between notions of human rights and the predatory behavior on the part of political and bureaucratic officials that pervades many developing countries. At the same time, members of the middle class are better placed than the poor and marginalized to seek fulfillment of their human rights in the marketplace because they can purchase the goods and services they require. We would accordingly expect the poor and marginalized to mobilize human rights much more often than political, bureaucratic, and corporate elites or members of the middle class. But we are also conscious of the potential for human rights to be mobilized by such groups— particularly in light of the Latin American health-related evidence discussed above. In this respect, our approach is both bottom-up and top-down.

# **Indonesia**

# _Structural factors_

Education rights litigation in Indonesia has its origins in the nature of the country’s education system as it evolved under the New Order (the authoritarian regime that ruled Indonesia from 1965 to 1998) and the struggles over education policy and its implementation that were unleashed by its collapse and the country’s subsequent transition to democratic and decentralized rule.

The New Order dramatically expanded access to education by building thousands of new public schools and recruiting hundreds of thousands of new teachers to staff them, particularly between the early 1970s and the early 1980s, when the country was awash with petrodollars as a result of the international oil boom. But it failed to ensure that children, having started school, completed it, and did little to improve the quality of education. Academic standards were low, teacher quality poor, teacher absenteeism rates high, learning outcomes poor, dropout rates high, and progression rates low (World Bank 1998; Jalal and Musthafa 2001). There were also marked regional inequalities in education access, with children in remote regions typically having much lower primary completion rates and secondary enrollment rates than children in central and urban areas (World Bank 1998, pp. 51, 56).

In part, these problems were simply a reflection of the New Order’s unwillingness to invest significant budgetary resources in the education system.<sup>6</sup> But they also reflected the fact that the education system under the New Order functioned more as a mechanism through which predatory officials accumulated resources, distributed patronage, mobilized political support, and exercised political control than as a mechanism for promoting education and learning (Rosser and Fahmi 2016).

Public schools and higher education institutions, which dominated the education system, were part of the larger “franchise” (McLeod 2000) structure that characterized the New Order’s rule (Rosser and Joshi 2013). In accordance with this structure, regional government officials, who had control over teacher appointments, sold teacher and school principal positions to the highest bidders while incumbents in these positions extracted rents from parents and other sources. Alternatively, these officials appointed friends, family members, and political allies to such positions. At the same time, schools played an important role in mobilizing support for Golkar, the New Order’s electoral vehicle, at election time. As civil servants, teachers were required to vote for Golkar and campaign on its behalf (Rosser and Fahmi 2016). Finally, public schools and higher education institutions played a crucial role in the exercise of political

> 6 According to World Bank (1998, p. 148), the Indonesian government spent an average of just 2.87 percent of GDP on education each year between 1986/7 and 1996/7.

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