Between the ethical and the right thing: How (not) to be corrupt in Indonesian bureaucracy in an age of good governance

Abstract

Is it possible to be corrupt yet ethical? Or good but unethical? In one of Indonesia's most corrupt towns, the answers to these questions are far from clear for young elite civil servants, who must navigate the moral‐ethical landscape of post‐Suharto bureaucracy. For them, anticorruption efforts heighten uncertainty regarding what corruption is and facilitate slippage between various constructions of ethical selfhood. The uncertainty arises at the intersection of local moral economies, national ideologies of state building, the particular global morality of anticorruption, and a conception of the good that inspires neoliberal ideas on governance. Finding themselves at this intersection, young civil servants can find no unambiguous contrast between being “good” and “corrupt.” [corruption, anticorruption, good governance, civil service, morality, ethics, Indonesia] Apakah mungkin seseorang yang melakukan praktek korupsi akan tetapi pada saat yang bersamaan menjadi seseorang yang etis? Atau sebaliknya; apakah mungkin menjadi seseorang yang baik akan tetapi juga tidak etis? Di suatu kota yang paling korup di Indonesia, jawaban terhadap pertanyaan di atas sangatlah tidak jelas dan sulit untuk diterangkan bagi elit Pegawai Negeri Sipil (PNS) muda, yang harus menavigasi tatanan moral dan etika dalam tubuh birokrasi pasca kekuasaan Soeharto. Bagi mereka, upaya gerakan antikorupsi justru meningkatkan ketidakjelasan tentang apa itu korupsi dan mempermudah tergelincir di antara beragam konstruksi dan makna etika. Ketidakjelasan itu timbul pada saat terjadi persinggungan antara ekonomi moral lokal, ideologi nasional tentang pembentukan negara, nilai moralitas antikorupsi global dan konsepsi tentang kebaikan, yang menginspirasi ide‐ide neoliberalisme tentang pemerintahan. Bagi PNS yang berada di tengah‐tengah persimpangan ini, mereka menemukan ketiadaan batas yang jelas antar menjadi “baik” dan “korup”. [korupsi, anti korupsi, good governance, Pamong Praja, moralitas, etika, Indonesia]

Untitled

“…Salah satu tema penting yang menjadi bagian dari wacana alternatif antikorupsi di Indonesia berdasarkan studi oleh Pertiwi (2016), Tidey (2016) dan Jakimow (2018) Ini senada dengan apa yang diserukan dalam penelitian terbaru terkait moralitas yang ditulis oleh Shadnam (2015). Ia mengemukakan bahwa konteks membentuk moralitas -apa yang dianggap baik dan buruk dalam kondisi ruang dan waktu tertentu.…”

Laughing about Corruption in Ethiopian‐Chinese Encounters

“…Contrary to the binary distinction between corrupt and uncorrupt that marks much of Western discourse, corruption narratives in Ethiopian‐Chinese encounters convey the overlapping moralities in practices that are all classified as corrupt. In her work on moral economies in Kupang, Indonesia, Sylvia Tidey () shows how civil servants navigate ethics in their daily decisions about whether to engage in corruption in an environment where anticorruption campaigns increase the uncertainty of what corruption entails. Their considerations reveal their moral ambiguity at play in assessing and engaging in corruption.…”

“…Their considerations reveal their moral ambiguity at play in assessing and engaging in corruption. In situations where corrupt behavior is morally justified or even expected, the boundaries between the good and the corrupt are unclear (Tidey ). The desires that fuel corruption are not necessarily selfish, as they are commonly portrayed by the criminalizing optic of Western narratives of good governance (Hasty ).…”

“…It is a quintessential “site for debates prompted by conflicting systems of moral and ethical behaviour” (Gupta , 7). There is, however, a great deal of moral ambiguity involved in defining what precisely constitutes corrupt behavior and the artificial separation between the public and private sphere on which it is premised, allowing for slippage between what is and what is notconsidered to be corruption or corrupt (Li ; Smith ; Tidey ).…”

Keywords and key words in AE

“…The third is politics or political , which is used 15 times, including four times in connection with migrant or refugee issues and six times with neoliberalism and related issues; this indicates that clusters of keywords tend to overlap. Further, intersecting these themes is the analytical lens of ethics , which appears 10 times in 2016, or 15 times if combined with morality ; occasionally both words are used as keywords in the same article to emphasize its centrality to the analysis (e.g., in Sylvia Tidey's [] article on the ambiguous ethics of anticorruption policy in Indonesia, which also has ethical in the title). But ethics is also frequently used in relation to themes of religion (e.g., Abu‐Lughod ; Bush ; Zaloom ), as well as other themes not typically associated with it, such as the infrastructure of Californian home aesthetics in the Anthropocene (Vine ).…”