The Need for Revitalizing Democratic Politics through Culture-Context Deliberation: A Note on Participatory Development in Indonesia

Abstract

Democratic theories either participatory or representative have been revitalized by most current theory of deliberative democracy. Many less developed nations in Asia and Africa have found it hard to create a working democracy in their respective countries as a result of adopting or adapting modern democratic values and institutions. This has been caused crucially by the drawback of its respected theories, along with presence of distorted democracy imposed by domination of global corporatism, such a situation has been made worse by the main stream of universalists' approach to the study of political development that assumes that modern western democracies would work when transplanted elsewhere outside western nations. By employing theoretical perspective of deliberative democracy that puts culture in significant place is politics, we find more promising position to understand new path of democratization. The paper makes an account of deliberation practices experienced in the governance of participatory development in Indonesia. It is our finding that deliberation has been lacking and gives negative impacts on legitimacy by larger public. The recommendation is to introduce more deliberative mechanism that is very likely to contribute to improving procedure in participatory development in the country.