stimulating citizen demand for better governance has become a fundamental tool for more transparency and accountability in public affairs, and an integral part of the World Bank’s governance and anti-corruption strategy.

However, World Bank officials familiar with Cambodia are more tentative in claiming that the programme might have an impact on corruption. They suggest a cautious approach to lay the groundwork for more modest forms of accountability.13 The DFGG programme emerged from the Bank’s evaluations of the role of civil society in promoting good governance in Cambodia. These concluded that social accountability techniques could harness CSOs more effectively to ‘demand-side’ good governance initiatives (Burke and Vanna 2005; Malena and Chhim 2009). In making these assessments, the World Bank drew explicitly on its own ‘demand-side’ agenda, seeking to shift civil society activism ‘from shouting to counting’ (World Bank 2004a). This prompted the Bank to launch a Program for Enhancing Capacity for Social Accountability (PECSA) in Cambodia in 2008. PECSA incorporated four goals: training CSOs in social accountability techniques; adapting what were called ‘global accountability practices’ (World Bank n.d.) to the Cambodian context; providing grants for experimenting with social accountability; and supporting networking between social accountability groups. PECSA entailed two-week intensive ‘social accountability schools’ (World Bank n.d.) run by trainers imported from Ateneo University’s School of Government. Students were taken to see social accountability in action in the Philippines and in India, reflecting the World Bank’s view of social accountability as primarily a technical mechanism

13 Interview by Caroline Hughes with former Senior Advisor for Public Sector Governance and External Affairs, the World Bank, Vinay Bhargava, 20 July, 2009, Phnom Penh.

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or set of capacities for promoting reform, rather than a contextually embedded political movement. The DFGG built upon PECSA, offering US$4 million in grants to non-state actors to form partnerships with government institutions in social accountability projects. Selected state agencies, already experimenting with accountability practices, were also assisted.14 To ensure political support, DFGG was launched following extensive discussions with government officials, and is run through a Project Coordination Office based in the MoI. Given the Cambodian government’s lack of interest in anticorruption campaigns, what ideological agenda(s) does this programme serve, and to what extent does it involve a migration of political authority away from existing power-holders and toward citizens more broadly? For the World Bank, the significance is twofold. First, DFGG provides an opportunity to initiate new modes of accountability within state institutions. Although the institutions selected are marginal to the key areas of natural resource management and land, and consequently do not directly tackle the political economy of corruption underpinning CPP power, they do, Bank officials suggest, offer opportunities for the government to experiment with new ways of working. According to a Bank official who led the project in its inception phase: We know there are certain things that are off limits. For example, what has happened with PACT and USAID. It is not explicitly written but it happens. The government will make sure that line is not crossed . . . We are trying to close the gap between what is theoretically possible and what is actually happening. Without pushing the frontier, we can do a lot that isn’t being done. Hopefully the frontier will move, but we can do a lot of things up to the frontier that weren’t being done.15

Second, the programme provides an opportunity to reduce distrust between the Cambodian government and civil society, fostering ‘a culture of constructive engagement that NSAs [Non-State Actors] would carry over to other contexts’ (World Bank 2008b: 13). Interviews with senior government officials suggest a different conceptualization of accountability. Secretary of State of the MoI, Ngy Chanphal, who heads the DFGG Project Coordination Office, noted in an interview that when translated into Khmer, the programme was called the ‘Local Governance Project’ rather than the ‘Demand for Good Governance Project’, because:

14 Interview by Caroline Hughes with former Senior Advisor for Public Sector Governance and External Affairs, the World Bank, Vinay Bhargava, 20 July 2009, Phnom Penh. 15 Interview by Caroline Hughes with former Senior Advisor for Public Sector Governance and External Affairs, the World Bank, Vinay Bhargava, 20 July 2009, Phnom Penh.

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There was some complaint about the title. The word demand means demanding, imposing forcefully. This is not really good . . . So when the World Bank brought this project we changed the title in Khmer to Local Good Governance Project. In Khmer we would not accept this kind of demand.16

NGO participants in the project also pointed to differences between the government’s and the Bank’s translation of the term accountability itself. While the World Bank preferred tetuel koh trew which means a broad sense of responsibility or obligation, the government insisted upon using the invented term koneakdeypheap which has a narrower meaning, more associated with accountancy.17 The government’s care on the use of terminology is indicative of concern to impose a particular ideological framework on the project. The decision to substitute the idea of ‘demand’ with the idea of ‘local’ governance is particularly interesting, since acceptance of the programme on the part of the Cambodian government accords with ongoing experimentation with decentralization of government; and it is here that powerful political coalitions of support for a particular ideological approach to accountability can be most clearly identified. As described in the previous chapter, decentralization of government is regarded in recent development orthodoxy as providing increasing accountability by reducing the costs to the poor of organizing to demand better service. The Cambodian government has declared a concern to promote what it calls ‘democratic development’ (Royal Government of Cambodia 2010c) at local level via decentralization of governance, and in this area appears to be genuinely embracing new forms of social accountability. Underlying this embrace are two concerns central to the CPP’s political strategy. The CPP consistently campaigns on its ability to ‘get things done’. The power to mobilize resources and deliver tangible local development goods is central to the Party’s image and dominates television news broadcasts. The state-business relationship reflects this: private tycoons vie with one another to contribute donations to Party ‘good works’ in return for receiving honours such as the title of Okhna, bestowed when one has contributed US$100,000 to these development projects. The material benefits of such a title are significant: of nineteen contracts to develop Special Economic Zones awarded to Cambodian businesses, for example, thirteen were awarded to Okhnas (Royal Government of Cambodia 2010b). Some of these Okhnas have also been identified by NGO Global Witness (2007: 11) as recipients of lucrative logging 16 Interview by Caroline Hughes with Secretary of State, Cambodian Ministry of Interior, Ngy Chanphal, 22 July 2009, Phnom Penh. 17 Interview by Caroline Hughes with SILAKA Training Coordinator, Heng Vannarith, 21 July 2009, Phnom Penh.

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concessions and large agro-industrial land concessions (Royal Government of Cambodia 2010c). Three Okhnas have also been appointed to parliament as CPP senators. High-ranking government officials from Phnom Penh ministries are allocated districts, within which they are responsible for coordinating development projects paid for via the state budget, international aid projects, and private donations. Ministers and secretaries of state spend their weekends overseeing these projects in liaison with district Party working groups, who in turn liaise with elected commune councils. As explained in chapter four, moral ideas of accountability mesh well with this system. Secretary of State Ngy Chanphal commented on the improved coordination between central and local government since the election of commune councils began in 2002, and the significance of this for the CPP’s national electoral strategy: The new civil servants should not be the master of the people, but the public servants. We want to make services better: we are trying, working as a political party; we are required to work in our home districts. Now what happens down there—people bring it back to the government to hear . . . Buying votes is not going to help. We have to prove that we work well and explain government policy, really do things. We have to be involved in infrastructure et cetera. The people see it. And you cannot trust that they will vote for you if you don’t do this.18

This policy of working at the grassroots to mobilize participation and support is integral to the CPP’s hold on power (Craig and Pak 2011). Government officials such as Ngy Chanphal describe the system as a form of home-grown democracy: ‘Now we have a very democratic society—from the grassroots up, this is not imported from somewhere . . . Doing reform and economic development, ensuring the sustainability of the livelihood of the people is the main objective’.19 Some analysts have regarded this as a shift from the elite patronage surrounding forestry in the 1990s, used to cement the CPP’s political alliances and end the Khmer Rouge—or Party of Democratic Kampuchea—insurgency, to a form of mass patronage that could represent a precursor to democracy (Craig and Pak 2011). However, the ideological underpinnings of this system are different from those of democratic accountability. While liberal and democratic terminology is freely appropriated in government documents, the system has more

18 Interview by Caroline Hughes with Secretary of State, Cambodian MoI, Ngy Chanphal, 22 July 2009, Phnom Penh. 19 Interview by Caroline Hughes with Secretary of State, Cambodian MoI, Ngy Chanphal, 22 July 2009, Phnom Penh.

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in common with a hybrid socialist and nationalist ideology of moral solidarity between leaders and peasants that has long been familiar in Cambodian political rhetoric. It reprises a long-standing assertion by Cambodian socialist regimes of a historically given commonality of purpose amongst various classes in achieving social and economic progress, conceptualized as preservation of public order, combined with more efficient infrastructure and service delivery. Since the 1990s, a Khmer culturalist and nationalist version of this has been articulated, which combines the language of modernization with symbols of cultural authenticity, such as patronage of Buddhist temples, and detailed attention to traditional rituals of etiquette and rank. A particularly powerful motif has been that of development as a ‘gift’ given by meritorious benefactors to the poor out of a sense of moral obligation. This combines ideas of socialist mobilization for development with Buddhist conceptions of merit making and compassion (Hughes 2006). There is a sharp disjuncture between this approach and democratic accountability. The CPP’s model of ‘democratic’ development thus substitutes mobilization of participation into predetermined agendas for a shift of political authority from elite to masses. It imposes rigid hierarchies of benevolence and gratitude, while creating means for better information about mismanagement of resources to flow up through Party—not state—structures. This has improved the atmosphere within Cambodian villages, in comparison to the widespread climate of fear that prevailed in previous decades, but allows only the most limited of debates over government ‘effectiveness’. The DFGG accords with this approach. Opportunities for citizens to monitor government activities, for example through audits and report cards, can be oriented to Party needs. Social accountability mechanisms supply higher levels of government with data they can use to discipline and control local level officials. They can encourage citizens to join with government in ironing out questions of effectiveness, rather than to develop autonomous citizens’ movements that might challenge the government for control over decision-making. Like the Philippines’ PRA, then, the DFGG risks absorbing activists in technical and administrative questions, as opposed to coalition building activities that can empower the poor. This implies limited ability to tackle issues, such as corruption, on which the government does not wish to implement reform. DFGG requires, as a condition of receiving grant funding, conformity to principles of ‘constructive engagement’ between NGOs and government. This potentially reinforces a division already drawn by the Cambodian government, between NGOs doing ‘good works’ in village development and NGOs confronting the government via advocacy initiatives in the heavily-contested areas of access for the poor to land and natural resources. The constructive engagement clause in the DFGG project document is played down by World Bank officials as merely

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a requirement that ‘someone in government knows what you are planning to do and is prepared to listen—otherwise what is the point in doing it’?20 For Ngy Chanphal, the clause has more significance: ‘The NGOs have to understand the reform agenda of the government. We will not provide funding to NGOs who want to bring the government down. We want to improve service delivery and build a partnership together’.21 Ngy went on to note that only a small number of NGOs, working in areas of human rights and corruption, departed from this model and had an ‘attitude of unconstructive engagement’. He commented that such NGOs would be kept out of the programme because ‘[w]e can’t afford to have fighting with each other—democracy is not mature yet’.22 The distinction drawn between ‘political’ NGOs and ‘local development’ NGOs represents a second aspect of the utility of the DFGG programme. For the MoI, local development NGOs can be regarded as an extension of government, via constructive ‘partnerships’, helping the central Ministry to monitor the practices of local government and make up for any shortfalls at a time when the structure of local government is changing rapidly under the influence of decentralization reform: ‘civil society can help to monitor subnational councils, work with subnational councils at district and province level and bring more local knowledge’.23 For Ngy Chanphal: One of the main assets for Cambodia is that we have 2,400 NGOs. Now they have capacity—they are doing a lot more work. In remote areas, only those working with NGOs know what’s going on there. Their work is complementary to Government.24

In a context where NGOs are highly dependent on external funding, the US$4 million available via the DFGG scheme offers an opportunity for the MoI to cement its relationship with ‘constructive’ NGOs: We have a principle of constructive engagement—it is clear that those that are not supporting the government will not be funded. But NGOs working to support the reform agenda—reform is life or death for Cambodia.25

20 Interview by Caroline Hughes with former Senior Advisor for Public Sector Governance External Affairs, the World Bank, Vinay Bhargava, 20 July 2009, Phnom Penh. 21 Interview by Caroline Hughes with Secretary of State, Cambodian MoI, Ngy Chanphal, 22 2009, Phnom Penh. 22 Interview by Caroline Hughes with Secretary of State, Cambodian MoI, Ngy Chanphal, 22 2009, Phnom Penh. 23 Interview by Caroline Hughes with Secretary of State, Cambodian MoI, Ngy Chanphal, 22 2009, Phnom Penh. 24 Interview by Caroline Hughes with Secretary of State, Cambodian MoI, Ngy Chanphal, 22 2009, Phnom Penh. 25 Interview by Caroline Hughes with Secretary of State, Cambodian MoI, Ngy Chanphal, 22 2009, Phnom Penh.

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The involvement of NGOs in a government-framed vision of reform at the expense of contestation over resource distributions suggests potential to use social accountability mechanisms as ‘deodorizers’ of an authoritarian move to dispossess the poor of the right to use and access Cambodia’s resource base. In Cambodia’s contemporary political economy, subsistence farmers can no longer access unused land or forest products as of customary right; they must rely instead on gifts from government-aligned NGOs and benefactors for their survival. Their participation in politics risks being confined, in part via social accountability mechanisms, to comments on the effectiveness with which these goods are delivered. Viewed in this light, social accountability emerges as a means for the government to perfect already powerful systems of grassroots co-optation associated with the provision of small-scale development programmes. Therefore, the level of threat surrounding NGO work is significant. The scope available to Cambodian NGOs who participated in the PECSA and DFGG programmes to push the boundaries of government tolerance for criticism is limited. NGO graduates from the PECSA programme questioned whether entry into DFGG-style partnerships would allow more assertive engagement with government on contentious issues like corruption: What is the benefit for NGOs from this? There is no clear answer . . . There must be consultation first, to figure out whether they [the government] are willing or not. If we start monitoring the budget—how they spend it—the relationship will be put into question. There must be clear points to say that if you do things in the good governance area and get some pressure from the police, or from the provincial governor, you can come to us; there is a mechanism, or something like that. Then again, getting information on government money is not easy and if we fail we will lose credit with the donors.26

Another graduate who went on the India visit commented that democracy is a prerequisite for, rather than a result of, social accountability: ‘The Indian government is very democratic: because of full democracy, the level of threat is almost zero. People can say what they want to say’.27 In Cambodia, by contrast, this interviewee suggested, most of the NGOs that were likely to have the capacity to implement social accountability work ‘are working for advocacy for change within government, so the government

26 Interview by Caroline Hughes with SILAKA Training Coordinator, Heng Vannarith, 21 July 2009, Phnom Penh. 27 Interview by Caroline Hughes with Head of Programme, Cooperation Committee of Cambodia, Soeung Saroeun, 23 July 2009, Phnom Penh.

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is not happy to work with them’.28 From the NGO perspective, the DFGG programme risked reinforcing, rather than breaking down, the divide between acceptable and unacceptable forms of criticism, and reasserting the area of natural resources—land and forestry governance—in particular as a no-go area for assertive struggle on the part of civil society.

C O N C LUS IO N These cases indicate how democratic values form a highly contingent rather than a necessary aspect of social accountability movements. Both cases demonstrate the dangers of co-optation, with activists being drawn into technical mechanisms of monitoring—often under the auspices of international aid agencies—at the expense of broad political coalition building and mobilization of democratic forces. Furthermore, the cases show how liberal ideologies can intersect with socially conservative moral rhetoric to form the basis of non-democratic coalitions for social accountability. By thus rendering non-democratic rule more efficient, social accountability can actually make political struggles over highly contested issues such as corruption less effective. Historical and structural trajectories help mediate the political impact of social accountability mechanisms. In both cases, the legacy of Cold War authoritarian regimes has been deeply fragmented civil societies, which entails that authority does not naturally migrate to economically disadvantaged groups under social accountability mechanisms. Rather, social accountability mechanisms can become tools for authoritarian forces within broader coalitions, shoring up hierarchies of power and the political authority of existing elites through liberal administrative techniques and conservative notions of morality. This can play out in a variety of ways: in the Philippines it reinforces the power of the Church and the hold of discourses of human fallibility rather than political injustice as the source of social problems. In Cambodia, it assists in the promotion of an image of the Party as a benevolent channel of communication between the elite and the masses, facilitating effective development of rural villages in a context of Khmer nationalist solidarity. This serves Party legitimacy strategies ahead of rectifying the failure of electoral processes in Cambodia to secure adequate representation for the poor.

28 Interview by Caroline Hughes with Head of Programme, Cooperation Committee of Cambodia, Soeung Saroeun, 23 July 2009, Phnom Penh.

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Importantly, this study is not dismissive of the democratic potential of social accountability and a constructive role to that end by international aid agencies. Indeed, as the Philippines case study demonstrated, there were points in the PRA reform movement when that happened. However, the political authority of citizens to shape and contest reform agendas through independent collective political action is not always integral to social accountability mechanisms. The extent to which it is depends principally on what interests and ideologies are ascendant within coalitions for social accountability.

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6 State-based Anticorruption Agencies in Indonesia, the Philippines, and Thailand I N T RO DUC T IO N In Indonesia, the Philippines, and Thailand the collapse of authoritarian rule gave rise to new political regimes characterized by democratic institutions including regular elections, a free media, a competitive political party system, and growing civil society. However, in all cases, the economic sphere has continued to be dominated by oligarchs and money politics has exerted a pervasive influence over new democratic institutions. In these settings, new horizontal accountability agencies have been established to combat corruption. Horizontal accountability agencies are ‘state actors and agencies willing and able to sanction other state actors and agencies for their acts and omissions, in accordance with the law and the constitution’ (Kenney 2003: 67; see also Goetz and Jenkins 2005: 11–12). If democratic transition is understood as a process of institutional redesign following the creation of a democratic elite pact, then horizontal accountability should play a significant role in promoting democracy. After all, horizontal accountability enshrines the system of checks and balances ensuring institutions behave as intended. However, horizontal accountability is premised on a formal separation of powers within the state that in post-authoritarian contexts can be difficult to realize where power remains in the hands of a dominant elite. The failure of formal democratic processes to advance the interest of the poor in many countries has prompted attempts to use judicial institutions. This suggests that there is potential for the judiciary to go beyond a purely safeguarding mode of operation, and become activist in promoting equal rights in the political sphere for marginal or subordinate groups (Goetz and Jenkins 2005; Fox 2007). Social activism in support of accountability can give rise to judges, ombudsmen, and commissioners with a greater concern to safeguard popular sovereignty against the abuses of elites.

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Linking the action of horizontal accountability agencies to societal coalitions that support or obstruct them raises the question of how different ideologies of accountability promoted by such coalitions affect the role of horizontal accountability agencies in securing democracy in post-authoritarian societies. Our analysis of the Ombudsman’s Office of the Philippines, the Corruption Eradication Commission in Indonesia, and the National Counter Corruption Commission and Constitutional Court in Thailand, and the social forces that support these institutions, shows that societal coalitions may pursue democratic, liberal, or moral approaches to accountability or various alliances of these. The relative influence of these ideologies within accountability coalitions matters fundamentally for how these institutions operate. Our earlier analysis of distinct ideologies of accountability suggests different approaches to combating corruption. Democratic ideological approaches to corruption focus primarily on the extent to which corruption prevents equal access to decision-making by citizens. Attention therefore focuses on the types of power and influence peddling that are most debilitating for democratic politics. In the context of Indonesia, the Philippines, and Thailand deals whereby business groups and officials collude to significantly affect government policy making are thus strategically most significant. For liberals, emphasis is instead placed upon how corruption costs the citizen by erecting obstacles in the way of legitimate activities and by expropriating or misallocating resources that detract from productivity and economic growth. Liberal approaches to combating corruption, consequently, focus on freeing up citizens and markets from excessive officialdom, and the forms of corruption most targeted for eradication involve large amounts of resources that are misused. Both liberals and democrats regard corruption as morally wrong, but the political significance of this wrongdoing differs: for the former it impedes individual freedom and rights to private property, for the latter it obstructs popular sovereignty. For moralists, however, primary concern is with correct conduct, and the role of horizontal accountability institutions is to ensure adherence by individual officials to prescribed moral codes. Alongside these ideological approaches to accountability for corruption, there is also a further tactical dimension to support for anticorruption initiatives. In Indonesia, the Philippines, and Thailand there has been a powerful tendency for elite groups to use accusations of corruption to mobilize support against elite competitors. Consequently, even corrupt elites might find the presence of an anticorruption institution useful, although in such circumstances the institution’s powers will be formally or informally circumscribed to ensure control over targets of investigation.

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The history of these agencies in all three countries surveyed in this chapter has therefore been turbulent. From the liberal and democratic aspirations that characterized their establishment, there has been a significant decline in elite support for these agencies, except for tactical purposes, and their powers have been regularly challenged, limited, eroded, and/or politically co-opted. Countering this process, there have been waves of popular mobilization against corruption, providing some protection to these agencies and periodically infusing them with something of a fighting spirit. However, societal mobilizations promoting accountability for corruption have varied in their ideological preoccupations and whose political authority these agencies ought to embody. In the Philippines, the power of the Catholic Church has enabled substantial mobilizations against corruption, but the reformist import of these is restricted by an overwhelmingly moralist ideological orientation. This orientation locates political authority in the scriptures interpreted by the Church. In Indonesia, civil society groups have been significant in mobilizing against corruption using a mix of liberal and democratic ideals, but these groups are small and weak and have had difficulty using anticorruption campaigns to instigate wider reform movements. Here attempts to promote popular authority fail due to the absence of adequate links between activists and the broader community. In Thailand, deep societal divisions emanating from its political economy produced opposing elite factions. Elites have harnessed moral populism in attempts to prevail over both political competitors and powerful societal mobilizations. The latter partially reflect and serve elite interests, but have increasingly taken on dynamics of their own. These dynamics include unprecedented conflict over the authority of the monarchy as expressed in the continuing use of repressive laws. Groups seeking to promote substantive democratic change have therefore become targets of repression and/or co-optation by liberals, moralists, and opportunists. Struggles for the heart and soul of these institutions remain inconclusive in all three countries, yet a trend towards long-term erosion of their powers is clear.

IND ONESIA’S CORRUPTION ERADICATION C O M M I S S IO N Indonesia’s Corruption Eradication Commission (Komisi Pemberantasan Korupsi or KPK) was established in 2003, as one of a tranche of institutional reforms following the 1997 Asian Financial Crisis and the success of the pro-democracy reformasi movement in ousting the longstanding dictatorial

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New Order regime of President Suharto. The origins of the KPK lay in both internal and external pressures for change. For the reformasi movement the slogan ‘corruption, collusion, and nepotism’ (‘korupsi, kolusi, dan nepotisme’ or KKN) became a key rallying cry, targeted above all at the Suharto family and the network of state-subsidized monopolies under their control. Following Suharto’s resignation, both prominent domestic reformers and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) regarded the business affairs of the Suharto children as exemplifying the problems exacerbating the crisis’ effects. The major external pressure for anticorruption reform came via IMF-demands for structural reform of Indonesian governance, in return for ‘bailing out’ the Indonesian economy, and was linked to primarily neoliberal approaches to improving productivity and expediting recovery (Republic of Indonesia 2002b). This IMF-commitment contributed to the decision to award the KPK substantial powers when it was created (in law) in 2002. This included a dedicated Corruption Crimes Court whose staff included ad hoc judges recruited independently of the mainstream judicial system. The law stipulated that these ad hoc judges would comprise a 3–2 majority over career judges in any hearing, although this requirement was subsequently removed and the single Court established in 2002 was in 2009 replaced with a more problematic and controversial system of regional courts (Republic of Indonesia 2002a: Art. 53–62; Aritonang 2012). The KPK was also given extensive investigative powers, including using wiretaps against corruption suspects. Neoliberal ideologies of reform were eclipsed in economic policy by a resurgent economic nationalism once Indonesia emerged from the worst of the Asian Financial Crisis and withdrew from the IMF structural adjustment programme in 2003 (Thee 2010: 75). However, the KPK survived this shift, partly because of the specifically democratic appeal of anticorruption initiatives to the reformasi generation. The status of the KPK soon reflected tension between two elements of Indonesian politics. The first is elite reconsolidation following the end of the New Order regime. The nexus between abuse of power and accumulation of wealth was not properly tackled in post-New Order Indonesia—only one of Suharto’s children, Tommy Suharto, spent a brief spell behind bars and this was not for corruption but for arranging the assassination of the judge presiding over his corruption case (The Economist 2006: 73). In any case new predatory elites have rapidly emerged to replace the old (Robison and Hadiz 2004). New democratic processes emerged amidst entrenched inequalities of power between rich and poor and predatory alliances between politicians, state officials, and business tycoons. Consequently, according to East Asian Barometer, Indonesian political parties are by far the country’s least trusted

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institutions. Parliament, similarly, scores relatively badly, beating only parties and courts in the public’s trust. Political parties rely on favours from business to get elected—favours that are repaid by parliamentarians once in power.1 The second element is widening political space in which members of the reformasi generation organize and lobby for more progressive politics, creating an ideological imperative among politicians to espouse an anticorruption agenda. There is an active and committed anticorruption non-governmental organization (NGO) movement (Setiyono and McLeod 2010: 349), although its links to organized constituencies are limited. Opinion polls suggest that corruption is of concern to the Indonesian electorate (IFES 2005: 22; Abu Dhabi Gallup Center 2011: 2), and President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono campaigned prominently on a ‘Mr Clean’ image in his presidential campaigns of 2004 and 2009. Nevertheless, because the political party system remains mired in money politics, populist rhetoric aside, there are no regular, well-functioning representative channels through which public concerns over corruption can translate into consistent political support for anticorruption initiatives. These tensions lead to ambiguity in the KPK’s performance. The agency has successfully exercised its considerable powers in cases brought against the new, post-New Order elite, under Yudhoyono’s presidency. As many as 152 politicians were implicated in graft charges during Yudhoyono’s first term, and his son’s father-in-law was convicted of corruption. The KPK also convicted a prosecutor and a ‘case broker’ in the Attorney-General’s Office (AGO), and implicated other prosecutors (Witular 2009). Investigations into the theft of billions of dollars following the Indonesian government’s bailout of a failing bank, Bank Century, during the 2008 Global Financial Crisis, implicated senior police officers. This led to a major confrontation between the KPK and the police, described below. However, the KPK has also been criticized for failing to follow the Bank Century trail to its conclusion; critics allege more rigorous investigations would have implicated major political figures in the Yudhoyono government (Rachman and Arnaz 2010; Siahaan 2010). For the KPK, operating in this context has meant that the agency has faced cycles of attack and reprieve by political elites. Attacks involved repeated legal challenges, often raised by individuals under KPK investigation. In response, coalitions of support have mobilized behind the KPK, which has become a focus and symbol of public concern. The nature of these coalitions, the ways they mobilize, and the kinds of ideological appeals they make, are significant indicators of both the strength and the weakness of democratic forces in Indonesia. 1 According to East Asia Barometer (2006), political parties scored a 44.3% positive rating, while the courts scored 56.4% and parliament 61.2%. The most trusted institution was the military on 85.8%, followed by television on 79.5%.

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The most outright attack on the KPK occurred in the context of the Bank Century case. KPK investigators recorded the Chief Detective of the National Police, Susno Duadji, on a wiretap demanding bribes from billionaire business figure Boedi Sampoerna in return for issuing a letter to facilitate his illegal withdrawal of funds from the stricken bank (Arnaz and Andriyanto 2009). Subsequently, it transpired, Susno conspired with members of the AGO to frame two KPK commissioners on bribery charges, in an attempt to thwart their investigations. KPK commissioners, Bibit Samad Rianto and Chandra M. Hamzah, were arrested and detained, sparking public demonstrations, initially by a network of NGO activists but subsequently by crowds of thousands in central Jakarta. A wave of public support appeared evident as popular rock bands composed anticorruption songs performed live at rallies, while a Facebook page attracted 1 million members (Sabarini 2009). Events reached their climax when a different wiretap recording was played in the Constitutional Court and relayed via national television, in which Susno and a high-ranking AGO official plotted the false accusations to be levelled against Chandra and Bibit (Jakarta Post 2009c). Following these revelations, the Constitutional Court declared that the charges against Chandra and Bibit should be dropped. Interviewed by Tempo magazine about the affair, Susno commented that the KPK’s attempts to tackle the police were like a gecko trying to attack a crocodile (Tempo Interactive 2009). This comment provided a ready slogan for anticorruption campaigners, who characterized their fight against corruption as that of a cicak melawan buaya (gecko vs. crocodile), in a manner that caught the imagination of a wide range of groups in Jakarta (Butt 2011). The metaphor of the weak confronting the strong was linked to nationalist rhetoric as the word CICAK or gecko was coined as an acronym for Cinta Indonesia Cinta KPK (Love Indonesia, Love the KPK), the name adopted by the network of NGOs organizing protests. Students and Islamic groups joined the demonstrations, business groups complained about the effect on foreign investment, and Indonesian newspaper editorials called for the resignation of senior officials and the intervention of the president to prove his commitment to fighting corruption (NU Online 2009; Suharmoko 2009; Jakarta Post 2009a). One NGO activist interviewed at this time captured the mood of excitement amongst anticorruption campaigners as the movement snowballed: ‘This is a very critical time, when people are questioning what we have gained since reformasi.’2 Memories of reformasi, particularly among NGOs whose leaders had all taken part in the protests that brought down Suharto and initiated democratization in Indonesia, infused a 2 Interview by Caroline Hughes with Executive Director, Indonesian Centre for Law and Policy Studies, Eryanto Nugroho, 12 November 2009, Jakarta.

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broader agenda into protests. Not only should the KPK be saved, but the institutions serving to shield the rapacious behaviour of oligarchs and big business—the police and the AGO—should be reformed. The Indonesian president adopted a cautious response seeking to defuse the situation by appointing a committee of inquiry, comprising eminent lawyers and academics. According to one member, the committee was viewed by the President’s Office as ‘a way to reduce public anger’;3 an anticorruption activist who refused to join the committee saw it as ‘a buffer, to shield [the president] from public anger’.4 The committee recommended dropping the charges against the KPK commissioners; however, the president still refrained from intervening directly, rather handing the recommendations to the AGO for action, and returning authority to the very institutions at the heart of the problem (Maulia 2009a). The two KPK commissioners were eventually released. Susno resigned and was subsequently indicted on corruption charges, and the president then set up the Judicial Mafia Eradication Task Force, staffed by legal experts mandated to clean up the judicial system and the AGO (Maulia 2009b). These outcomes were criticized as inadequate by newspaper editorialists and anticorruption activists. However, they were sufficient to calm the situation and protestors went home. This conclusion to the affair severed the link between action on corruption eradication and the broader reform agenda required for a specifically democratic approach to tackling money politics. One anticorruption activist commented: The approach the task force uses to handle the issue is to give the management to specialists, and to take it away from the popular movement. When the KPK was created, its purpose was to ensure that the anti-corruption movement was managed by specialists. And now the task force has a similar approach: using specialists. But if the movement wants to grow it has to collaborate with the grassroots. With the task force: the state wants just the state to be involved.5

Rather than operating as a focus for public protest and struggle, as Goetz and Jenkins (2005) suggest, the creation of a new task force, with fewer powers than the KPK possessed, represented a way of defusing the situation without addressing key concerns of demonstrators. Consequently, popular sovereignty 3 Interview by Caroline Hughes with Professor of Law, University of Indonesia, Hikmahanto Juwana, 23 April 2010, Jakarta. 4 Interview by Caroline Hughes with Secretary-General, Transparency International Indonesia, Teten Masduki, 20 April 2010, Jakarta. 5 Interview by Caroline Hughes with Executive Director, Indonesian Centre for Law and Policy Studies, Eryanto Nugroho, 26 April 2010, Jakarta.

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was not reaffirmed. A member of the task force, and previously of the KPK, commented on the limited powers at the task force’s disposal: We have three kinds of power. Associational power, because we are very close to the president. Second we have information and data power. Third we have moral power. They trust us because we don’t have any burden and nothing to lose—we are not politicians although we are associated with the president. We are seen as independent.6

The task force saw itself as an independent moral arbiter serving the president, rather than as a force for popular sovereignty. This contrasts with the way that societal movements attempted to claim the KPK in the name of the people. For example, the popular magazine Tempo Interactive (2009: 1) depicted the KPK commissioners in a front cover cartoon as knights in shining armour coming to the assistance of a stricken nation; the KPK’s own 2008 annual report emphasized this link between commission and nation with a somewhat symbolic photograph of a KPK investigator donating blood to the national blood bank. After the charges were dropped against Bibit and Chandra demands for accountability among the NGO movement became increasingly tempered by morality-based ideology. Although a Facebook campaign attracted 1 million members, the public protests remained small, and the NGOs which organized the CICAK movement could make limited claims to constitute a democratic movement with a broad mandate for pursuing far-reaching reform. An agenda that leads reformist NGOs to spend most of their time engaging with state institutions and conducting activities such as the training of parliamentarians in legislative drafting has led to a distancing from any mass base. One NGO activist interviewed in 2009 summed up this argument: Few NGOs still do the work of organizing to build people power. Most are engaging with government, not with the people . . . The irony is that this is not so democratic. The system looks so democratic, but it has weakened civil society organizations . . . They say that they are doing things in the name of the public, but in reality, we don’t have the public any more behind us.7

The inability to claim a popular mandate or to imagine the kinds of radical collective action necessary to dislodge the structures of oligarchic power that emerged in the aftermath of reformasi led to difficulties in formulating 6 Interview by Caroline Hughes with member of Judicial Mafia Eradication Task Force, Mas Achmad Santosa, 29 April 2010, Jakarta. 7 Interview by Caroline Hughes with Managing Director, Perhimpunan Pendidikan Demokrasi (P2D) or Society for Democracy Education, Donny Ardyanto, 13 November 2009, Jakarta.

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strategies for fighting corruption that are specifically democratic. As one NGO activist commented, ‘making the linkage between poverty and corruption—it’s too hard to explain’.8 A moralistic rhetoric of the nation’s values has therefore emerged among NGOs because organizations are missing that could supplement the KPK’s role with a specifically democratic mandate and a wider reform strategy that could link street protests with broader critiques of the social and political order.

MORAL APPROACHES TO CORRUPTION I N I N D O NE S IA The absence of such links has an impact on strategies for fighting corruption. KPK staff members interviewed in April 2010 commented on the long-term outlook of the KPK’s approach to anticorruption: ‘We have to start to touch the anti-corruption culture—there should be education, and it should be started by our leaders. It requires more than just putting people in jail’.9 NGO activists, lacking significant direct links to the population at large, tend to imitate this approach: We need to make more campaigns: every individual needs to know what they should do. Like the green movement to stop people taking plastic bags: it needs to be a lifestyle issue so that every individual can do something . . . We need to spend more energy challenging the mainstream discourse about the mafia and the elite. We need to make it an everyday issue.10

This shift from critique of the political and economic order and the grand corruption that characterizes it towards petty day-to-day corruption reflects a retreat from the democratic claims that began to surface during the cicak melawan buaya struggle. The concern to promote democracy through making abuses of power by elite actors the top priority is ruled out. Instead, corruption becomes a ‘lifestyle issue’ in which everybody is implicated and therefore everybody has the same opportunity to effect reform. Such an approach locates the problem of corruption at the level of the individual citizen. Consequently, 8

Interview by Caroline Hughes with Managing Director, P2D, Donny Ardyanto, 13 November 2009, Jakarta. 9 Interview by Caroline Hughes with KPK official (name withheld upon request), 29 April 2010, Jakarta. 10 Interview by Caroline Hughes with Executive Director, Indonesian Centre for Law and Policy Studies, Eryanto Nugroho, 26 April 2010, Jakarta.

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people need to be educated to hold themselves to account—under the tutelage of NGOs. Religious organizations, whose links to the Indonesian masses are far deeper than those of NGOs, have also adopted a moral rather than a specifically democratic approach. Since the early years of the post-authoritarian era, Indonesia’s two mass Islamic movements—the traditionalist rural-based Nahdlatul Ulama and the reformist, urban-based Muhammadiyah—have eschewed political activism in favour of moral didacticism, reflected in their approach to corruption. Both movements have issued fatwas, or legal opinions, condemning corruption under Islamic law (Jakarta Post 2010a), and in 2010 jointly released a book entitled Corruptors Are Infidels, published with the assistance of the Partnership for Development NGO, which stated that: ‘A corrupt act which is essentially putting money above all else is equal to syirik or blasphemy’ (Kemitraan Partnership 2010). In statements surrounding these activities, leaders of both organizations regard corruption as an issue of moral decline or ignorance, rather than as emerging from elite abuse of power. In discussions surrounding the book’s release, for example, its chief researcher commented that: ‘We need to re-orientate society’s values and place corruption as not only illegal but also immoral ‘(Kemitraan Partnership 2010; NU Online 2010). Similarly, Muhammadiyah leader Din Syamsuddin described corruption as rooted in a national crisis of ‘moral illiteracy’ (Jakarta Post 2010b). Religious leaders have issued statements on corruption scandals such as the Bank Century case, calling upon elected leaders to pursue lawbreakers. Due to the influence of these organizations on their millions of followers, this is seen as putting pressure on elected bodies over corruption issues. However, religious organizations have not linked the corruption issue to broader political reforms, focusing instead on individual actions of wrongdoers and nor have they attempted to build activist coalitions for reform. While parliamentary political parties and the Office of the President remain reliant for funding upon donations from big business, pressures to promote broader reform and opportunities for doing so remain limited, insuring the anticorruption agenda remains narrowly framed as an issue of law and order rather than of democratic deepening.

T HE AM B I GUI T I ES O F A NT ICO R RU P T IO N AGEN DAS I N IND O NE S IA The discussion above illustrates the significance of the Office of the President in a situation where movements of activists, non-elites, and the poor have

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few avenues through which concerns over corruption can be represented in the political system. Political parties represented in parliament have generally been resistant to raising corruption as an issue, even tactically against one another, because of the heavy reliance of all political parties on money politics.11 Nevertheless, Yudhoyono’s ‘Mr Clean’ image has been seriously eroded by continual corruption scandals. The president’s response to the Bibit–Chandra case, and to other high-profile corruption scandals, illustrates the decline in his interest in anticorruption following his re-election in 2009 and his party’s dependence upon money politics. His actions following the Bibit–Chandra affair, although criticized as indecisive, succeeded in giving the appearance of upholding horizontal accountability while demobilizing political protests and severing both NGOs and the KPK from the burgeoning mass movement of public support. Indeed, the weakness of the president’s commitment to corruption eradication is revealed when his own interests are at stake. In 2011, a different scandal erupted, centred on Muhammad Nazaruddin, a former treasurer and legislator from the president’s Partai Demokrat, or Democratic Party, accused of corruption involving construction contracts related to the Southeast Asian Games (Belford 2011). Nazaruddin fled Indonesia for Latin America, while making press statements implicating a range of powerful figures in the ruling Partai Demokrat. Since returning to Indonesia under arrest, his only public statement was an open letter to Yudhoyono offering silence in return for protection. This prompted press speculation that Nazaruddin had cut a deal to avoid implicating high-level figures in return for a light jail sentence (Haryanto and Sihaloho 2011). Similarly, in 2011, the government’s commitment was called into question by news of a plan to give an Independence Day amnesty to Gayus Tambunan, a notorious corruption convict and former tax officer who was jailed in 2010 for making millions brokering tax deals to allow major companies to escape tax liabilities. Following a press furore, the idea was axed. Other corruption convicts have also had sentences reduced on appeal: one such beneficiary was Aulia Pohan, whose daughter is married to Yudhoyono’s son (Syofyan 2010). Golkar Party chairman Aburizal Bakrie, a billionaire tycoon whose party supports the Partai Demokrat in the ruling coalition, owned some of the companies drawn into the Gayus scandal. Despite the fact that Bakrie has

11 This does not hold true at the district level where candidates for office frequently use corruption allegations against one another (Djani 2013). Equally, the large number of district and provincial officials indicted for corruption may reflect attempts by central government officials to reassert control following the 2001 decentralization programme (personal email communication, Professor of Asian Politics and Societies, Murdoch University, Vedi Hadiz, 22 January 2013).

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been Yudhoyono’s main rival within the coalition, Yudhoyono also relies on Golkar support to rule. Consequently, there is a history of favours between Yudhoyono and Bakrie: Bakrie’s company Lapindo Brantas was responsible for a devastating environmental disaster in Java in 2006; it failed to pay compensation it promised, yet did not limit the political career of the Golkar chairman (Jakarta Post 2009b). Furthermore, President Yudhoyono allowed the suspension of the Indonesian stock exchange for three days during the 2008 financial crisis, primarily because of the slumping value of Bakrie Group companies (The Economist 2009: 58). The Bakrie Group came under scrutiny from the Judicial Mafia Eradication Task Force following the Gayus scandal prompting reports that Golkar successfully lobbied Yudhoyono against the renewal of the task force’s mandate at the end of 2011 (Witular 2011). These scandals, implicating huge companies that dominate the Indonesian stock exchange, and individuals within the cabinet and the presidential palace, indicate the limits to the ability of institutions like the KPK to root out corruption in Indonesia. Corruption at the top of Indonesia’s political parties exists in a context of elections that ‘remain the freest, fairest, and most competitive in Southeast Asia’ (Mietzner 2010: 186). However, the emergence of a competitive party system has not prompted redistribution of power away from corrupt business-state alliances and towards pro-democratic coalitions. As one NGO organizer commented: ‘Corruption is still there and it can undermine the principle of democracy. It makes problems of lack of participation, lack of representation of poor people’.12 Thus, the KPK and other institutions such as the Judicial Mafia Eradication Task Force are tolerable compromises for elite actors such as Yudhoyono, provided they can be isolated from wider social groups. Yudhoyono is constrained to espouse a genuine corruption eradication agenda for the purpose of election campaigning without antagonizing elite allies who control powerful parliamentary voting blocks. Consequently, in times of high public mobilization he has moved to support the KPK, while activities of civil society organizations (CSOs) that keep cases in the public eye place democratic pressure on the government (Setiyono 2012). In September 2012, following an attempt by police to storm the KPK to arrest one of its investigators after the KPK summoned a police chief on corruption charges. Yudhoyono again intervened, apparently reluctantly, to support the KPK. ‘I reject any attempt to weaken KPK,’ he commented, while also criticizing a simultaneous plan by the parliament’s legal affairs committee to limit the KPK’s prosecutorial and wiretap powers (Moestafa and Suhana 2012). When such popular pressures are not evident,

12

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Interview by Caroline Hughes with Teten Masduki, 20 April 2010, Jakarta.

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however, he has been less keen to support the agency. Following the protests in 2009, parliament moved to weaken the powers of the Anti-Corruption Court, used by the KPK to prosecute its cases. The ebb and flow of attacks and counter-attacks against the KPK reflect the president’s key political dilemma: the need to appease sections of the electorate for whom corruption is a key concern while reducing the threat to his allies in cabinet. Provided the KPK can be isolated from waves of public support that could lead to demands for wholesale reform of such agencies as the police and AGO, then supporting the KPK’s powers to catch individual corruptors is relatively convenient for the president and his party. It absolves them from initiating moves for structural reform of the political order that has brought them to power and sustained them there. Meanwhile, ‘big fish’ can be protected from these institutions: if key allies are caught in the net, corruption in the prison service and presidential amnesties ensure that their stay behind bars is both comfortable and brief.

PHI LI PPI N ES’ O MBU D S MA N Democratic rhetoric is discernible among dominant influences promoting the cause of anticorruption and improvement in the work of the ombudsman in the Philippines. However, liberal and moral values substantively prevail in these critiques and political campaigns. Periodically, democratic forces have played significant roles within anticorruption coalitions focused on the ombudsman, but sustained influence in linking horizontal accountability to democratic aspirations has proved elusive. As with the KPK in Indonesia, the Office of the Ombudsman in the Philippines was born out of a social movement that overthrew an authoritarian regime, in this case with the removal of Ferdinand Marcos in 1986. The ombudsman was established through the 1987 Constitution as the Philippines’ most powerful independent anticorruption body. However, whereas the KPK’s institutional design was influenced by IMF pressure, the Philippines’ elite had a freer hand. As with all institutions of accountability or representation following the demise of authoritarian rule in the Philippines, the aim of established oligarchs in particular was to contain pressures for social and political reform (Boudreau 2009b). This reflected in both the design of institutions and/or the way their operations were circumscribed by wider power relations. The powers of the Philippines’ ombudsman are not as broad as the KPK’s. It is not permitted, for instance, to gather evidence by conducting wiretaps on suspects or by examining their bank accounts, nor does it have powers

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of arrest (Bolongaita 2010). Moreover, the ombudsman has to take its cases to the Sandiganbayan, a separate court for trying high officials on graft and corruption charges. Many of the ombudsman’s cases end up being withdrawn or dismissed, with Sandiganbayan prosecutors complaining that investigators did not compile sufficient evidence to carry the case (Bolongaita 2010: 15). The process for appointing the ombudsman is also more open to political intervention than the one for selecting KPK commissioners. The 1987 Constitution provided for appointments to judicial posts, including the ombudsman, to be conducted by an eight-member Judicial and Bar Council (JBC) pre-selecting a short-list of eligible candidates from which the president chooses. However, lack of transparency in the deliberations and decisions of the JBC have prompted widespread suspicions of its politicization (Mangahas 2011). Furthermore, the majority of members of the JBC are either presidential appointments, or appointed by chairs of parliamentary committees who are themselves generally members of the ruling party or coalition (Mangahas 2011). The Philippines’ ombudsman has presided over generally poor prosecution rates and rarely enjoyed public support akin to that for the KPK in Indonesia. A report by the Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism examining prosecution data over twenty-two years concluded that, when it comes to catching ‘big fish’, the ombudsman’s record is consistently ‘dismal’. Significantly, the ombudsman’s biggest scalp to date is Joseph Estrada—the only president who, by virtue of his truncated period in office as a result of being ousted in a military-backed coup in 2001, did not have an opportunity to appoint an ombudsman. Aside from Estrada and former Armed Forces comptroller Major General Carlos F. Garcia—who pleaded guilty to lesser offenses to evade prosecution for plunder—‘just a handful of officials have been convicted of corruption in the ombudsman’s more than two decades of existence’ (Mangahas and Ilagan 2011). Dominance of elites and oligarchs over Philippine political institutions places the ombudsman in a context where even the original institutional intentions behind it are difficult to implement. Indeed, oligarchic structures of power provide the foundation for political corruption in the Philippines, undermining the ability of citizens to effectively exercise political authority through either vertical or horizontal accountability. Yet the ascendance of liberal and moral ideologies among the social and political forces driving anticorruption reform agendas also contributes to the lack of scrutiny of these oligarchic relationships. This is demonstrated below through discussion of the respective terms of Ombudsmen Simeon Marcelo (2002–5) and Merceditas Gutierrez (2005– 11). The former was a rare period in which civil society forces embraced the

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work of the ombudsman; the latter witnessed the first successful campaign to remove an ombudsman. However, in neither case did these actions much advance the cause of democratic accountability.

CIVI L S O C I ET Y C OALI T I O NS IN T H E PH IL IP PINE S The People Power II movement that culminated in President Estrada’s political demise in 2001 marked a new level of coordination among civil society forces across the ideological spectrum campaigning around corruption. Following Estrada’s removal, some of this civil society energy was redirected in support of Ombudsman Marcelo, accompanied by higher expectations of what the office could achieve. Yet the ascendance of liberal and moral critiques of corruption was quickly asserted in this period. Two of the most prominent civil society coalitions that emerged were the Transparency and Accountability Network (TAN) and the Coalition Against Corruption (CAC). Both include assorted NGOs, academics, church, and business groups, but CAC’s alliances with the Makati Business Club (MBC) and the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of the Philippines (CBCP) are especially strong. CAC also incorporates TAN. Notwithstanding diversity in its membership base, the idea that corruption is the most serious threat to Philippine democracy and society is a recurrent and powerful theme among these coalitions (Punongbayan 2008). While there was some minor involvement of the political left in TAN and CAC, notably through the Caucus of Development NGO Networks (CODE-NGO), much of its energy in this period was directed through the Plunder Watch initiative that mobilized to ensure Estrada’s prosecution following his removal from office. According to Plunder Watch’s head, Carol Araullo, though, the prosecution marginalized the organization, raising suspicions about where the process was headed and possible deals within the political establishment (Araullo 2007). As it transpired, Estrada was prosecuted but also pardoned by President Arroyo. Marcelo came to the post of ombudsman in October 2002 with a reputation formed through prosecuting star witnesses in the Estrada trial. He spent time in a Jesuit seminary prior to a legal career with one of Manila’s most powerful law firms. Consequently, he enjoyed significant public support and strategic links with groups like the MBC and the CBCP, both important players in CAC and TAN. Marcelo endorsed the World Bank view that working with NGO actors is ‘a crucial component to broadening an anticorruption coalition’ (Marcelo 2005: 16). Accordingly, he involved civil society groups

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in a variety of ways during his term, including using Church-based organizations and members as observers on Procurement Reform Act (PRA) Bids and Awards Committees and assorted NGOs in the ombudsman’s Lifestyle Checks. For Marcelo, ‘a massively funded anti-corruption campaign should be seen as an investment and not an expense, where the primary beneficiaries are the poor and the marginalized sectors of society, and where the direct and immediate effect is the alleviation of poverty in our country’ (Marcelo 2005: 6). The CBCP supported Marcelo in efforts to extract from President Arroyo increased budgets for the Ombudsman’s Office.13 Arroyo’s opposition to reproductive health reforms laid the basis for cordial relationships with some bishops (Jimenez-David 2010). Marcelo’s alignment with Church leadership perspectives on corruption was reflected in his endorsement of the Ehem! Manual produced by the Philippine Province of the Society of Jesus. This manual was designed to combat corruption through engendering a heightened sense of civic and moral duty among both public institutions and ordinary citizens (Marcelo 2005: 17). Such concerns were formed against the background of urban poor support for Estrada that shocked Church leaders. CBCP President and Archbishop of Jaro, Angel Lagdameo, would later explain that democracy too must be morally and spiritually based and centred on the defeat of corruption: Our message contributes to the flourishing of democracy which must not be built only on political formulae . . . It is through internal conversion into the maturity of Christ through communal and prayerful discernment and action that the roots of corruption are discovered and destroyed. We believe that such communal action will perpetuate at the grassroots level the spirit of People Power so brilliantly demonstrated to the world at EDSA I. It is People Power with a difference. From the grassroots will come out a culture of truth and integrity we so deeply seek and build (Lagdameo 2008).

Operationally, Marcelo abandoned the established case-quota system that encouraged investigators to complete easier cases first, declaring ‘big fish’ targets the priority. He announced in March 2005 that his office, with the help of volunteer Philippine Bar Association lawyers, would focus on ‘about 50 of the most prominent and high-impact cases’ involving ‘high ranking government officials who are represented by the best lawyers that money can buy’ (Mangahas and Ilagan 2011). Power was also delegated in an attempt to expedite cases and Marcelo exercised unprecedented administrative sanctions, suspending officials while investigations were under way (Bolongaita 2010: 21).

13 Interview by Garry Rodan with former Ombudsman of the Philippines, Simeon V. Marcelo, 27 August 2009, Manila.

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When Marcelo resigned mid-term in late 2005 on the grounds of ill health, he could claim some achievements, especially recovering US$64 million of Marcos’ assets (Bolongaita 2010: 12). However, he had been unable to secure a single conviction in cases filed against members of Congress, governors, and vice-governors and his acquittal rate of 12.16% was also highest of any ombudsman (Mangahas and Ilagan 2011). Marcelo’s departure did not mark the end of civil society activism in relation to the ombudsman, but it would take a new twist. President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo had already been accused of a vote buying scam prior to the 2004 elections, allegedly involving P728 million (US$12.9 million) in funds channelled to favoured officials to purchase farm inputs such as fertilizer for their constituents. Accusations of cheating dramatically escalated, however, following the playing on radio and television of taped telephone conversations between Arroyo and Commission on Elections (COMELEC) Commissioner in charge of the Mindanao region, Virgilio ‘Garcia’ Garcilliano, about ways to rig the 2004 national election results (Verzola 2010: 7). Not surprisingly, appointments to key institutions such as the Supreme Court, the Elections Commission, and the ombudsman assumed even greater political importance than usual, with the appointment of Gutierrez as ombudsman apparently reflecting concern by the president to protect herself and her allies from possible prosecution. Gutierrez was the 1972 classmate of Jose Miguel ‘Mike’ Arroyo, the First Gentleman, in the Ateneo Law School and served short terms as justice secretary, presidential legal counsel, and briefly acted as executive secretary under Arroyo. Initial scepticism about Gutierrez’s appointment turned to outright opposition as she failed to act in a number of cases involving senior public officials and Arroyo administration figures. Her handling of a case involving officials of COMELEC in an anomalous P1 billion (US$19.1 million) contract for automated counting machines was a turning point in public attitude. At the time of this Mega Pacific Consortium deal, Benjamin Abalos—a close friend of ‘Mike’ Arroyo—chaired COMELEC. The COMELEC case had already been the subject of a Supreme Court ruling in January 2004. This ruling nullified COMELEC’s contract with Mega Pacific, ordering the ombudsman to determine individual criminal liability. In February and March 2006, the Supreme Court issued two resolutions demanding the ombudsman ‘show cause’ as to why it should not be held in contempt for failing to comply with this order. The ombudsman’s response was to absolve Abalos and all officials from blame in the matter (Tiongson-Mayrina 2007). Ombudsman Gutierrez’s decision convinced many Filipinos that connections to the president and her administration afforded impunity, a view reinforced by a subsequent string of failures and inaction in equally

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controversial cases, variously involving the justice secretary, a former Department of Agriculture secretary, and the National Police director. The ombudsman also failed to act on a report by the World Bank implicating the president and government officials in graft and corruption in the US$150 million World Bank-financed National Roads Improvement and Management Project (Sisante 2009). For the constituents of social democratic and socialist minor parties, such as Akbayan (Citizens’ Action Party) and Bayan Muna (People First, or Nation First) and their associated CSOs,14 these controversies raised fundamental ideological and material issues. According to Akbayan’s representative Risa Hontiveros (2009): ‘As found by the Supreme Court, the Comelec’s acts have jeopardized the pith and soul of democracy—credible, orderly, and peaceful elections. On the other hand, the Ombudsman’s exoneration of the concerned Comelec officials in the Mega-Pacific case has jeopardized the system of public accountability, which is the pith and soul of her office’. Meanwhile, the fertilizer scam represented the divergence of funds from peasants and agricultural workers and this prompted demands by related people’s organizations for the impeachment of the ombudsman.15 In March 2009, Kilosbayan (People’s Action), a group of thirty-one civil society leaders including former Cabinet officials, led by ex-Senate President and past leader of the Liberal Party, Jovito Salonga, filed a complaint for impeachment against the ombudsman at the House of Representatives.16 The petition asserted that the ‘Ombudsman has become synonymous to inaction, mishandling, or downright dismissal of clear cases of graft and corruption, some leading to the President herself or that of her associates’ (Cabacungan and Dalangin-Fernandez 2009). It was strongly endorsed by representatives of left-wing minor parties Akbayan and Bayan Muna. In late August 2009 the ombudsman further enraged her critics by dropping all graft charges against the Arroyos in connection with a collapsed US$329-million national broadband network deal (Dalangin-Fernandez 2011). Nevertheless, the House of Representatives Justice Committee—composed mostly of administration Congress representatives—subsequently dismissed the impeachment

14

Both Akbayan and Bayan Muna compete for votes among the Party List notionally intended to incorporate representation of otherwise marginalized sectors of society. 15 Interview by Garry Rodan with Secretary-General, Bayan, Renato Reyes, 13 October 2011, Manila. 16 Kilosbayan describes itself as a ‘non-profit, non-partisan, independent, ethics-oriented people’s organization’ enabling ‘persons from various religious backgrounds to pursue and protect, within the democratic framework, their legitimate and collective interests and aspirations through peaceful and lawful means’ (Kilosbayan n.d.).

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complaint against Gutierrez and the House voted overwhelmingly in November 2009 to accept the Committee’s recommendation.17

T HE I M PEAC HM EN T O F G U T IE R R E Z : A DEMO CRATIC MOMENT? The outcome of elections in May 2010 brought Liberal Party Senator Benigno Aquino III to office and shifted the balance of congressional power. Significantly, Aquino rode to office on the back of his central pledge to arrest corruption, projected as the root cause of poverty in his campaign slogan: ‘Kung walang corrupt, walang mahirap’ (‘If there is no corruption, there would be no poverty’) (BBC News 2011). But while investigating the Arroyos was a key plank of President Aquino’s platform to combat corruption, his attempt to establish a Truth Commission for this was blocked in December 2010 by the Supreme Court, which was overwhelmingly dominated by Arroyo appointees (Lero 2010: 78). It was in this context of an intra-elite battle for control of the state apparatus that civil society and minor party hopes of an impeachment of Gutierrez were rekindled. However, the new administration’s preparedness to support impeachment proceedings was not instantaneous. Many politicians defected from Arroyo’s Lakas-Kampi-CMD18 party to the Liberals on the eve of the election, or shortly after (Diaz and Padua 2010). Arguably these defectors’ desire to align with the presidential winner had more to do with the spoils of victory than Aquino’s declared anticorruption crusade. Tactically, though, Aquino and his closest party allies incrementally came to the conclusion that his pursuit of Arroyo on corruption allegations necessitated support for Gutierrez’s impeachment and a testing of the political allegiances of the Supreme Court. In this climate, mounting public protests and mobilizations against Gutierrez offered plenty of encouragement for measures to facilitate her removal. In July and August 2010, impeachment complaints were respectively endorsed by Akbayan and Bayan Muna figures. This time the House of Representatives found the two complaints ‘sufficient in form’ to proceed. In response, Gutierrez applied to the Supreme Court, contending this move

17

The vote was 172 in favour, fifteen against, and one abstention. See GMA News Online (2009). Lakas-Kampi-CMD party was created in 2009, when the Lakas-CMD (Lakas-Christian Muslim Democrats) merged with Kampi (Kabalikat ng Malayang Pilipino). In 2012, however, the coalition split as Lakas-Kampi-CMD reverted to the original name Lakas-CMD and most of Kampi’s original members formed the new National Unity Party (NUP). 18

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violated a procedural technicality, and the Court ruled to suspend impeachment proceedings. Meanwhile, in December 2010 a new scandal emerged over a plea bargain struck by the ombudsman with former military comptroller Major General Carlos Garcia, who had been indicted for stealing P302 million (US$6.5 million) from the state. Senior judiciary and civil society actors expressed dismay at the sudden abandonment of what appeared a case with strong prospects. A Senate hearing into the plea bargain started in January 2011, and the controversy intensified as whistleblowers, including former Army Colonel George Rabusa and former Commission of Audit (COA) official Heidi Mendoza, gave evidence of widespread and high-level corruption within the military.19 Mendoza became a key actor inside and outside the hearing, her moral arguments and appeals serving as a basis for a new round of civil society mobilization. Mendoza called on the Church to support her and Rabusa: ‘There is a brewing tension between good and evil and I believe now is the time for a baptized Catholic and a Christian public servant like me to run to my mentors and seek the comfort of the church’ (quoted in BCBP Editor 2011). The Association of Major Religious Superiors promptly responded, issuing a ‘Statement of Support’ for the whistleblowers as a moral imperative, as the ‘devil personified continues to plunder our country’s resources at the expense of the poor who continue to suffer’ (Mananzan and Pedregosa 2011). Various Church-related organizations held up the whistleblowers as model Christians or ‘truth tellers’, with services held to pray for them and displaying of school banners in support. The Church also organized public demonstrations and public forums to condemn corruption in the military (CBCP News 2011b). Mendoza’s depiction as a positive role model of how Christians can and should take personal moral responsibility for fighting corruption stirred enthusiasm for public-based action. The testimonies by Mendoza and Rabusa also further energized the business community, especially the MBC, the Management Association of the Philippines, and the Brotherhood of Christian Businessmen and Professionals (BCBP). Statements of all three organizations contained an emotive mix of liberal, moral, and democratic language (see BCBP Editor 2011; Osorio 2011; MAP 2011). The MBC used the Garcia plea bargain to press again for the impeachment of Gutierrez (De Vera et al. 2011). By mid-February 2011, legal

19 Mendoza headed a six-member COA team assigned to the Office of the Ombudsman from 2004–6 to investigate Garcia’s transactions. See Chua and Tordesillas (2011).

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obstacles were resolved and the House of Representatives promptly moved to have the Senate begin an impeachment investigation. In response, Church activists intensified their public campaign. The Catholic Education Association of the Philippines sought to expedite Gutierrez’s demise, imploring her to ‘consider her resignation as a moral choice’ (CBCP News 2011b). In March 2011, the Catholic NGO Pagbabago! (People’s Movement for Change), whose co-Chairperson Sister Mary John Mananzan was among those who filed the Bayan-sponsored impeachment petition in 2010, also led a public petition against the ombudsman. Meanwhile, continual media statements from various Church bodies called for Gutierrez’s resignation. Finally, in April 2011, she submitted it (Punongbayan 2011). A shift in the power balance of Congress combined with grassroots activism to bring about Gutierrez’s downfall. However, according to Akbayan’s Hontiveros: ‘The major factor was the mobilization of citizens, anticorruption citizens, outside the House. Really attending in force, the broad representation at every committee hearing, until it went out on to the floor in plenary, witnessing up to the very last moment of the votes coming in, in larger numbers than even we had predicted’.20 The new ombudsman, Conchita Morales, selected by President Aquino in July 2011, received positive endorsements from Church and business leaders (CBCP News 2011a). Aquino also appointed whistleblower Mendoza to the COA as a commissioner. This was unquestionably a triumph for a broad coalition of civil society and political forces, but not necessarily for democracy in the Philippines. First, civil society activism was only successful once the election of a new government produced a tactical interest in impeachment on the part of a section of the elite. Second, while democratic forces played a significant role in mobilizing opposition to Gutierrez, this didn’t translate into subsequent influence over how to combat corruption, which instead reflected the ascendance of moral and liberal ideologies. In mid-December 2010, the MBC and the European Chamber of Commerce in the Philippines launched the Philippine Integrity Initiative, supported by a US$1.4 million grant from Siemens AG (quoted in Osorio 2010). The Integrity Initiative was described as a ‘multisectoral campaign that seeks to institutionalize integrity standards among various sectors of society—business, government, judiciary, academe, youth, civil society, church and media’ (Integrity Initiative 2011b). Consortium members included the CAC and the Bishops-Businessmen Conference. Importantly, embodied in the Integrity

20 Interview by Garry Rodan with Akbayan Member of the House of Representatives (2004–10), Risa Hontiveros, 18 October 2011, Manila.

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Initiative is an understanding of how a particular moral order is the foundation for economic and social progress: Ultimately, the Integrity Initiative hopes to build up trust in government, a more equitable society and fair market conditions. This will result in improved competitiveness and increased business confidence, which will be evident with the increase in domestic and foreign investments, and more employment generated for Filipinos. Subsequently, with more Filipinos employed in a vibrant and dynamic Philippine economy, the alleviation of poverty should become an inevitability (Integrity Initiative 2011a).

The political pre-eminence of this synthesis of moral and liberal perspectives on corruption prompted critical reflection by democratic elements. For instance, Akbayan’s Walden Bello, a key actor in the impeachment process since 2009 and whose party became a minor member of the ruling coalition led by Aquino, challenged Aquino’s 2010 election assertion that ‘if there is no corruption, there would be no poverty’: . . . while indeed corruption contributes to poverty, it is not the main cause of poverty, and the hegemony of the corruption discourse during the campaign meant the avoidance of any substantive discussion of the key issues behind poverty and economic stagnation—among them, uncontrolled population growth, a debt service policy that has radically reduced funds for capital expenditures, trade liberalization that has devastated industry and agriculture, and the completion of the land reform program (Bello 2010a).

Moreover, Bello lamented the way that already considerable odds were lengthening for those seeking to challenge elite power in the Philippines, by vertical—let alone horizontal—accountability: What worries me, more than violence and vote-buying . . . is the skyrocketing cost of elections . . . The need to raise enormous sums to have an impact on an expanding electorate has, of course, naturally strengthened the rich and those organizations favoured by the rich over the electoral system . . . elections function not so much as a means through which people choose their leaders but a mechanism whereby rival factions of the elite compete for possession of the state apparatus (Bello 2010a).

Similar sentiments were echoed by Bayan Muna’s Neri Colmenares who asserted that: ‘If there is no social reform in terms of elite domination in economy, politics, the ombudsman will take one hundred years to be able to reform society’.21 Father Joe Dizon (Umil 2011), who was one of the petitioners to 21 Interview by Garry Rodan with Member of the House of Representatives, Neri Colmenares, 13 October 2011, Manila.

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remove Gutierrez, also proclaimed: ‘Reforming government does not start from eradicating corruption alone. There has to be an overhaul in the social structure in which government is led only by the elite’. Yet building effective political pressure towards such an agenda is extremely difficult where there is such a fragmented civil society as in the Philippines. Instead, President Aquino’s drive against corruption marked a new round of intra-elite struggle, starting with a focus on the Supreme Court and the Senate impeachment in May 2012 of Chief Justice Renato Corona. He was a ‘midnight’ appointment by Arroyo and her former chief of staff. Corona’s fate was sealed when he admitted to failing to declare US$2.4 million deposited in foreign currency bank accounts in his mandatory statement of assets and liabilities (Hookway 2012b). Significantly, Corona had also been accused of bias in favour of President Arroyo on various cases before the Supreme Court (Montecillo 2012). Corona and some of his supporters contended that Aquino’s desire to control the judiciary, together with revenge for a Court order to dismantle the Hacienda Luisita plantation owned by President Aquino’s relatives were motivations for impeachment (Manila Bulletin 2012; CBCP News 2012).22 In any case, Corona’s conviction was politically popular, not least with the MBC that declared this would ‘build a culture of integrity not just in the Supreme Court and judicial system but in the other branches of government’ (Hookway 2012b). In March 2012, ‘Mike’ Arroyo was also arrested on court charges of accepting money to push through the 2007 deal with Chinese company ZTE Corporation for a nationwide broadband network (Associated Press 2012). Between November 2011 and October 2012, former President Arroyo was indicted too on a string of ombudsman filed charges including alleged vote fraud and a 2008 plunder involving P300 million (US$7.2 million) of state lottery funds (Larano 2012). In high political drama, and in defiance of the Supreme Court, Philippine immigration officials blocked the former president’s attempt to board a plane to Hong Kong in November 201l. The government had feared Arroyo would not return from Hong Kong to face corruption investigations (Hookway 2011). To be sure, some ‘big fish’ were being prosecuted and this was both politically popular and seen in liberal quarters as laying the basis for economic and social gains. But this was also an approach to combating corruption that surrendered little or no control over power by established elites.

22

For an official rebuttal on Corona’s claims about Hacienda Luista see ABS-CBNnews.com (2012).

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Thailand’s National Counter Corruption Commission (NCCC) and Constitutional Court were created by the 1997 Constitution, which introduced a raft of horizontal accountability agencies. This also included an electoral commission, an ombudsman’s office, and a national audit authority, all of which had combating money politics as a key aim. Money politics was considered complicit in the vicious cycle of election-corruption-coup characterizing Thai politics for the past two decades. In the aftermath of protests in response to military intervention in 1992, a reform movement emerged which sought a constitutional fix for Thailand’s perennial political instability. The 1997 Constitution was called the ‘People’s Constitution’ because it was drafted with an unprecedented degree of public deliberation. It was passed despite the objections of many politicians in the wake of the Asian Financial Crisis which brought the Thai economy to its knees (Harding and Leyland 2011). The Constitution was intended to enhance both vertical and horizontal accountability. Vertical accountability would be strengthened by increasing the effectiveness of the executive branch and promoting stronger links between Members of Parliament (MPs) and constituency members through a new electoral system. However, the representative function of political parties was to be balanced by an elected upper house, with deputies drawn from civil society rather than political parties. These deputies were envisaged as socially minded individuals not compromised by money politics. The Senate was to have a key role appointing commissioners of horizontal accountability agencies. Liberal approaches are evident in the preoccupation with strengthening oversight through horizontal accountability to promote the rule of law. The ‘independent agencies’ would constrain money politics in the interest of clean and efficient government. At the hub of this system was the new Constitutional Court, envisaged as ‘the guardian’ of the new liberal order (Dressel 2010: 675). In practice, the liberal strand in the 1997 Constitution was tactically tied to a conservative conception of judicial power as rooted in a moral order emanating from the Thai monarch.23 Failure to reform either the monarchy or the military in the 1997 Constitution represented a concession to conservatives 23 In this liberal-conservative alliance, Hewison (2010b: 126) characterizes the interests of liberals as focused on good governance, political rights, and an end to money politics, whereas conservatives were keen to promote order, stability, and unity and to maintain the positions of the monarchy and the military. The alliance of these interests underpinned the new constitution.

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(Connors 1999: 208). Furthermore, elitism persisted to an extent both in the drafting process and the eventual document (Hewison 2007: 931). This included the provision in the 1997 Constitution barring parliamentary candidates without university degrees (Rodan and Jayasuria 2012: 182).

TH AKS I N AN D T HE I N DEPE ND E NT AG E NCIE S Up to 2001, the new horizontal accountability agencies appeared to be establishing some authority, particularly in the sphere of anticorruption. The Election Commission made efforts to introduce strict oversight of electoral politics and vote-buying, while the NCCC indicted its first ‘big fish’ in 2000, in the shape of Deputy Prime Minister Sanan Kachornprasat, Minister of Interior, and Secretary-General of the ruling Democrat Party. The next big fish proved more difficult to net. In 2001, telecommunications magnate Thaksin Shinawatra’s Thai Rak Thai (TRT)—or ‘Thais Love Thais’— party came to power in elections held amid a bleak economic recession. TRT won the elections emphatically, almost winning a majority, which no political party in Thailand had done before. It then swallowed up some smaller parties, allowing it to rule without coalition partners. Even before the elections, Thaksin had been under investigation by the NCCC over suspicions of incomplete assets declarations during an earlier stint as a cabinet minister. Following his election, the NCCC concluded its investigation and its commissioners voted by 8:1 to indict Thaksin and forward his case to the Constitutional Court. In the seventeen previous cases forwarded by the NCCC, the Court had supported the anticorruption agency. However, Thaksin had recently been elected and announced a raft of populist programmes increasing his popularity. He rejected unpopular IMF-mandated austerity measures, and promised a moratorium on farmers’ debts, a universal healthcare scheme, and other reflationary measures. When his case was heard at the Constitutional Court, demonstrators turned out in force to support him, including individuals such as Sondhi Limongkul who would later lead protests against him. There were rumours that even Prem Tinsulanond, president of the Privy Council and right-hand-man to the king, who would later give the green light for a military coup against Thaksin, privately asked the Court to dismiss the charges. In a context of economic crisis, climbing unemployment, and deepening poverty in Thailand, elite actors feared descent into social chaos if Thaksin was convicted (Hewison 2010c: 124). The Court found a convoluted means to formally acquit Thaksin. Often seen as a turning point in Thailand’s recent political trajectory, the Constitutional

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Court’s subservience to both public opinion and elite pressure was a symptom of intense social struggles that were to overwhelm the Court’s independence in the future. It was later reported that Thaksin had personally lobbied judges for support, and that judges had admitted to applying ‘political science’ rather than legal principles in hearing the case (Suthichai 2004). Thaksin’s period as prime minister from 2001 to 2006 was characterized by both populism and authoritarianism. He delivered on populist programmes such as the healthcare scheme and the million-baht per village rural development fund, eliciting huge support amongst rural poor, while alienating the Bangkok middle classes who saw themselves as paying for rural welfare (Glassman 2010). These schemes were populist in that they were delivered peremptorily through Thaksin’s trademark ‘CEO governance’ approach, specifically as a vehicle for mobilizing electoral support. Although popular, the schemes did not serve as a vehicle for promoting deliberation or decision-making amongst rural poor, and consequently a solid ideological platform for a social democratic or redistributive agenda did not emerge at this stage. Thaksin did not attempt to win the argument through democratic debate or support for independent organizations of the poor. Consequently, the hostility of the urban elite and middle class was easily rationalized by the claim that the poor were irrational in their attachment to Thaksin, and that, therefore, their choices at the polls could be discounted. However, as Montesano (2009: 11) has suggested, part of the support for Thaksin was due to what he calls the ‘continuing skew of the Thai party political spectrum to the right and to a resultant lack of progressive alternatives for voters’. With no social democratic party making the case for redistribution of wealth in a polity where decades of disinvestment in rural areas had underpinned economic growth by providing a cheap pool of labour for urban industry (Glassman 2010), the poor gave their allegiances to Thaksin. Buoyed up on this wave of grassroots support, Thaksin swiftly undermined the institutions created by the 1997 Constitution. The fulcrum of the horizontal accountability system in the 1997 Constitution was the Senate, responsible for appointing commissioners to independent agencies. The Senate never lived up to the non-partisan hopes of Constitution-drafters. Most Senators elected were close to political parties (Chambers 2009). Although only about forty were initially aligned with Thaksin and TRT, Thaksin gradually co-opted more, gaining majority Senate support by January 2004 (Chambers 2009). By this means, Thaksin gained control of many appointments to independent agencies. The NCCC was a particular target, due to the ‘formidable’ record of its first set of commissioners, appointed in 1997 (The Nation 2003a). Following the overruling of Thaksin’s indictment, the NCCC indicted former Public Health Minister Rakkiat Sukthana on a drug-procurement scandal and began

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investigating nine other incumbent and former ministers (The Nation 2003b). However, the agency’s reputation was shaken when new commissioners, appointed in 2003, were dismissed by the Supreme Court the same year after voting themselves a large pay rise without parliamentary approval. The third set of commissioners appointed in 2005 reportedly all had ‘close ties to senior government figures or their family members’ (The Nation 2005). In the February 2005 elections, TRT won a landslide victory. Thaksin became the first premier in Thai history to have survived a four-year term, the first to have been re-elected, and the first to command a simple majority in the House of Representatives. Subsequently, however, Thaksin came into conflict with the monarchy over a planned military shuffle, rejected by the palace. Members of the King’s Privy Council also began to criticize Thaksin publicly. Political polarization began in earnest the following year when Thaksin sold his family’s share in telecommunications company Shin Corporation to the Singapore government-linked company Temasek Holdings. Given his control of the NCCC there should have been few risks for the prime minister despite the fact that Thaksin avoided paying tax on dealings surrounding the sale. However, public outrage over Thaksin’s actions precipitated a crisis, partly due to the role of former Thaksin ally Sondhi Limthongkul. Sondhi was a media celebrity, whose weekly current affairs show on one of Thaksin’s television channels had recently been cancelled due to its increasingly critical tone. Sondhi began conducting the show live in Lumphini Park in the centre of Bangkok. The Shin Corporation sale became a key issue in the show, prompting the emergence of a new political movement, the People’s Alliance for Democracy (PAD), seeking Thaksin’s ouster and arrest. PAD was soon bolstered by other groups, including the ‘Dharma Army’ of Chamlong Srimaung, leader of the May 1992 protests. These high profile leaders began to articulate the discontent felt by the Bangkok population at Thaksin’s disregard for the law and for horizontal accountability. In rural areas, these misdeeds were less politically significant. Corruption was not a new phenomenon, but Thaksin’s rural development programmes brought real change. At the same time, Thaksin began increasingly to present himself as a man of the people, adopting the slogan ‘The heart of TRT is the people’ and publicizing his rural development programmes relentlessly (Pasuk and Baker 2009: 87–8).

ROYALI S M RES U RG E NT PAD and other groups that later coalesced into the ‘yellow-shirt’ coalition looked to the monarchy rather than to liberal principles of constitutionalism

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to support their position. In February 2006 Sondhi appealed to the king to remove Thaksin from power, despite the lack of a constitutional basis for this. Sondhi accused Thaksin and the TRT of plotting to overthrow the monarchy and at rallies, t-shirts and headbands were distributed bearing the slogan ‘We fight for the King’ (Pasuk and Baker 2011: 90). Pasuk and Baker (2011: 90) report that this cost the movement support of some social activists. However, owing to a legacy of the demise of the left in Thailand during the Cold War and the weakness of a civil society largely comprising locally focused single-issue NGOs (Connors 2003: 217), there is a tendency on the part of liberals to ally with the monarchy as a source of order and development (Glassman 2010; Thongchai 2008). Such ideas were evident in public speeches of key actors through 2006. Privy Council President Prem Tinsulanond, for example, made speeches to the army and naval academies in which he demanded that military allegiance belonged to the king and country and not the government of the day, and that holders of public office ‘must embrace ethics and morality’ (Wassana 2006)—a comment that would perhaps be uncontroversial if it was not widely seen as a justification for a coup to overthrow a recently elected government. Thai scholars have articulated the theme of moral authority as a key ingredient to political rule and as a culturally authentic approach to democracy. The concept of ‘Thai-style Democracy’ (TSD) draws upon ‘Buddhist-based cultural paradigms that emphasize improvisional, compromised and flexible adjustments to their social world’ (Pattana 2006: 3). Thongchai (2008: 28), a critic of this approach, comments that the notion of Thai-style democracy ‘acknowledges moral authority as the superior and ultimate legitimacy’. The influence of this ideology is such, Thongchai (2008: 28) argues, that Thai citizens respond to breakdowns in democratic process by seeking refuge ‘not so much in the legal process or accountability mechanisms within the political system as in the higher moral authority’. Thus, analysing the 2006 coup, Thai academic Surin Maisrikrod (2007: 349; as discussed in Hewison and Kengkij 2010: 182) argued that Thaksin’s rule ‘lacked moral authority’ whereas coup instigator Prem Tinsulanonda, head of the King’s Privy Council, ‘represented the moral order’. TSD represents a deeply embedded moral ideology that is frequently used to justify elite dominance of accountability processes (Hewison and Kengkij 2010: 195). Although drawing on the language of democracy, it in fact limits or even precludes the award of political authority to the people. Connors (2008a: 145) suggests that TSD ‘has come to mean governments which rule by the consent of the people when they are able to make the right choices, where power is divided among the executive, legislature and judiciary and the king plays a guardianship role and holds ultimate sovereignty’ (original italics).

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Hewison and Kengkij (2010: 188) go further in claiming that TSD transforms citizens into ‘children-people’ on whose behalf the elite make decisions—the opposite of awarding authority to public citizens. There is more debate about the relationship between TSD and liberalism. For Hewison and Kengkij (2010: 190) the two are incompatible to the extent that ‘anti-liberalism has remained an important underpinning of TSD to the present day’. Connors (2008a: 145), by contrast, sees Thai liberalism as emerging from ‘ancient notions of Buddhist kingship or Dhammaraja, which envisages a social contract between monarch and subject based on the royal performance of duties and exemplary morality’, producing an ideological hybrid that is distinctly Thai. In the decade from the Asian Financial Crisis and the passage of the 1997 Constitution to the military coup that unseated Thaksin in 2006, liberalism was significantly weakened in Thailand, as reaction to liberal policies promoted by the IMF-led domestic business groups and middle classes to embrace, first, Thaksin’s economic nationalism, and then the moral conservatism of the palace. Moral ideologies thus dominated the coalition that sought to oust Thaksin, as erstwhile liberals allied tactically with, or reverted to, a moral ideology of royalist conservatism that bore little resemblance to classical liberalism. This reversion to moral conservatism was exemplified by PAD’s call for a ‘new politics’ centred on the moral authority of the king. These ideas achieved increasing purchase within various sections of Bangkok’s middle classes, as they recovered from the Asian Financial Crisis. Key groups incorporating social activists, professionals, and liberal academics became increasingly reluctant to pay taxes to support Thaksin’s grand rural strategies, and increasingly appalled at the way Thaksin was concentrating power and wealth in his own hands. At the same time, Thailand’s aristocrats, military leaders, and oligarchs became increasingly concerned at the threat to their power presented by Thaksin’s rise. Thaksin dealt with the fallout from the Shin Corporation sale by calling snap elections for April 2006, to renew the overwhelming democratic mandate acquired only a year earlier. He also announced new programmes of handouts in rural areas. Opposition parties, probably fearing ignominious defeat, boycotted the elections, prompting Thaksin to declare a caretaker government. In the midst of this political crisis, a group of senators petitioned the Constitutional Court to impeach Thaksin over the Shin Corporation sale, but the Constitutional Court, by this time packed with judges effectively chosen by Thaksin, rejected the petition. At this point, the king intervened. He addressed a meeting of justices from the Constitutional, Supreme, and Administrative Courts, reminding them of

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their duty to the crown, declaring that elections in which only one party participated were ‘undemocratic’ and calling on the judges to fix the situation. This galvanized the courts into action, prompting the three courts to meet for a ‘judicial summit’ following which the Constitutional Court broke with Thaksin, annulling the 2 April elections, and charging the (Thaksin-appointed) Election Commission with dereliction of duty. Thaksin responded by calling new elections for October 2006, but before these elections could take place, the military intervened with Thailand’s first coup d’état for fifteen years.

T H E PO S T-C O UP O RDE R A ND CO R RU P T IO N ERADICATION It was important that no lives were lost in a coup that was presented as a restoration of moral order, rather than as an overturning of democracy. The post-coup order established by the military and its conservative and liberal allies was institutionalized via a new constitution ratified by public referendum in August 2007. Subsequently, the military junta established a new anticorruption framework focusing intensively on Thaksin and his allies. An Assets Scrutiny Committee of established anti-Thaksin figures was appointed by the military with the mandate to examine losses to the state during the Thaksin administration. It moved swiftly to freeze Bt66 billion (US$2 billion) of Thaksin’s assets before his trial by the Supreme Court for dishonest dealings in relation to the Shin Corporation sale (Connors 2008b). The 2007 constitution put the judiciary at the heart of constitutional power, with control over appointments not only for independent agencies but also for half the seats in the Senate. In the new regime, the judiciary is conceived as the agent of monarchical authority, swearing allegiance to king and country rather than to a democratic conception of sovereignty. These moves were intended to constrain future executives while re-establishing Thailand’s longstanding conservative political order around principles which conflated morality with rule of law. As one Thai analyst noted: ‘Institutions aligned to the previous political order, anchored around a monarchy-centred socio-political hierarchy, were granted more leeway and authority. Democratic institutions, such as Parliament, political parties and politicians, are kept weak systematically’ (Thitinan 2012b). This was, the same observer commented, ‘the antithesis of the hard-won democratic principles enshrined in the now-abolished 1997 Charter’ (Thitinan 2007). It also represented a more complete capture of horizontal accountability institutions, by elite groups aligned with the palace, than Thaksin ever achieved (Hewison 2010b: 133).

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Despite claiming the moral high ground in this way, the judicial branch has frequently appeared openly partisan, ignored due process, and exceeded its powers. The judicial summit in 2006 that prompted the cancellation of elections, as Montesano (2009: 12) points out, had no legal or constitutional basis but was a response to orders that the king was not constitutionally entitled to make. The authority it claimed was on the basis that it was ‘a gathering of the putatively responsible, capable and good’ (Montesano 2009: 12). Furthermore, the coalition purportedly calling for a return to order and law ‘sought to force Thaksin’s ouster through the extra-institutional means of mounting as large public rallies as possible’ (Montesano 2009: 5), including when Thaksin allies were re-elected in new elections in 2007, through occupying Bangkok’s international and domestic airports in 2008. Moreover, the judiciary has defended the Constitution despite its basis in a military coup, following Thai precedent in deciding that, although the coup was not legal, nevertheless the new Constitution could be since it was put forward by a government that had de facto power (Connors 2010). In flexing its newfound powers, the Constitutional Court since 2006 has twice dissolved democratically elected pro-Thaksin political parties on corruption charges related to money politics during elections, while twice acquitting the Democrat Party on technicalities over similar offences. On the second occasion, the acquittal followed the release on YouTube of footage of Democrat Party officials apparently lobbying Constitutional Court judges over the case (The Economist 2010). Meanwhile, the Supreme Court convicted a pro-Thaksin elected prime minister of corruption on the somewhat trumped-up basis that he received payments from a television station related to a cooking show he hosted while occupying political office. The use of moral ideologies centred on the institution of the monarchy is crucial to the legitimation of such judicial behaviour, allowing for flexible interpretations of correct conduct premised on a presumed underlying threat posed by Thaksin and his allies to the entire moral order that the king personifies and to which judges, like the military, pledge allegiance. This has not been uncontested. In the two elections since 2006, pro-Thaksin parties were re-elected each time. The first party was dissolved after a year in office; the second, led by Thaksin’s sister Yingluck Shinawatra, was more long-lasting. These parties are bolstered by a mass movement of supporters called the United Front for Democracy Against Dictatorship (UDD), or more commonly the ‘red-shirt movement’. Initially emerging from protests against the coup and the 2007 constitutional referendum, the movement encompasses a range of groups including those demanding the return of Thaksin as well as others that are not natural Thaksin allies. It included, for example, some unions and leftists, despite Thaksin’s assault on these during his time in

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power, who regard Thaksin’s electoral mandate, rather than the king, as the ultimate sovereign power in Thai politics.24 Opponents deride references to the democratic mandate with some justification as populist electoral authoritarianism masquerading as democracy, given Thaksin’s dominance of the media during his period in power, and his massive cash handout programmes to the rural poor. The Nation newspaper, for example, discussing Thaksin’s 2008 denunciation of Thailand’s ‘privileged elites’ for conspiring against him and ‘the principle of liberal democracy’, following his conviction in absentia by the Supreme Court for corruption, commented: ‘Thaksin himself is, without a doubt, at the forefront of Thailand’s “privileged elite.” He also apparently confuses electoral gimmickry and populism with “liberal democracy”’ (The Nation 2008). Similarly, an intellectual at Chulalongkorn University, critical of Thaksin, commented: There’s no country in the world that would put their entire faith in elections . . . But of course it’s an important element of democracy. It tends to get better when you have enough money to eat and you are proud of yourself, so you start thinking; how should I vote? But if you do not have money, you rely on money from a populist government, you’ve worsened democracy . . . Better income, better education makes the electorate become a [better] quality one. But politicians don’t want to break this particular dependence link.25

However, the UDD counters the moralist claims of the royalist movement. UDD pamphlets point out the inconsistencies in claims to promote the rule of law and actual judicial behaviour in post-coup Thailand. UDD spokespersons decry what they regard as dismissive attitudes of elites towards voters’ choices. Thida Thavornseth, chair of the UDD, characterized the royalist position as: ‘We’re the good ones and all of you are bad, all of you stupid. You’re the majority, we are smaller, but we are the good ones, so we have the right to be Godlike’. She further asserted that: ‘We cannot accept this, when people say you don’t have morals or accountability . . . We are fighting only for equality . . . It’s up to the people to decide’.26 The UDD mobilized repeatedly demanding either a return to the pre-coup political order or new elections. In 2009 UDD protests forced the cancellation

24 Other unions and former communists have joined the yellow-shirts, regarding Thaksin as a manifestation of internationally sponsored capitalism more dangerous to Thai workers than the old guard aristocracy and monarchy. Interview by Garry Rodan and Caroline Hughes with chairperson of UDD, Thida Thavornseth, 19 September 2012, Bangkok. 25 Interview by Caroline Hughes with Assistant Professor of Political Science, Chulalongkorn University, Surat Horachaikul, 18 September 2012, Bangkok. 26 Interview by Garry Rodan and Caroline Hughes with chairperson of UDD, Thida Thavornseth, 19 September 2012, Bangkok.

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of an ASEAN summit scheduled in Pattaya. From March to May 2010 thousands of red-shirts occupied central Bangkok for weeks in a spectacular show of force, demanding the repeal of the new order instituted by military rule. The protests ended in a violent crackdown by a reportedly reluctant army, which left ninety-eight people dead. No one has been held to account for the deaths, although the government reportedly paid a sum of US$245,000 in compensation per victim to families, in return for assurances that they would not pursue the question of accountability (Bello 2010b). Importantly, since the coup, with Thaksin in exile his ability to dominate Thai political debate is much curtailed; yet Thaksin aligned parties still command majorities at the polls. For the red-shirts, the judiciary’s continued attempts to place obstacles in the way of a pro-Thaksin government, through party dissolution orders, criminal charges, and Constitutional Court interventions into legislative debates, represent the antithesis of accountability. Thus a red-shirt pamphlet comments: ‘Not only the Judiciary has lost the connection with the people as the only legitimate source of sovereign powers in a democratic society but also it is virtually unable to be checked by any effective means’ (UDD n.d.: 9). Similarly, a group of law lecturers from Thammasat University, calling themselves Nitirat, or the ‘Enlightened Jurists Group’, pitched for the expunging of all records and judicial decisions emanating from the 2006 coup, on the grounds that ‘the people, as holders of sovereign power, must be able to legally undo undemocratic legal actions made by the coup makers’ (The Nation 2011). The failure to account for the deaths of May 2010 and the widespread use of oppressive lèse-majesté legislation to imprison critics of the king and, sometimes, the judiciary deepened the divide between the judiciary and the UDD. Amidst this deep, highly contested, and sometimes violent social division, efforts to eradicate corruption in Thailand became irredeemably politicized. Although the NCCC, now renamed the National Anti-Corruption Commission (NACC), continued to work alongside the Electoral Commission to combat money politics, its efforts were undermined by the fact that its commissioners were appointed by procedures of the 2007 post-coup Constitution, in which judges aligned with the ‘yellow’ coalition were prominent. Deep UDD distrust of the judiciary contributes to red-shirt movement suspicion that the powerful moral and liberal ideologies propelling anticorruption initiatives since 2006 are a masquerade for a campaign to eradicate democracy. Consequently, Bello (2010b) quotes a red-shirt taxi driver in Bangkok, shortly after the violent suppression of the 2010 red-shirt protests: ‘The Bangkok rich think we are stupid people who can’t be trusted with democratic choice. We know what we’re doing. So yes, they say Thaksin is corruption. But he’s for us and he’s proven it’. In red-shirt rhetoric on accountability, Thaksin’s corruption is now

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set against the human rights abuses of the military and the judiciary in failing to account for the deaths in May 2010.

AC C O UN TAB I LI T Y VERS U S R E CO NCIL IAT IO N Following the 2011 election of yet another pro-Thaksin party, the Pheu Thai Party (PTP), meaning ‘For Thais Party’, headed by Thaksin’s sister, Yingluck, a new agenda of reconciliation emerged. Former coup-maker General Sondhi Boonyaratglin put forward a reconciliation bill in 2012 which would rehabilitate pro-Thaksin politicians banned from politics while also granting amnesties for crimes committed in connection with public protests between 15 September 2005 and 10 May 2011. The bill would pave the way for Thaksin’s return and repeal a number of convictions for corruption, at the same time as ensuring nobody would ever be brought to trial for the May 2010 deaths. Other political groups subsequently put forward their own versions of reconciliation bills, with varying emphases and exclusions. Although no bill has yet been passed, Thaksin’s endorsement of a move towards reconciliation has prompted rifts within the red-shirt coalition, with some UDD members regarding his statements on the issue as self-serving. UDD chair Thida explained the rift as arising from different agendas between UDD and PTP: ‘The party wants to stay as long as they can in government, but for us, we want to change the country’.27 On the ‘yellow’ side of politics, the Democrat Party resorted to brawling in the House of Representatives to prevent discussion of the bill (Veera 2012). According to Thitinan (2012a), the bill represented a behind-the-scenes deal serving the interests of elites on both sides while abandoning their followers, allowing Yingluck to rule provided she does not challenge the military’s prerogatives and upholds lèse-majesté provisions that bolster the monarchy against the UDD challenge. Important elements in PAD and UDD thus appear likely to reject the provisions of reconciliation. Both coalitions have taken on a momentum of their own, prompting The Nation to comment: ‘Politics spawns hatred to serve its own purpose. Then hatred becomes an uncontrollable beast and not even politics can stop it . . . Reconciliation is no longer up to the people who started the war’ (The Nation 2012).

27 Interview by Garry Rodan and Caroline Hughes with chairperson of UDD, Thida Thavornseth, 19 September 2012, Bangkok.

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Arguably, however, the impasse in Thai politics is more to do with deep-rooted and long-standing socio-economic divisions in Thai society than with contemporary personalities, what Thitinan calls ‘a deep-seated and irreconcilable conflict between the older, more traditional Thailand and a new Thailand’ (Thitinan 2008: 144). Elite populism has built links between formerly fragmented grassroots and middle class movements on both sides, as well as prompting new divisions between them. It has also prompted new critical debates on the role of the king, the relationship between Bangkok and the provinces, and the costs and benefits of a welfare state (Hewison 2010c). As Hewison (2010c) suggests, this legacy raises the possibility that a new level of democratic deliberation could emerge in Thai politics, as civil society groups are strengthened by ongoing high levels of mobilization, and if discussion begins to focus more squarely on the future of Thailand’s economic and social development rather than on the fate of elite personalities. This could lay the basis for strategies of accountability for corruption focusing on the structural problem of oligarchy rather than merely the wrongdoings and underlying moral failings of individuals.

C O N C LUSIO N In all three cases shown above, the ability of anticorruption agencies to act effectively against corruption was significantly determined by the strength and nature of societal coalitions forming in support and in opposition to them. In this context, both ideological and tactical considerations have to differing extents been evident in accountability movements. In each case, anticorruption agencies have attempted to impose accountability on ‘big fish’—powerful predators making millions from corrupt activities. Meanwhile, populist leaders have in all three cases used anticorruption agencies tactically as a means to oust or apply pressure on threatening opponents as part of their intra-elite power struggles. In Indonesia and the Philippines, crusading agencies endured a crippling backlash from corrupt politicians, and civil society campaigns espousing a range of anticorruption ideologies were insufficiently powerful to prevent this. As argued above, the weakness of civil society in Indonesia made efforts to link the undoubted popularity of the KPK to a new democratic agenda ultimately unsuccessful. The outcome has been sporadic confrontations between the KPK and elite and oligarchic actors, defused by a publicity-conscious president, followed by periods of quiet chipping away at the KPK’s powers. In the Philippines, the ombudsman’s office has been overtly politicized through

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tactical use by contending elites. Within civil society, the influence of the Catholic Church and its moralist approach has prevented concerns about corruption from expanding past concerns over proper procedure into concerns over the societal structures that uphold elite domination. In Thailand, the situation is somewhat different: the undermining of horizontal accountability agencies by a populist leader proclaiming democratic values prompted a royalist-liberal backlash explicitly resting on a conception of moral authority conceived of as authentically Thai. However, civil society coalitions that mobilized on each side around this confrontation have not gone away—rather they appear to becoming increasingly diverse, articulate, and deliberative and include challenging the assertion of royal prerogative. Consequently, elite focus in both the royalist-liberal coalition and the PTP on the personage of Thaksin and the question of who holds power is increasingly distinct from concerns on the ground. Although the situation is polarized and possibly escalating, characterized by repeated violent confrontations that paralyse institutions of government, this situation has also thrown up a range of new civil society networks which appear to offer opportunities for critical debate, particularly to non-elite groups. As the inevitable close approaches on the reign of the ageing Thai monarch, due to turn 86 in December 2013, better capabilities for organizing deliberation within civil society would appear to be the only politically sustainable route out of the ideological stalemate.

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Conclusion The foregoing case studies highlight how demands for, and initiatives in, accountability across Southeast Asia traverse a range of mechanisms and policy foci. This includes horizontal, vertical, and diagonal forms of accountability that in one or other country in the region involves attempts to promote political and administrative decentralization, human rights protection, and the arrest of corruption. These case studies do not represent an exhaustive documentation of the region’s accountability reform struggles. They do, however, capture thematically the accountability reform pressures and ideas exerting influence in the region. The purpose of such case studies was to open up analysis to an appreciation of the different forms of, and rationales for, accountability occurring in Southeast Asia. This meant taking democratic and non-democratic accountability equally seriously. It also meant taking analysis beyond distinguishing between mere accountability rhetoric and genuine accountability reform, important as this is. The aim was instead to advance understanding of how different ideologies of accountability affect the strategies and opportunities for contestation within a political regime: who can be involved in contestation and how. This approach has revealed how, regardless of whether the push for accountability employs democratic or non-democratic ideologies that reflect genuine beliefs or tactical considerations, the political effects are in all instances real and consequential. Indeed, competition of ideas on accountability reform is no political sideshow. The views and interests that prevail have fundamental importance for political regime directions. In essence, what is at stake is the very basis on which state power is exercised: the power relationship between rulers and ruled. Rationales for or against accountability, or for one form of accountability over another, all speak to this vital political question. Consequently, accountability politics involves a wide range of political and social actors, some of which have democratic aspirations but many of which enter these debates and struggles precisely to avert democracy or to ensure it is limited to procedural forms.

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Accountability institutions should thus not simply be evaluated against technical considerations of best practice. They represent potential sites of conflict between contending ideas and forces precisely because which ideologies dominate these institutions fundamentally affects which interests might be protected or challenged through them. At its most blatant, this conflict was demonstrated by the Thai case study where state-based horizontal accountability institutions have been extremely politicized. However, in other cases conflict between ideologically aligned groups has been more swiftly suppressed or co-opted. For example, the demonstrations of thousands in support of the Corruption Eradication Commission in Indonesia quickly subsided, even though contention between the Commission and the Indonesian police continued. Yet what is at stake in the Indonesian case is no less fundamentally political. To be sure, across different regimes in Southeast Asia we have seen significant examples of genuine accountability at work, including in response to media scrutiny and public concern and/or organized protests. In particular, from time to time this has translated into action against members of the political, economic, or bureaucratic elite. The removal of an ombudsman and the laying of charges against two former presidents in the Philippines, for example, remind us that accountability institutions can under certain circumstances genuinely hold those who exercise power to account. Yet understanding those circumstances, and the tendency for accountability action to centre on disciplining individuals rather than deeper reforms in relationships between the rulers and the ruled, is critical to appreciating the extent and limits of that accountability. A striking theme within Southeast Asia, therefore, is how accountability has, in both democratic and authoritarian regimes, often been harnessed by elites to narrow the scope of what aspects of state power can be scrutinized, and by whom. This is possible because different ideologies of accountability frame governance problems and solutions in contrasting ways and have distinctive stances on whose political authority an institution should embody. Only democratic ideologies insist that governance problems are to be determined and addressed, directly or indirectly, through expressions of popular sovereignty. Both liberal and moral ideologies invoke different notions of authority—the sanctity of individual liberty or a code of behaviour that is external, given, and beyond contestation—biased in favour of politically conservative conceptions of, and outcomes to, governance problems. Thus, as we saw in the various movements across the region, corruption is viewed from both liberal and moral ideologies as a problem of individuals lacking integrity and to be combated accordingly. The difference is that the former ideology places more emphasis on institutional design to remove bad apples

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from the barrel; the latter underlines the need for individuals to adhere to some religious or other moral code of behaviour. Either way, the political prescription is for minor adjustments rather than large-scale reforms relating to the political, social, or economic order. Consequently, a marriage of convenience between liberal and moral ideas was evident among activists and reformers in many countries in the region. Indeed, these ideas are associated with some of the most powerful actors in Southeast Asia, including wealthy business groups, international agencies such as the World Bank, and populist politicians and media personalities. Moral reform agendas have in many instances also presented a means of translating international liberal prescriptions on accountability into politically supportable domestic curbs on abuses of state powers. Indeed, the moral populist agenda helps give force to liberal ideas which otherwise have struggled to exert an influence in their own right in much of Southeast Asia. Where moral populism has been most powerfully challenged it has been by democratic populists espousing redistributive reform agendas or rhetoric, as in Thailand under Thaksin and the Philippines under Estrada. More commonly, moral and liberal alliances have been successful in tempering democratic challenges. Importantly, liberal and moral ideologies of accountability can be embraced for different reasons. To be sure, a great many politicians, activists, and bureaucrats in Southeast Asia who are seriously troubled by corruption and human rights abuses, for example, invest sincere hope in these ideologies to help understand and ameliorate such problems. Yet there are also powerful elites and oligarchs who tactically exploit different ideologies of accountability. Spontaneous popular protests can and have emerged across the region in response to concerns about governance. Such episodes may be disruptive and lead down the path of radical demands for change that make established elites nervous. In this context, many elites are attracted to accountability ideologies and mechanisms that can project appearances of responding to public concerns while not risking any significant loss of political or social control. Thus, in the Philippines we saw, for example, how widespread popular concerns and mobilization over corruption that led to the removal of an ombudsman have failed to lay the basis for advancing democratic accountability reform agendas. Instead, liberal and moral ideological accounts have reinforced each other following the demise of Ombudsman Gutierrez. From the liberal perspective, Gutierrez’s removal helps restore integrity at the helm of a key institution as the basis for attracting future private investment and thereby redressing poverty. The question of integrity is viewed more broadly among moral ideologues in the Philippines, placing a premium on individuals, rich and poor, abiding by a religious code of behaviour. In both cases, though, attention has been steered well clear of democratic concerns about

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the need to address the systemic obstacles to non-elites and their representatives being able to influence who controls state power and how. Much the same was true of the earlier mass movement that resulted in Estrada being forced from the presidency, while oligarchic structures linked to inadequate institutions of political accountability escaped reform. This is a pattern that in one way or another has been repeated across much of the region, as the case studies demonstrate. Such outcomes, however, are not guaranteed. This was demonstrated in the case study of Thailand, where attempts by elites to harness horizontal accountability ideologies and mechanisms to limit the impact of vertical, electoral accountability have exacerbated rather than dampened pressures for social and economic reform. Both this general pattern and the exception to it have much to do with the nature and strategies of intra-elite struggles to control state power and the political traction or lack thereof of moral ideologies. One key difference in the Thai case is that Thaksin’s strategy to take a greater share of state power at the expense of established elites incorporated a new deal for hitherto marginalized social classes linked to electoral politics. Elsewhere in the region, including in democracies such as the Philippines and Indonesia, intra-elite competition through the ballot has generally been conducted without recourse to such tactics. Another difference is that the attempt by conservative and reactionary forces to combat and block the Thaksin challenge to established elites by invoking the moral authority of the king came to be seen by many of the poor as a blatant ideological tool to keep them politically marginalized. In this particular case, then, the limits to tactical elite exploitation of moral ideologies are exposed. Importantly, though, the general pattern of successful elite containment of accountability reform politics is not simply a function of cynical and opportunistic elite and oligarchic behaviour. This pattern is fundamentally linked to historical and structural processes that have laid the social foundations shaping state-civil society relations in Southeast Asia that favour particular ideologies of accountability gaining political traction over others. Legacies of the Cold War and the impact of the contemporary global political economy have combined in Southeast Asia to affect profoundly the extent and complexion of civil societies. The net effect is that independent, class-based mass organizations are generally limited across the region, including in democracies, and while in some parts of the region independent civil society forces are more extensive than in others, even here civil societies are politically fragmented rather than cohesive. The organizational bases around which large-scale and ideologically coherent accountability reform coalitions can form are therefore limited. It is precisely because of such limitations to civil society that opportunities for citizens to press their political claims, including on accountability issues,

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rely inordinately on relationships with elites and opportunities presented by intra-elite struggles. The same limitations explain why citizens’ vulnerability to populist ideologies is so high—particularly moral populism. In our case studies, moral ideologies loom especially large in mediating the coalitions and outcomes of accountability reform politics. Moral ideologies are useful in obviating the need for major social and political reform that entails a redistribution of significant economic and political power. Our case studies variously demonstrated how the political authority of nationalism via Ho Chi Minh in Vietnam, of traditional values via the king in Thailand, and of God via Catholicism in the Philippines and Islam in Malaysia, for example, has been a powerful basis of ideological and political mobilization around concerns over abuses of state power. From the viewpoint of elites, such moral ideologies are attractive in obviating the need for major social and political reforms that entail a significant redistribution of political, economic, or social power. Moral ideologies therefore pose a particular challenge for social democracy—both by deflecting critical analysis away from what social democrats may see as the root causes of accountability deficiencies as well as by favouring modes of political participation that don’t routinely rely on independent, collective mass organizations. However, the pervasive influence of moral ideologies of accountability also limits the prospects for liberal democracy because it tends to diminish the imperative for working out a balance or contract between the primary emphasis on individual liberty and collective authority. Our case studies have shown that, at times, accountability reform movements have opened up opportunities for dialogue and engagement between otherwise discrete social activists. However, the potential for democratic ideologies to take wider root is all too often undermined by the attraction of moral ideologies for many of the very politically marginalized social forces that democratic ideologies are seeking to empower. Indeed, moral ideologies are of the utmost strategic political importance to accountability reform struggles in Southeast Asia and the future directions of political regimes more generally. In a context where the masses are often poorly organized politically, or not organized at all, moral ideologies regularly play a decisive role in binding coalitions for accountability reform. In the absence of moral ideologies, coalitions would be much harder to form for lack of a common language that can unite citizens against abuses of state power. Yet, cynical elites and liberals whose political projects differ from democrats can more easily exploit the worldviews of moral ideologues. In reflecting on contemporary struggles over accountability in Southeast Asia contained in this book’s case studies, it is important not to lose sight of the broader historical processes to which these struggles belong. Contemporary

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debate over governance and accountability has arisen in response to post-Cold War political economy transformations affecting authoritarian and democratic regimes alike in Southeast Asia. Whether it was the withdrawal of Soviet support or the advent of the Asian financial crisis, across different regimes in recent decades new pressures have emerged for elites to find new ways to stabilize their rule. In this context, new ideas about governance institutions have been integral to the attempts by contending elites to secure their political and/ or material interests, as well as to those social and political actors with more democratic visions. Political regimes in Southeast Asia have long been subject to pressures for change, punctuated by crisis and occasionally collapse. In the process, old elites reorganize and/or new elites emerge. Either way, new political strategies are usually needed. We should therefore be cautious not to assume that increasing focus on accountability institutions across the region reflects functional or historical imperatives of modern capitalist economies favouring more liberal or democratic rule. Rather, it is quite possible that in many instances what is unfolding is the recalibration of governance by elites to co-opt, undermine, or accommodate challenges from non-elite forces. Importantly, the point this book makes is that the nature and power of challenges to elite strategies is in significant part mediated by the sorts of ideologies that are embraced and/or internalized within non-elite groups. This is why non-democratic ideologies—especially moral ones—are so crucial, not just to the struggle over accountability reform but also to political regime directions. This is a struggle over the core idea of any political regime: on whose authority the organization of the regime rests.

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