What Drives Governance Reversal and How Does it Reshape State–Society Relations in Indonesia

Abstract

This study investigates governance reversal as a failure-driven institutional reconfig- uration, through which decentralized, networked, or collaborative arrangements are re-centralized under state authority. This study combines a systematic literature re- view with a document-based qualitative analysis of three Indonesian policy domains: halal certification reform, the Makan Bergizi Gratis (MBG) program, and military involvement in food governance through territorial development battalions. This article formalizes a failure-reversal framework by mapping the sequence of failure, political interpretation, and institutional reconfiguration onto four analytical dimen- sions: institutional change, authority shift, policy justification, and governance mode. The framework also identifies two possible outcome pathways: corrective capacity, where state reassertion improves coordination and implementation, and pathological centralization, where reassertion intensifies executive dominance, symbolic institu- tionalism, and accountability deficits. The Indonesian cases are treated as purposively selected, maximum-variation illustrative cases rather than as a basis for an uncon- ditional empirical generalization. Therefore, governance reversal is proposed as an analytically transferable but scope-conditioned concept for studying how governance failures reshape state-society relations.