suggests that Indonesian teachers nevertheless remain too numerous, too costly, too poor in quality, too badly distributed, and too frequently absent from work (see World Bank 2010a; Pisani 2013; McKenzie _et al_ 2014; Chang _et al_ 2014; Al-Samarrai _et al_ 2012).

This paper examines the role of political economy factors in contributing to Indonesia’s current teacher management problems and shaping efforts to resolve them. It suggests that these problems have their origins in the way in which political and bureaucratic elites, at both the national and local levels, have for decades used the school system—and teacher management in particular—to accumulate resources, distribute patronage, mobilize political support, and exercise political control. This orientation has meant that teacher numbers, quality, and distribution have been managed to maximize flows of rents and votes from schools to this elite, lubricate patronage and political networks, and ensure that these elites maintain political control rather than to maximize educational performance and equity. Democratization and decentralization since the fall of the New Order, the authoritarian and centralized regime that ruled Indonesia from 1965 to 1998, have done little to change this situation. They have consolidated the formal authority of regional governments in relation to teacher management and created genuine competition within the local elite for teachers’ votes. But schools’ role as a source of rents and votes as well as a mechanism for distributing patronage and exercising political control has remained more or less unchanged.

In this context, recent central government efforts to reduce teacher numbers, promote better teacher distribution, and enhance teacher quality through, for instance, more transparent recruitment practices and teacher redistribution have represented a direct assault on elite interests. In particular, given that local elites play the dominant role in teacher management, the central government’s efforts have represented an assault on the interests of local elites. Central government reform initiatives have consequently encountered considerable—if often subterranean—resistance except in a few exceptional cases where specific conditions conducive to reform have emerged.

The paper argues—on the basis of an analysis of the political dynamics surrounding specific reforms in a set of regional cases—that these conditions are:

- i) where the central government has had at its disposal or been able to devise policy instruments that are effective in disciplining local governments and it has maintained a commitment to these instruments in the face of opposition; ii) where local civil society groups are present and able to launch effective public campaigns demanding reform, exploiting their ability to access the independent media and, if necessary, the courts; and local governments are able to find effective ways of buying off the losers from reform;

- iii) where mid-level government officials, especially ones at the local education agency, have judged that reform initiatives can be exploited for patronage purposes; secured support from above; and officials have devised effective strategies for managing the politics of reform;

- iv) where reform-minded district leaders have been elected providing an imperative for education agency officials to design reform programs and the latter have had access to relevant ideas and policy advice as a result of contact with donors; and v) where teachers and the patronage and political networks of which they are part have stood to lose little from reform in the first place.

9