Programme Period: December 2014-January 2014
It is a known fact that Indonesia continues to lag behind its Southeast Asian neighbours in terms of international publications, particularly in the social sciences and humanities (Evers, 2003). Despite the enhanced budget allocation for research in recent years by the Directorate General of Higher Education, Ministry of Education and Culture, these structural problems largely remain unaddressed and prevent Indonesian academics from performing an adequate role as the main actor in the country’s knowledge sector, thereby limiting their contribution to national development.
This proposal has been jointly developed by the Communications Research Centre of the Faculty of Social and Political Sciences of Indonesia’s leading university, Universitas Indonesia (Puskakom UI), together with the Centre for Innovation Policy and Governance (CIPG), in collaboration with the Asia Research Centre, Murdoch University, Australia. Direct access to and insights from within a major Indonesian state university, and nationally acknowledged research pedigrees of CIPG, combined with the Asia Research Centre’s long-established expertise on social, political and economic change in Indonesia, will facilitate the identification of the key issues and problems of conducting research in the country. The further aim is to address these problems through a set of coherent policy recommendations that could be tied to a broader programme of reform that is both manageable and realistic.
This inevitably involves a proper and informed appreciation of the existing situation and the intellectual, organisational and structural constraints that are being confronted by those conducting research in Indonesia.
