Public Governance
The Report Nobody Reads
An institution can publish hundreds of pages of reports every year and still be seen as closed. The problem isn't the page count.
24 August 2026
Laras Anindita, S.E., M.M.
Lecturer · Researcher · Writer
Nusantara Raya School of Economics
A lecturer and researcher in public governance. This is where I collect academic work alongside lighter notes — on budgets, data, and how institutions make decisions. Some of it is written for fellow researchers, some for anyone who wants to read public documents without feeling they must become an expert first.
Public GovernanceDevelopment EconomicsDigital Economy
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All writingArticlePublic Governance
Consultations That Were Decided in Advance
18 August 2026
A forum that only rubber-stamps decisions already made slowly loses its participants — and its purpose.
Read more →ArticlePublic Governance
Rethinking the Weekly Meeting
11 August 2026
Routine meetings often survive not because they are useful, but because nobody dares to stop them. There is a way to test which ones are worth keeping.
Read more →ArticleDigital Economy
Data Collected Twice
4 August 2026
Village officers fill in forms with the same content for three different agencies. The cost is borne by the people who are paid the least.
Read more →ArticlePublic Literacy
Learning to Read a Budget (Part 2): Reading the Difference
22 July 2026
A large gap between the plan and actual spending is not automatically a sign of wrongdoing. There are four common causes to rule out first.
Read more →ArticlePublic Governance
Choosing Indicators That Don't Fool You
8 July 2026
An indicator chosen because it is easy to count will change the work so that it is easy to count. That is no accident.
Read more →ArticlePublic Literacy
The Official Travel Budget and How to Read It
24 June 2026
This line item is criticised most often and read in full least often. There are three things to look at before judging it.
Read more →Academic Publications
All publicationsPublicationPublic Governance
Local Budget Transparency and Public Trust: A Study of Three Mid-Sized Cities
Laras Anindita, Bagas Prasetyo, Nadia Kusuma
Nusantara Journal of Public Administration · Vol. 9, No. 2 · pp. 141-158 · 2026
Publishing budget documents is often treated as an administrative duty. This study tests its link with public trust in three mid-sized cities, and finds that trust is driven not by how many documents are uploaded, but by how easily ordinary people can read them.
Read more →PublicationDevelopment Economics
MSME Compliance Costs under One-Stop Licensing Services
Laras Anindita, Rangga Mahendra
Journal of Applied Regional Economics · Vol. 6, No. 1 · pp. 23-40 · 2024
One-stop licensing cuts the number of desks a business has to visit, but it does not automatically cut the cost of compliance. This research separates official fees from the cost of time, and shows that for micro businesses the biggest expense is an unpredictable schedule.
Read more →PublicationPublic Governance
When Performance Indicators Measure the Wrong Thing: A Review of Local Planning Documents
Laras Anindita
Journal of Policy and Governance · Vol. 4, No. 3 · pp. 201-219 · 2022
A review of 48 local planning documents finds a recurring pattern: indicators that are easy to count displace the goals they were meant to serve. This article proposes a simple test to separate indicators that measure outcomes from those that merely measure activity.
Read more →PublicationDigital Economy
Data Literacy among Village Officials: The Prerequisite That Gets Skipped
Laras Anindita, Sinta Hapsari
Proceedings of the Nusantara Conference on Digital Governance · pp. 77-89 · 2021
One Data programs rest on the assumption that the people collecting data understand what they collect. Fieldwork in 12 villages shows that this assumption is rarely tested, and traces its effect on the quality of the data that reaches the district level.
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Topics
#villages#evaluation#budgets#public literacy#transparency#meetings#one data#data#performance indicators#public communication#participation#organisations#productivity#administrative burden#lectures#regional spending#accountability#training#human resources#local budgets#public trust#msme#licensing#compliance costs#planning#data literacy
What cannot be explained simply has usually not been fully thought through.
Lucid · Accountable · Near the ground