Wawan Sobari

Wawan Sobari is a lecturer in the Department of Political Science at Brawijaya University in Malang, Indonesia. He was the awardee of International Fellowship Program of Ford Foundation in 2005 to pursue his MA in the Netherlands. Wawan gained his PhD in Politics and Public Policy from Flinders University, Australia in 2015 with a study entitled “Patronage Driven Democracy: Narratives of Survival and Failure of District Heads in the Emerging Democratic Indonesia (A Case Study in Four Rural and Urban Districts in East Java, Indonesia).” Also, Wawan is a senior researcher at the Jawa Pos Institute of Pro-Otonomi (JPIP). JPIP is an independent and non-profit organisation centring its activities on research and advocacy to promote progressive decentralisation in Indonesia. In addition to local politics and decentralisation, his research interests include governance, policy analysis and democracy. Wawan has been a consultant to United States Agency for International Development (USAID), World Bank, The Asia Foundation and German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit [GIZ]).