The 1st IRSA International Institute

BACKGROUND

There is a growing concern in Indonesia and other parts of the world about insufficient capacity and poor condition of infrastructure. Indonesia faces major challenges in its infrastructure sectors as it seeks to consolidate and accelerate its still fragile economic recovery, improve its international competitiveness, and increase access to basic public services including health, communications, construction, transportation, energy, manufacturing and education. Global experience has shown that infrastructure is an important factor for improving health, education, and environment, fostering economic growth, and reducing poverty – all components of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs).
According to a World Bank’s recent study (2006) entitled “Indonesia Averting Infrastructure Crisis”, the state of infrastructure is a difficulty rather than a help to regional development. Risks of power outages are discouraging investors in new factories, traffic congestion in and around major cities is worsening the quality of environment (e.g., increasing noise and air pollutant levels), longer travel times are making businesses uncompetitive. Worsening seaports and railway stations, the decaying of highways, and other problems are evident and mounting, while many transportation services are in poor and deteriorating condition and a lack of safety. Many households have no access to piped clean water, and limited access to telecommunications, and electricity. The report also rise several issues that go beyond individual infrastructure sectors include a lack of credibility to mobilize private investments, poor public management, insufficient user charges, inadequate financing, difficult decentralization challenges, unclear allocation of responsibilities among public authorities, insufficient strategic planning and coordination capacity, high political and regulatory risks, and high levels of corruption. As a result, Indonesia’s infrastructure quality ranks among the lowest in the region and is affecting growth, poverty reduction, foreign investment, and the environment (World Bank, 2006).
Moreover, as Indonesia embarked on a major decentralization in 2001, decentralization has created uncertainty as to which the central government has transferred many responsibilities relating to infrastructure provision to local authorities. The situation is worsening by the fact that some decentralization implementing regulations are inconsistent with others, as well as with existing national sector regulations. In regional economic development under the atmosphere of decentralization, the sharing of this responsibility among level of jurisdiction stills needs to be determined and discussed.
To this end, we need to understand more the appropriate role, responsibilities and relationships for the various functions that need to be performed in the infrastructure sector, including policy making, financing, service provision and regulation between central and local authorities. This is significantly necessary to formulate the best strategy and policy for regional economic development in Indonesia that is more decentralized, particularly, when the role of public services, poverty, and the environment are of central importance and closely inter-related.

OBJECTIVES

To help overcome challenges posed by the above problems, this institute will attempt to generate transfer of knowledge as well as discussion and debate on formulating innovative methods, strategies and approaches for sustainable regional development and planning. These may go beyond sector-specific issues including the utilization of tools, methods and theoretical frameworks specifically designed for assessing and evaluating infrastructure development, planning, and policy.
Through organization of this institute we expect to accomplish the following:

1. To carry out an evaluation of the current status of regional development in Indonesia.
2. To help in the transfer of important information on the current trends in the infrastructure development, planning and policy.
3. To publish a technical document based on the proceedings of the seminars. All papers, apart from invited review papers, must present original work; they should not have been published elsewhere.

THEME AND TOPICS

The 1st IRSA International Institute is a series of lectures with several paper sessions in between.  The lectures and paper sessions are organized on topics such as Economic Growth and Development; Poverty; Decentralization, Governance, and Regional Inequality; Urban and Regional Systems, Infrastructure Development and Finance, Interregional Migration, Urban and Interregional Transportation, Resource Utilization, Impact Analysis, Regional Modeling, Regional and Urban Planning, Environmental Quality; Location of Economic Activity, and Energy Issues. Lecture consists of a significant time for the lecturer to discuss a current important topic followed by a question and answer session. Paper sessions are seminar-style with a discussant for each paper and ample time for discussion and constructive feedback to authors.
More specifically, some suggested topics pertaining to the infrastructure development challenges to be addressed at the institute are the following:

• Role of Infrastructure Investment in Economic Growth and Poverty Reduction;
• Mitigating Conflicts Between Infrastructure Development and Environment;
• Government Policies for Promoting Sustainable Infrastructure and Growth;
• Infrastructure Development of Eastern Indonesia;
• Infrastructure Finance and Investment: Transportation, Water, Energy, and Communication

Lecturers are only by invitation, while papers for the paper sessions are for everyone to submit.  For the paper session, papers on any regional science topic are welcome.

EXPECTED PARTICIPANTS

• Members of the Indonesian Regional Science Association (IRSA)
• Members of the Regional Science Association International (RSAI)
• Academician
• Government officials in Indonesia (BAPPENAS, Ministry of Home Affairs, Ministry of Finance, Ministry of Public Works, Ministry of Transportation, Ministry of Communication and Information,  and other central government entities)
• Regional government officials in Indonesia (Province/Kabupaten/Kota Bappeda, Dinas Offices, others)
• Non-Governmental Organizations
• Private sectors (Telkom, PLN, PDAM, Jasa Marga, PT Garuda, PT Pelni, PT KAI)
• International donor communities (Usaid, AusAID, DFID, GTZ, JICA, others)
• Interested parties from other regional science and economics societies