Project
Decentralization and Public Spending in a Colonial Context
In 1901 the Dutch colonial government started the “Ethical Policy”, which included a programme of political decentralisation and aimed to expand public infrastructure, education and health care in order to improve living conditions in the Netherlands East Indies. Both underlying motives and the extent to which this succeeded are the subject of academic debate. This project entails the collection and publication of a large body of primary data that will shed light on the following question: how was public spending distributed across localities in the Netherlands East Indies between 1892 and 1942 and how was this affected by decentralisation.
A key moment in the colonial history of the Netherlands and Indonesia relates to the “Ethical Policy”, which began with Queen Wilhelmina’s speech to parliament in 1901 and lasted until the Japanese occupation of the Netherlands Indies in 1942 (Cribb 1993). The stated aim of the Ethical Policy was to improve material living conditions of the Indonesian population (Boomgaard 1986). While it is primarily known as a public spending programme with increased investments in infrastructure, irrigation, healthcare, and schooling, it also fostered a process of administrative decentralisation that allowed for the political representation of (a small share) of the population, including European, Indonesian and Chinese representatives.
The Ethical Policy has been hailed as one of the world’s first developmental policy programmes in the Global South, yet much remains unclear about its aims and achievements, particularly those related to administrative and political decentralisation. Despite the availability of source materials, we currently still lack a systematic study of the development of local public spending and on the consequences of decentralisation in the Netherlands East Indies in the late colonial era. The main contribution of this project is to provide a solid empirical foundation to study decentralisation and spending across the Netherlands East Indies from 1892 to 1942 using detailed local-level data. This project is now feasible because of recent digitisation of reports on public spending in Delpher and Google Books.