The USAID/Indonesia Local Governance Support Program (LGSP)1 led by RTI International supported “expanding participatory, effective and accountable governance” through an integrated set of assistance activities engaged with local governments (LGs), legislative councils, and civil society organizations (CSOs). The $61.8 million project, one of the largest USAID governance projects worldwide, provided intensive technical assistance and training to 62 district governments in nine provinces of Indonesia during its 4½-year implementation period, March 2005 to September 2009. In addition, LGSP assisted several provincial governments - notably Aceh and West Java - and provided policy support to key national ministries dealing with local governments. RTI’s implementing partners for LGSP were International City/County Management Association (ICMA), Computer Assisted Development Incorporated (CADI), Democracy International (DI), and Indonesian Media Law and Policy Center (IMLPC).

At the time of LGSP’s inception, significant progress had been made in Indonesia’s “big bang” decentralization strategy of transferring authority to local governments. However, local-level institutions still operated in an environment of incomplete administrative and regulatory reform, and required significant support. USAID designed the program to focus squarely on strengthening core governance processes such as budgeting and participatory planning, as well as eliciting demand for good governance through support to local councils and CSOs. While improving service-delivery management was one of LGSP’s aims, USAID’s sector projects assumed the main responsibility for strengthening direct service-delivery improvements in health, education, and environment (including water supply and sanitation).

LGSP sought to strengthen the core competencies of local administrations and the capacity of democratic governance institutions by focusing on five primary program areas: (i) enhancing strategic and participatory planning; (ii) improving the finance, budgeting, and accounting function of local governments; (iii) streng-thening management systems for public service delivery; (iv) improving the capacity and performance of local legislative councils; and (v) strengthening the capacity of civil society and the media. To support these thematic technical programs, LGSP also undertook work in the cross-cutting areas of participatory training approaches, building capacity of local consultant service providers, knowledge-sharing across local governments, and performance assessment and benchmarking.

Based on a range of initial diagnostics, LGSP extended its support progressively in 2005–2006 to nearly 60 partner governments through two rounds of district identification and preparatory work, on the basis of which an ambitious work program was developed with local governments, councils, and CSOs. With the support of local consultant service providers (SPs), technical specialists based in LGSP’s eight regional offices delivered technical assistance through workshops, clinics, and hands-on advice. District coordinators - full-time LGSP staff assigned in each partner locality - remained in continuous dialogue with local partners to elicit their priorities and follow up on training delivered. National office advisers developed training modules and provided technical oversight, while piloting new approaches, organizing crossregional workshops and exchanges, and working with Government of Indonesia (GOI) nationallevel partners.

Although LGSP originally had been designed to work solely at the local level, in 2006 it was agreed that the program could achieve wider national impact by scaling up efforts at the national level in order to strengthen the enabling environment for effective decentralization. In addition to directing more advisory resources to assist national-level partners, the project was also modified during project implementation to phase out two regions, while adding another (West Papua) in a public-private partnership with BP Berau, BP Indonesia’s oil and gas company; and to extend work in Aceh, which had initially had only a two-year time frame as a special response to the December 2004 tsunami.

In the last year of implementation, LGSP focused on carrying to completion those activities which carried the greatest prospect of sustainability, preparing service providers and other partners to maintain the momentum of the reform efforts, and undertaking systematic measurement of program outcomes.