Strengthening Zakat Institutions through Evidence-Based Governance: A Comparative Legal Study of Indonesia, Malaysia, and Singapore

Abstract

Zakat institutions operate within increasingly complex governance environments in which legal authority, financial accountability, social welfare, and institutional effectiveness must be reconciled. Formal regulation, transparency requirements, and digitalisation, however, do not necessarily ensure that institutional decisions are informed by reliable evidence or responsive to changing social needs. This article examines how evidence is incorporated into contemporary zakat governance and identifies institutional arrangements that enable evidence to inform legitimate, accountable, and effective decision-making. Employing normative legal research with a comparative legal approach, the study examines the governance frameworks and institutional practices of zakat administration in Indonesia, Malaysia, and Singapore. The analysis focuses on the legal allocation of authority, information and reporting mechanisms, supervisory arrangements, beneficiary-oriented decision-making, and institutional evaluation. The findings demonstrate that effective zakat governance depends not merely on formal authority or disclosure, but on the institutional capacity to transform verified information into decisions and to subject those decisions to systematic evaluation. Building on the comparative findings, this article proposes a Reflexive Evidence-Based Governance Model comprising five interconnected functions: evidence generation, institutional decision-making, implementation, outcome evaluation, and corrective learning. The model reconceptualises accountability from a primarily retrospective compliance mechanism into a continuous institutional capacity for explanation, evaluation, and correction. It further positions zakat institutions as learning legal institutions in which evidence can influence subsequent decisions while remaining within the normative boundaries of Islamic law and maqāṣid al-sharīʿah. The model offers a functional governance framework applicable across diverse contemporary Muslim jurisdictions.