Yes I agree that the emphasis of the decentralization in Indonesia be shifted from district

governments to provincial governments. Because, with the emphasis of autonomy at the local
government level (district level or kabupaten, and municipality level or city), most of
government authority was devolved to that level and consequently, there has been shift of
government expenditure from highly centralized expenditure (dominated by central budget
or APBN) to decentralized expenditure (dominated by local budget or APBD). With
most of government authority has been decentralized to the local level (kabupaten and
municipality level), the role of provincial level is limited into providing basic public services
that cannot be served by local level or that has inter-district/municipality dimension.
The provincial government is also responsible in ensuring that the coordination
among districts/municipalities works well. From central government point of view, the
provincial government has the role as the central representative in the area. This relatively
vague authority for provincial level may be still one of the weaknesses in Indonesian
decentralization scheme. And to overcome this weaknesses, the government should shift the
emphasis of decentralization to provincial government.

The original version of law 22/1999 stated that the local government had to do eleven
mandatory functions of public services such as health, education, infrastructure, investment,
environment etc. However that statement is far from clear since it has not been explained
well the distribution of authorities among central, provincial, and local governments in
certain functions. For example, local governments have the responsibility in providing
goods and qualified education for their residents but it is not clear if they are responsible
only for basic education (elementary and secondary) or including high school or even
the higher education. In the basic education itself, the confusion arises when the central
government has quite extensive program on basic education financed by the APBN. The
government regulation (PP) 25/2000 that was trying to give the guidance did not fully
meet the expectation since it only gave in detail the list of duties for central and
provincial governments and assumed that the rest will be done by the local government. This
residual approach did not really help solving the problem of authority devolution when
most of local governments in Indonesia are still learning to practice the decentralized
system.