HORIZONTAL LEARNING: ALTERNATIVE TO CENTRALIZED GOVERNANCE  Purwo Santoso Gadjah Mada University, Indonesia Endowed with fragmentations and polycentricism, governance in Indonesia tends to be centralistic. As the big bang of decentralization in the last decade gained constitutional mandates, new approaches to decentralization are highly in demand. This paper offers horizontal learning as the answer. The prevalence of tension between central-local authorities is rooted by divide-and-rule mindset embedded in the current mode of thinking. Unleashing the learning capacity of the technocracy, (which has been subverted by an authority-obsessed bureaucracy), to supplement the making of local democracy, would see that large scale local autonomy pose no threat to national unity. Keywords: horizontal learning, national unity, technocracy, decentralization, bureaucracy This paper proposes horizontal learning as an alternative strategy for Indonesia to deal with conflicting demands. Demand for effective responses to the increasingly demanding public tend to lead to centralism. while later troubles of the country in weaving local diversity into a solid unity. Such an alternative is urgent, especially to break through the vicious cycle of centralization and decentralization. On the one hand, the notion of centralized governance persists because it has been the blueprint on which the idea of Indonesia as a modern state was built. On the other hand, the fact that Indonesia‟s diversity is too complex for a centralized government to govern effectively the notion of decentralized governance remains a salient political discourse in Indonesia‟s. In doing so, this paper departs from the assumption that effective governance requires a particular knowledge system. Knowledge is acquired through a learning process and therefore this paper proposes learning as its theme. 1. VENTURING NEW OPPORTUNITIES The issue of learning governance processes here is discussed as it is occurs in the context of horizontal governance. As a practice horizontal governance is actually not a new model of governance. It was introduced a couple decades ago as an important issue in governance, public management, and public policy studies, mainly known under the label of network theory. Horizontal governance has come to prominence during the  Presented at Exploring Leadership and Learning Theories in Asia [ELLTA] Conference 2011, 15-17 February 2011, Universiti Sains Malaysia.