Postcolonial Constitutionalism and Advisory Bodies: A Comparative Study of the Conseil d’État in Madagascar and Wantimpres in Indonesia

Abstract

This paper examines how executive advisory institutions, the Conseil d’État in Madagascar and the Presidential Advisory Council (Wantimpres) in Indonesia, are structured and positioned within postcolonial constitutional orders. Rather than proposing concrete reforms or measuring policy effectiveness, the study focuses on mapping and interpreting their constitutional design and institutional logic. Using a normative–juridical and comparative method, it analyses constitutional provisions, organic laws and regulations with secondary literature in postcolonial constitutionalism, legal transplant and institutional isomorphism. The analysis shows that Madagascar embeds advisory functions in a supreme administrative court that also issues binding rulings, producing a highly judicialized and structurally faithful variant of the French Conseil d’État model. Indonesia, by contrast, locates advice in a non-structural presidential council whose members depend on the President and whose opinions are confidential, resulting in a more politically embedded and flexible advisory body. A postcolonial reading highlights how coercive, normative and mimetic pressures have produced hybrid institutions that borrow similar ideas yet follow divergent trajectories of adaptation. The paper’s contribution is therefore primarily descriptive and analytical: it clarifies the constitutional place of these bodies and offers a conceptual basis for later work on their value-added and possible reform.