Southeast Asia and Islamic Public Value: A Postscript
Southeast Asia and Islamic Public Value: A Postscript

Summary/Abstract: The current theme issue of Halduskultuur is one of the publications emerging from “Islamic Public Value,” a John Templeton Foundation grant based at University College London’s Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose (UCL IIPP), of which the three co-editors, and the authors, are members. The project aims to uncover, and present as legitimate, the perspectives of otherwise underrepresented and underexplored Islamic institutions undertaking polycentric governance and administration and creating public value to better the lives of their constituents and neighbors. The authors of the case studies presented here investigate, to this end, sometimes centuriesold autonomous indigenous institutions “still” operating across the Islamic world, and in this case, particularly in Southeast Asia. What is specific about them, and what thus makes this pursuit special, is that they are not NGOs – a common-enough model – but institutions that are, to various degrees, part of the state sphere – some as Ersatz, some as a secondary government, some semi-integrated with central administration, that is, governing in the shadows (Peters 2019), and some fully part of the government of the day. They therefore dovetail with the more community-based approach to state service provision that is often at the core of the reinvention of the state in the 21st century (Mazzucato et al. 2021), something all the more important when that reinvention is facing serious obstacles since 2024 (Buchsteiner 2025). They form what we call Indigenous Cooperative Institutions (ICIs), and they do so in an Islamic, and in particular in a Sufi, way (Drechsler et al. 2024).

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