System Failure for Good Reasons? Understanding Aid Information Management Systems (AIMS) with Indonesia as State Actor in the Changing Field of Aid

Abstract

Information systems (IS) failure in developing countries has been often understood as the failure of development practitioners to think and act in accordance with the local context. Such explanatory accounts mostly take contingency as the situation in the local context in which multiple stakeholders can coordinate and adapt to the local conditions, while implementing the globally-applicable logic of dominant institutions. There is a lack of understanding of contingency as the global context of the international development field, in particular how IS failure can be shaped by the state actor. In this paper, we trace the change of the global aid governance that influenced the context of aid information management systems (AIMS) in Indonesia. We argue that understanding the failure of AIMS in Indonesia needs to move from the project’s local situation to the global-level, recursive relationship between the field of aid governance and the state actor. Interpreting AIMS failure as the result of Indonesia’s strategic agency in the shifting landscape of global aid agenda allows information communication and technology (ICTD) researchers to reflect upon the macro political economy of development, in particular how the emerging powers can shape the development agenda in which future ICT innovations unfold.