Understanding policy changes: dilemmas of funding reform in Indonesian higher education

In the interpretive tradition, the study on policy changes focuses on analyzing the shift of framework of agreed and shared meanings amongst actors. While ‘dilemmas’ offer an analytical lens to understand policy change, their application remains limited. Drawing from the experience of funding reform for research in Indonesian higher education, this article explores the meanings and ideas associated with output-based funding mechanism. Affirming the established understanding within the interpretive tradition, this article finds that a policy change is a matter of actors’ inter-subjectivity and intra-discursive reasonings. This results in a wide acceptance of the new funding mechanism. However, by conceptualizing that actors are also institutionally situated, the concept of dilemmas unveils extra-discursive tensions and conflicts that confront actors’ understanding and receptivity of change. This finding underscores the significance of combining actors’ intra- and extra-discursive contexts in enriching the interpretive analysis of socio-political events.