Understanding factors determining successful policy implementation in Indonesia context: an explanation from Critical Realist perspective

This paper started from the observation that in the Indonesian context, many of regulative policies are partially or totally not implemented. To understand the reality of policy implementation, the paper started with investigating the paradigmatic foundation of existing policy implementation research literature. It highlighted paradigmatic problems of positivism that led to the low explanation power of implementation research. The paper turned its attention to a new potential paradigm: critical realism. It emphasized the important distinction between basic research and applied research with retroduction and retrodiction as its major inference method respectively. It also concluded that the relatively large distance of theory-reality in the context of developing countries makes the theorem of contingent duality of discovery and application not hold. Empirical case study research, based on critical realism, was then carried out mainly using a qualitative approach on the implementation of industrial technology policy as promulgated in the Law No 3/2014. Following the retrodictive approach of critical realism, the research then utilized a conceptual framework from the existing literature. The research found that in the implementation attempts of the Law No 3/2014, there were indeed a number of problems. Particularly, commitments of high-rank policy makers and necessary capacities are lacking.