Cross-Sector Learning for Education Policy Implementation from the Case of P4GN Policy in Lampung Province

Abstract

Indonesia’s zoning-based student admission system (Penerimaan Peserta Didik Baru, PPDB) and the Merdeka Curriculum (Kurikulum Merdeka) both promise more equitable, higher-quality outcomes, and each keeps falling short of that promise once it reaches the district level, a pattern studies of their implementation have documented repeatedly. Facilities go unevenly built, some institutions arrive far more ready than others, and stakeholders on the ground often know too little about what a policy actually asks of them, so these reforms rarely deliver the equity and quality gains they were designed to produce. Policy transfer, in the framework Dolowitz and Marsh developed, offers a way of drawing explicit and bounded lessons from a source case with a comparable implementation profile, and the Prevention and Eradication of Drug Abuse and Illicit Trafficking policy (P4GN), implemented across four districts in Lampung Province, Metro City, Way Kanan Regency, Tulang Bawang Regency, and North Lampung Regency, supplies exactly that. Looking within-case and across cases along six implementation dimensions, institutional capacity, inter-actor collaboration, the role individual actors play, political support, community participation, and local wisdom, the comparison turns up three lessons for education policy implementation at the district level. Institutional capacity has to be built before implementation starts. The Lampung comparison across the four districts backs this up directly. Units that had already built institutional capacity before P4GN’s rollout kept pace, while the ones still building it after rollout started consistently fell behind. Where resource asymmetries separate better-positioned units from worse-positioned ones, entrepreneurial and bridging actors willing to broker across agencies can offset much of the gap, as the Lampung data show. Inter-actor collaboration, paired with community participation, sustains a form of legitimacy that uniform national design cannot manufacture on its own. The transfer reaches its limits at a fairly specific point, since P4GN carries an enforcement dimension that education policy does not share. However, a six-dimension diagnostic of this kind could still shape how zoning and curriculum reform get sequenced across a district landscape as uneven as Indonesia’s, giving planners a way to ask, before rollout, whether capacity, actors, political backing, and legitimacy are actually in place.