Rinto Adriono

Rinto Adriano is building citizen participation into the budgetary process of district and local governments. His work is particularly important now, as Indonesia devolves control from the national to the district level, opening an opportunity for productive citizen input around the issue of allocating public funds.

Throughout Indonesia, a growing awareness of corruption and money politics has led to public outcry. Communities are seeing that their elected officials and the local governments they lead are not providing basic services such as health care, irrigation, education, and hunger relief. Rinto sees that part of the problem can be solved by enabling greater citizen involvement in directing public funds to the services that are most needed.
Through his School for Budget Advocacy, Rinto is helping citizens steer the budgeting process and set priorities that will guide funding decisions. He achieves this by reaching the people who work with communities and teaching them to undertake simple, but powerful budget analysis in their community outreach efforts. He then follows their progress with an eye for best practices and has begun building a story bank of successes: poor communities securing funds for programs that they really need. Through these stories, and through the growth of his program, Rinto aims to change the budgeting cycle to routinely include input from communities.
Several factors make Rinto’s idea particularly relevant in Indonesia today. District budgets are now published and available to everyone, a hopeful nod in the direction of transparency. In addition, districts have taken a larger role in collecting fees and taxes from citizens, which means that it is simple to calculate revenue and expense in terms of the taxes people pay and the public services rendered. Moreover, most planning regulations include a clause stating that the process should be “open” to the public, though the citizen sector has yet to invent ways to intercede. Finally, the growth in the number of citizen organizations working with communities makes possible the spread of Rinto’s work through existing channels.

In poor communities throughout Indonesia, access to basic services such as health care, education, and clean water is limited. Service provision is not effectively monitored, and public officials are not often held accountable for how public monies are spent. Additionally, most people view services as government assistance, without fully grasping that the funds for such services derive from remittances and taxes that they routinely pay. For pregnant women in a remote village, the existence of a clinic staffed by a competent health care provider can be a matter of life or death, yet people do not realize that they can demand the clinic.
Citizens cannot easily access budget information and even in the Reform Era there are still local bureaucrats who believe that such information is a state secret. In addition to lack of access, most people lack the skills to understand and monitor the budget process and to present proposals for the services they need. Elected regional representatives or village elite typically undertake all aspects of planning and generally do not elicit or encourage community participation. This leads to a lack of transparency and opens the door to corruption.
Civic participation in budget policy is a key issue in democratization. In civil society in Indonesia, this issue has been handled in an ad hoc way in part due to the sudden shift from a centralized, authoritarian state to more democratic, regional autonomy. Training aimed at improving the procedures has been limited to regional officials or village leaders, often ignoring the vital role that citizens can play. Efforts to address budget literacy have tended to take the form of seminars or publications, with no clear follow-up actions. Such efforts usually result in activists speaking for the people or budgets being used as political tools to criticize the government. The poor may gain access to information on corruption only to become frustrated and angry without knowing how to act constructively. Rinto sees that a systemic approach to helping communities learn to use budgets as a tool of democracy is desperately needed.

Rinto is regularizing people’s participation in all phases of the budget process. He works with existing community organizations as long as they are inclusive and democratic. The critical learning begins with mapping the problems the community faces—inadequate health services, the costliness of education, and so on. Citizens then learn to identify those responsible for allocating funds or providing services. Rinto helps them learn to read the existing regional budget and to understand their own contributions in fees and taxes. Often this reveals the fact that about 80 percent of the budget is spent on the salaries and needs of officials while 20 percent goes for programs directly benefiting the public. From this simple review of the existing budget, citizens learn to spot corruption and inefficiency, a first step in correcting the problem.
Rinto has developed tools and training materials that he uses to explain regional budgets to Indonesians, including those with little or no formal education. He introduces creative comparative data to highlight inequities. For example, one village requested 1.4 million rupiah for a children’s nutritional food program, while the current budget allocated 900 million rupiah to cover the cost of lunches for the 45 regional legislators. The map of problems and players, the list of taxes and fees the public pays, together with reading the regional budget, form the basis from which participants propose that funds be allocated to fulfill their needs. They are then assisted in preparing their proposal and planning an advocacy strategy to ensure that they can access the planning cycle and effectively monitor allocation and implementation.
Villagers with whom Rinto works have strengthened citizen organizations and participated in regional planning. For instance, participants living in a very remote village had a high incidence of women dying in childbirth because transportation to the nearest hospital was slow and arduous, even in the case of an emergency. The villagers now have earmarked funds to build a health clinic and to pay for a health care worker to live in their village. Other villagers have secured funds for supplemental food for young children and hired teachers for village schools.
Rinto sees the power of his approach to enable true civic participation, but he also realizes that it is time-intensive and that he needs to accelerate the spread of his idea. He is therefore working more intensively through his School for Budget Analysis and Advocacy (LADANG), which is aimed at teaching community outreach workers. Participants in the school commit to undertaking follow-up activities, including a minimum of three trainings in their communities. Rinto has designed the materials to easily adapt to community needs. In addition to the trainings, information and educational materials in the form of modules, case studies, films, publications and documentation of training processes are also collected and disseminated to citizen groups. Rinto and his colleagues are developing the Local Budget Clearing House to help link groups working on these issues throughout Indonesia so they can share experiences and offer mutual support and advice.
Rinto sees a vital connection between the work of budget advocacy and the goals of civil society networks and movements, including farmers’ unions, the women’s movement, and children’s rights organizations. Interest and support for the work initiated by LADANG is evident in the large numbers of applicants and the willingness of organizations to fund the courses for their community organizers.

Rinto was born and raised in Banyumas, a region of Central Java often seen as culturally and economically marginalized. When he was young, his family moved often because neighbors didn’t accept his parents’ mixed religious and ethnic marriage. One of Rinto’s elementary school teachers encouraged experience-based learning outside of the classroom and introduced him to working on projects in poor communities and in public hospitals. Rinto continued to contribute to community activities when he moved to Yogyakarta to study accounting in the economics department of Gajah Mada University.
Rinto’s research in economics led him to work with fellow students and lecturers in the Institute of Development and Economic Analysis. He found that he had the freedom to develop his interests in public policy and to become active in the nascent anti-corruption movement of the late 1990s. Rinto also began to get involved in citizen sector initiatives in Yogyakarta, and contributed to research related to pro-poor budgets. He saw that writing books on the subject reached a limited audience and that training local legislators did not guarantee that they would represent the interests of the poor. Committed to enabling real change, he adapted his strategy, applying his skills as a mentor and teacher working directly with community groups on budget literacy and advocacy. Working as a facilitator in anti-corruption networks, including Transparency International Indonesia, he tested his methods in communities beyond Java in Sulawesi and Sumatra. These early ideas have evolved into his current efforts to encourage the spread of effective tools to equip citizens to achieve full civic participation.