Co-Chair, Co-Producer? Developmental Pluralism in Indonesia's GPEDC Leadership, 2023–2025

Abstract

A state's visibility as a multilateral co-chair does not by itself establish authorship of collective policy decisions. This article asks how Indonesia's leadership in the Global Partnership for Effective Development Co-operation (GPEDC) during 2023–2025 reproduced or shaped pluralist and solidarist practices, and which outputs can be linked to identifiable Indonesian initiatives. Using an embedded qualitative case study, we compare GPEDC terms of reference, work programmes, steering-committee summaries, co-chair submissions to the Fourth International Conference on Financing for Development, the Sevilla outcome and Indonesia's monitoring results. Documents were selected for their institutional authority, event dates, attributable interventions and availability of before-and-after texts. The record identifies Indonesian facilitation of committee debates and specific 2024 proposals on South–South knowledge exchange, aid commitments and GPEDC funding transparency. However, several agendas predated those interventions, and collective co-chair submissions cannot establish individual drafting credit. The Sevilla outcome partly recognises GPEDC's relevance but stops short of the co-chairs' stronger follow-up proposal. Indonesia's monitoring data likewise document a coexistence of national ownership and uneven partner-system use, not a demonstrable motive to resist accountability. The article conceptualises developmental pluralism as this observable combination of sovereign policy space, voluntary cooperation and limited collective accountability. It distinguishes participation, proposal, institutional uptake and implementation rather than treating institutional leadership as proof of unilateral norm creation.