Expertise and National Planning

Abstract

This chapter looks into the development of Indonesia’s postcolonial higher education system and the international technical assistance protocol in developing Indonesia’s new managerial class. It looks into the rapid expansion of higher education and the effort of the Indonesian society to decolonize its education system away from the Dutch model. Because of the swiftness of this process, Indonesianization looked a lot like Americanization. International aid through technical assistance was the primary means through which Western ideas on development planning and expert production through international higher education became cemented. Aid money helped create personal and institutional relationships between Indonesian and American government institutions and universities. In particular, the relationship between experts like the economist Sumitro Djojohadikusumo, Indonesia’s state planning institution, the faculty of economics of the University of Indonesia and UN and usaid technical experts and Western social scientists from American within mit’s Indonesia Project and others. These forms of transnational relationships legitimized the position of Indonesian planning experts within planning institutions that had strong institutional relationship with the West. This pattern would continue throughout much of the twentieth century.