THE BATTLE FOR HISTORY AFTER SUHARTO: Beyond Sacred Dates,Great Men,and Legal Milestones

Historical discourse has become an important aspect of post-Suharto Indonesian politics. The nationalist instrumentalization of the past, always strong in Indonesia, took on a martial aspect under the New Order. Even today, the establishment remains reluctant to abandon it. But new visions of history have arisen out of the widespread protests against the New Order. Some preserve the form of a martial nationalist historiography, but displace it to the regions (especially Aceh and Papua), thus turning it against Jakarta. Others, both at a national and a local level, embrace more societal historiographies in which the state and national unity are not idealized, and in which internal conflict is not taboo.     

Design Experiments: Engaging Policy Makers in the Search for Evidence about What Works

This article presents an argument for the greater use of design experiments, which can assist policy making because they provide both robust and timely evidence. We discuss their origins in education research, set out the methodology and propose some adaptations to the techniques used in these education studies to foster their application to a range of policy fields and problem areas. Design experiments need to meet two challenges. Can they provide valid evidence? Can they provide evidence that will be used by policy makers? Our argument shows how design experiments are robust when set against the classical canons of scientific study. We further claim that the design experiment approach offers a more viable means to developing evidence-based policy making than other forms of evaluation because of the timeliness of the insights that it provides.     

Pedagogy and deliberative democracy: insights from recent experiments in the United Kingdom

A growing body of research suggests the existence of a disconnection between citizens, politicians and representative politics in advanced industrial democracies. This has led to a literature on the emergence of post-democratic or post-representative politics that connects to a parallel seam of scholarship on the capacity of deliberative democratic innovations to ‘close the gap’. This latter body of work has delivered major insights in terms of democratic design in ways that traverse ‘politics as theory’ and ‘politics as practice’. And yet the main argument of this article is that this seam of scholarship has generally failed to explore the existence of numerous pedagogical relationships that exist within the very fibre of deliberative processes. As such, the core contribution of this article focuses around the explication of a ‘pedagogical pyramid’ that applies a micro-political lens to deliberative processes. This theoretical contribution is empirically assessed with reference to a recent project that sought to test different citizen assembly pilots around plans for English regional devolution. The proposition being tested is that a better understanding of relational pedagogy within innovations is vital, not just to increase levels of knowledge, but also to build the capacity, confidence and contribution of democratically active citizens.