On 22 September 2026, Singapore-based BDx Data Centers announced the construction of AI Campus 2, better known as CGK4. It is a 640-megawatt artificial intelligence campus in Jatiluhur, Purwakarta, about five kilometers from the Jatiluhur Dam.

Two months earlier, on 28 July, West Java Governor Dedi Mulyadi and Purwakarta Regent Saepul Bahri Binzein laid the first stone, calling the site safe from natural disasters and a step towards Indonesia’s digital sovereignty. But it is worth scrutinizing what the provincial revenue agency said about why the CGK4 is being built near Jatiluhur: the area has enough electricity and clean water.

Of all the justifications, that last one deserves a second look. BDx said the project will work with the state utility company, PLN, and the local water provider, PDAM, and promises that supply won’t disturb household needs. But the water that makes Jatiluhur attractive to a data center is the same water that irrigates nearly a quarter of a million hectares of paddy fields, fills most of Jakarta’s taps, and keeps alive the villages rebuilt around a reservoir that once drowned their homes.

As the story develops, Governor Dedi recently halted this project because of its missing environmental impact assessment (AMDAL) and building permit (PBG), and demanded proof that its water use would not cut into supplies for farmers and residents who depend on Jatiluhur.

But building a data center next to a critical public facility needs more than an environmental impact assessment because it carries real social risk.

CGK4 is marketed as clean, hydro-adjacent, and job-creating. But without enforceable water priority, public disclosure, and genuine benefit-sharing, it risks becoming an unjust transition, with a global commodity like AI compute placed on top of a local commons just as El Niño intensifies.

Civilizations by the river and the social cost of the Jatiluhur reservoir

Mesopotamia flourished between the Tigris and the Euphrates, Egypt along the Nile, Harappa along the Indus. West Java is no different. If we trace the Citarum River far enough back, it ties to Tarumanagara, its namesake kingdom. From its earliest written record, statecraft in this region has focused on managing water: the Tugu inscription records King Purnawarman ordering a canal dug around the river for irrigation and flood prevention.

Similarly, Bandung was founded on a riverbank. Regent Wiranatakusumah II moved the capital from Karapyak (today’s Dayeuhkolot) to the banks of the Cikapundung. The colonial town used the river as an ornament. Yet the river that made the city later became its drain. Bappenas now lists Cikapundung as the city center’s main drainage channel and an outlet for domestic and industrial waste.

Although hundreds of kilometers away, Cikapundung is one of the Citarum’s 13 main tributaries and joins it at Baleendah. From there, the Citarum runs through three dams: Saguling, Cirata, and finally Jatiluhur. The water travels as far as Purwakarta, and Jatiluhur is where it all meets.

Construction of the Jatiluhur Dam began in 1957, and it was inaugurated in 1967. Its reservoir covers about 8,300 hectares and stores 2.44 billion cubic meters. It runs a 187.5 MW hydropower plant, irrigates some 242,000 hectares, and is called the backbone of national food security. It also supplies about 80 percent of Jakarta’s raw water.

But Jatiluhur’s social cost went largely unnoticed. Filling the reservoir submerged 14 villages and moved 5,002 people to its shores and to Karawang. Those who stayed rebuilt their lives on the water.

IIn 1974, families whose farmland had gone under started making their living from floating-net fish cages. A whole economy grew around them: hatcheries, feed shops, boat ferries and household fish processing, much of it run by women. Then the cages outgrew the lake. By late 2022, official counts put 46,270 cage plots in the reservoir, about four times the 11,306 allowed under a West Java Governor’s regulation. So the state reversed course, ordering clearances under Presidential Regulation No. 15/2018 that carried serious social risks for everyone who depended on the fishery.

Those were the two times Jatiluhur people have been affected by two waves of “national interest”. After the dam’s construction displaced them, the clean-up took away the livelihood they rebuilt.

Now the CGK4 AI campus might become the third wave.

Water should stay a public good

We tend to treat water as if the supply never runs out. Political ecologists such as Erik Swyngedouw and Karen Bakker argue that scarcity is produced locally, not just by nature. It is rarely just about rainfall; rather, it’s a decision-making process about who gets water first when there isn’t enough.

On paper, Indonesian law has already solved this. In a 2013 ruling, the Constitutional Court struck down the 2004 Water Law and set five limits on commercial water use: (1) business use must not undermine people’s rights; (2) the state must fulfill the right to water as a human right; (3) management must protect the environment; (4) water stays under absolute state control; and (5) priority for commercial use goes to state and regional enterprises. The replacement, Law No. 17/2019, still allows private users, but under stricter licensing and priority rules.

Like other natural resources, water is tested during the climate crisis. In October 2023, Jatiluhur surface fell to 93.77 meters above sea level, below the 94.44-meter crisis line set by its operator, Perum Jasa Tirta II (PJT II), and about 14 meters under its normal maximum. The pattern recurs this year, as PJT II data show the reservoir dropped from 106.79 to 99.37 meters between 8 June and 5 August, and by 31 August it stood at 96.34 meters. BMKG expects El Niño to last into early 2027.

Chart 1. As Jatiluhur fell 10 meters, a 640 MW data center broke ground 5 km away

Reservoir water level (2026) meters above sea level. Last public reading 31 August; vertical lines mark the BDx data center groundbreaking and halt.

Downstream, 10,673 hectares of rice in western Indramayu were at risk of crop failure by late July, and farmers were asking for Jatiluhur water to be released. Closer to the dam, police have been trucking clean water to Desa Babakan Cikao in Purwakarta, where wells have run dry. On 27 September, police delivered water to about 200 families in Desa Kutamanah, on the reservoir’s own shore, who had been short for roughly three months. It’s a lingering irony that people closest to Indonesia’s largest reservoir are waiting for water trucks.

So where do local people sit? While PJT II insists the reservoir can still meet every user’s needs until the end of the year, allocation follows a hierarchy in practice: Jakarta’s piped supply first, then irrigation and industry, and last the households on wells nearest the dam.

Even Jakarta’s officials admit that the stress shows first in shallow wells, not in the pipes. Yayasan Amerta Air Indonesia’s Hotmauli Sidabalok has warned that data-center water demand could turn this into environmental injustice, pitting a basic human need against industrial cooling. However, the question of environmental impact assessment remains largely undisclosed.

Other countries show where this can lead. In 2023, as Uruguay went through its worst drought in 74 years and Montevideo’s tap water was mixed with brackish estuary water, Google planned a data center in Canelones that would use about 7.6 million liters a day, the domestic use of 55,000 people. Its projected impact stayed hidden behind a confidentiality clause Google insisted on, until local researchers sued to see it.

Protesters answered with a slogan that is a political-ecology thesis on its own: No es sequía, es saqueo. It’s not drought, it’s plunder. In Querétaro, Mexico, eight of eleven aquifers are overexploited, and families in nearby Viborillas get water three days a week, while well concessions keep industry supplied. In neither place was scarcity simply natural.

A closer look at the promise of CGK4

The hydropower promise

CGK4 will rise to six buildings over about three years. The first will deliver 120 MW of IT capacity in phases from early 2027, using direct-to-chip liquid cooling for racks of up to 500 kW. The headline partnership is hydropower. But the company’s own statement says power will come through the state utility PLN, while a hydro arrangement with PJT II is only being “actively pursued.” An Indonesian trade outlet put it bluntly: the hydro option is still being explored, so it would be wrong to say CGK4 runs on Jatiluhur’s power.

A bit of math shows why: running at full load all year, 640 MW of IT capacity would use about 5,600 gigawatt-hours. PJT II says Jatiluhur’s plant produces about 830 million kWh, or 830 gigawatt-hours, in an average year. The full campus would need almost seven times the dam’s entire output. Building 1 alone would need more than the dam produces, and that is before accounting for cooling energy.

Chart 2. The data center would need 3.4 times the dam’s own hydropower capacity

Installed or design capacity, megawatts. Its water need (384 L/s at full build-out) equals about 2.1% of the raw water Jakarta takes from Jatiluhur.

This means most of CGK4’s electricity will come from the Java–Bali grid, which still runs mostly on coal. So “hydro” may end up as more of a label than an energy source.

Moreover, hydropower has an El Niño problem. In 2024, drought drained Zambia’s Lake Kariba to about 8 percent of usable storage, forcing the country to shut its Kariba North Bank station while daily power cuts stretched to 20 hours. If CGK4 does sign up for Jatiluhur hydro, a simple question follows. In a dry year, who gets cut first: the data center, other grid users, or the irrigation releases that farmers depend on?

The employment promise

The employment promise deserves the same scrutiny. Official statements speak of 2,000 to 3,000 jobs for a Rp 3.5 trillion first phase. However, most construction work is temporary, and permanent data-center jobs are few and require high skills. In Johor, 51 approved projects together account for about 7,561 skilled jobs, roughly 150 per project.

West Java legislator Maulana Yusuf welcomed the jobs amid more than 10,000 layoffs in the province this year, but he asked whether they are worth the project’s impact, and demanded an open environmental assessment and guarantees for farmers’ irrigation water.

Mexico offers a sobering comparison. In Querétaro, big tech firms have promised jobs by the thousands, yet one Microsoft facility employed only 64 people in 2025. Data centers are highly automated, and the market does not warrant a huge transfer of skills, but rather electricians and security guards.

An implementation gap?

Proponents said that Indonesia’s permitting system is meant to prevent harm. So are the rules for coal and nickel mining, which also look impeccable on paper.

The Citarum has long been branded one of the world’s most polluted rivers despite decades of regulation. And when Maulana asked colleagues across the West Java People’s Representative Council (DPRD) about CGK4’s permits and AMDAL, he said most of them knew nothing. This means the gap lies not in the law but in implementation, disclosure, and enforcement.

To be fair, there are real benefits. Domestic compute supports data sovereignty. Direct-to-chip cooling can use far less water than evaporative towers, if the heat is released through dry coolers. An inland, low-hazard site reduces disaster risk, and a large, steady customer can justify grid investment. But none of these benefits is guaranteed to reach the people living beside the reservoir.

Towards a just transition

In the International Labor Organization’s (ILO) 2015 guidelines, a just transition means decent work, social dialogue, and social protection. At Jatiluhur, it has to mean a bit more: a fair share of water and power, openness about who gets to see the data, and recognition for the people already displaced by the dam and the cage clearances.

Other places offer a menu of options. Malaysia stopped approving high-water-use data centers and now requires reclaimed water instead of the public supply. Ireland — where data centers use almost a quarter of the country’s electricity — froze new Dublin grid connections in 2021 and reopened them only for those who bring their own generation (and source at least 80 percent of their demand from new renewables).

In Chile, residents of Cerrillos took Google to an environmental court, which in February 2024 ordered its permit re-evaluated for climate change and aquifer risk. Google said it had already switched to air cooling. In Hamina, Finland, Google’s seawater-cooled data center gives its waste heat to the town’s energy company for free, enough to meet an expected 80 percent of local district heating.

The warning comes from Memphis, where xAI ran dozens of unpermitted gas turbines next to Boxtown, a neighborhood already facing four times the national cancer risk.

So what would a just CGK4 look like? At the very least, here are five recommended commitments:

1. A published water budget, with no reservoir or municipal water used for cooling.

2. A binding drought clause: when Jatiluhur falls below the crisis line, the data center cuts back before irrigation or households do.

3. New renewable capacity, with co-benefits for local people.

4. A public environmental assessment and a monitoring board that includes fish-cage households and farmer water-user groups.

5. Local hiring targets and a benefit-sharing fund tied to electricity consumed, directed to restoring the upper Citarum.

Guarding Jatiluhur people’s source of life

Tarumanagara dug canals, Bandung was founded on the Cikapundung, and Jatiluhur displaced five thousand people from their hometown so the nation could have rice and electricity. Each generation’s infrastructure has been built on the same river, and on the people alongside it.

The proposition CGK4 puts forward is not whether it should be built; it asks whether this generation will repeat the old bargain, where locals carry the costs and distant users enjoy the benefits. Or shall we give them the benefit of the doubt that they will honor the Constitutional Court’s principle that water belongs to the people first?

Want to share your views on public policy reforms or other political issues?

Write to us: connect@thinkpolicy.id

10 August 1995. Seven days before Indonesia’s independence commemoration day. In Bandung, thousands gazed at the sky as the N250 Gatotkaca readied for its maiden flight.

Across the archipelago, millions more watched on television, from government offices to roadside warungs, as TVRI broadcast the moment nationwide through the Palapa satellite network.

For many Indonesians, it was perhaps the closest thing to an Apollo moment. It was as if the country itself had just landed a person on the Moon. The N250 was, of course, no Saturn V. Yet, for a country at Indonesia’s then-level of income and technological development, the achievement felt like an income-adjusted equivalent.

Even reasonable skeptics of Indonesia’s aerospace ambitions could not easily dismiss what they had just witnessed: the country had successfully designed and flown its own commercial aircraft. Thanks to the then-Research and Technology Minister (later President) B. J. Habibie.

Taufiq Kiemas’ reaction was especially revealing. A prominent figure in the Indonesian Democratic Party (PDI) — and husband of party chair Megawati Sukarnoputri — Kiemas had frequently criticized the industrial policy projects associated with Habibie. Yet, Kiemas attended the N250’s maiden flight in person and reportedly wept as the aircraft lifted smoothly from the runway. It was a small but telling indication of how significant the N250 was as a symbol of both national pride and unity.

The N250 seemed to also embody the confidence of the era. As the aircraft gathered speed along the runway, Indonesia itself appeared poised for takeoff. The economy was growing at 8.2 percent in 1995, industrialization was rapidly proceeding, and the end of the Cold War had ushered in an extraordinary period of optimism about globalization and the prospects of emerging economies.

As capital poured into Southeast Asia and the region’s convergence with the industrialized world became durable, Indonesia was a prospective Asian Tiger, following South Korea, Taiwan, and Singapore as rapidly industrializing economies.

Indonesia was finally enjoying somewhat of a honeymoon period in its long arc of history.

Or so we thought. Just three years later, the honeymoon was over. The economy collapsed, the political order that had governed Indonesia for three decades fell, and the N250 program was dismantled before reaching commercial production.

The aircraft that had once represented Indonesia’s technological ascent was confined to a hangar. It would never fly again.

It all went downhill after the 1997 crisis

The 1997 Asian financial crisis did more than deprive the N250 of financing. Fundamentally, it radically transformed the political and institutional environment in which Indonesia’s aerospace program had been built.

As Indonesia turned to the International Monetary Fund (IMF) for emergency financing amounting to US$ 43 billion, continued support for aerospace company IPTN, which produced the N250, became part of a broader renegotiation of the country’s development model. The IMF-supported program required withdrawing budgetary and extrabudgetary support for the company and dismantling key fiscal mechanisms that had sustained it.

The conventional argument was that IPTN was expensive, Indonesia was still poor, and the resources devoted to aircraft development could have been better spent elsewhere. In a stronger version, Habibie’s aerospace ambitions were portrayed as an extravagance that helped push the country toward bankruptcy.

Yet, the claim that the N250 was expensive is rarely expressed relative to the size of the Indonesian economy. Development of the aircraft required roughly US$ 650 million. Spread over the development period from 1989 to 1998, this amounted to only about 0.03–0.04 percent of GDP per year. Of course, that didn’t establish the program as a good and effective industrial policy. But that estimate did make it difficult to prove that N250 was a significant macroeconomic burden whose cancellation was necessary to resolve the crisis. By comparison, the eventual fiscal cost of bank restructuring after the 1997 crisis approached 39 percent of GDP.

Dennis de Tray, the World Bank’s country director for Indonesia during the crisis, later acknowledged this distinction. Looking back on the 1998 reform package, he said that IPTN was “relatively unimportant in an economic sense,” suggesting that withdrawing support mattered primarily as a signal intended to restore investor confidence.

This thus begs the question: if IPTN was economically relatively unimportant, why was it targeted so explicitly? Part of the answer lies in the intellectual and political climate of the 1990s. Under the prevailing Washington Consensus, industrial policy like IPTN had become deeply unfashionable. Governments were increasingly expected to liberalize markets, reduce discretionary intervention, and let market signals discipline capital allocation.

A central presumption was that governments could not reliably “pick winners”: directed credit, infant-industry protection, subsidies, and support for targeted sectors were therefore treated with considerable suspicion.

IPTN represented a very different development philosophy, closer to the Hamiltonian state-involved industrialization strategies historically pursued by Japan and South Korea and, later, by China: the deliberate attempt by the state to build domestic technological and productive capabilities through subsidies and directed credit. IPTN therefore mattered beyond its immediate fiscal cost. It became a symbol of a broader development model that sat very uncomfortably with the dominant policy orthodoxy of the 1990s. In this sense, the dispute over IPTN was also a dispute over whether developing countries should retain the ability to conduct ambitious industrial policy at all.

To be fair, this skepticism had some basis in Indonesia’s own experience. Much of the country’s import-substitution drive in the 1970s and early 1980s produced protected industries that remained inefficient, lacked technological learning, and were weakly exposed to international competition.

Yet it is too crude to place IPTN in the same category. Unlike many earlier protected industries, IPTN did generate substantial technological learning and accumulated human capital. Its commercial performance was of course debatable, but the underlying capability-building process was real.

Many features of the New Order economy plainly required reform–it was long overdue. The more contentious question was whether to attempt a sweeping institutional restructuring in the middle of an exceptionally severe financial crisis.

Economists across the spectrum raised this concern, including Joseph Stiglitz and Martin Feldstein. Feldstein, the former chief economic advisor under the United States President Ronald Reagan, argued that many of the IMF’s structural reforms might be desirable in themselves, but warned against using the currency crisis to force fundamental institutional changes that were not necessary to resolve the immediate balance-of-payments problem. He described undertaking such reforms “in the midst of a currency crisis” as particularly poor timing.

The IMF’s own retrospective assessments — through its Independent Evaluation Office (IEO) — later echoed part of this criticism. Its post-crisis literature recorded concerns that Indonesia’s January 1998 program had become overloaded with structural conditions whose connection to the immediate foreign exchange crisis was often remote, and that the effort to signal reform could itself undermine confidence by making the program appear implausibly ambitious. IPTN became one of the most visible casualties of that effort to remake Indonesia.

Industrial policy revived, but not our potential

The rest, as we know, is history. IPTN survived the crisis as PT Dirgantara Indonesia, but only as a shell of its former self. Employment fell from roughly 16,000 at its peak to around 4,000 after successive restructurings, while the company never recovered the engineering depth or indigenous commercial aircraft development capability associated with the N250 era. Much of the technical talent accumulated over decades — including engineers trained at leading institutions abroad — was dispersed, with some later joining foreign firms such as Airbus, Boeing, and Embraer.

My father, Endri Rachman, was a former IPTN engineer. He earnestly shared his testimony with a journalist about why he chose to leave the country after IPTN’s restructuring. The journalist's verdict:

“A series of meetings with him made one thing clear: Endri Rachman cannot fairly be called ‘unnationalistic,’ short on ‘national spirit,’ or, worse, a ‘traitor to the nation’. Driven by determination, he tried to return to the homeland to build his own aircraft factory in Bandung, without the slightest help from the government. I repeat: without the slightest help from the government!”

The irony is that the policy logic behind Habibie’s experiment has since become remarkably conventional. What was once portrayed as an eccentric form of state-led development is now standard practice across much of the world: governments subsidize strategic industries, protect critical supply chains, and finance technological upgrading.

Industrial policy has returned to the center of economic policymaking. Even institutions once deeply skeptical of such interventions, including the World Bank, now treat industrial policy as a legitimate area of economic policy, albeit with renewed emphasis on discipline, competition, institutional design, and measurable performance. Indonesia itself has reentered this terrain through downstreaming, electric vehicles, and other strategic sectors.

From this perspective, Habibie’s central premise seems less anachronistic than it did in the 1990s. It was the right idea at the wrong time: His ideas reached their zenith during an era when the prevailing international policy consensus was moving decisively against state-led industrial development. And to be fair, the problem was also deeply institutional. Many of his projects were implemented through a highly centralized political system, with weak mechanisms for competition, accountability, private-sector participation, and exiting failure.

Today, Indonesia’s contemporary industrial policy remains preoccupied with capacity rather than capability. The focus is extensively on the headline numbers: how many smelters are built, how much investment is attracted, and how much output is produced.

Habibie’s industrial projects, for all their flaws, aimed at a deeper objective: accumulating engineering capability, human capital, and technological learning. Their execution was often imperfect, and their institutional architecture was vulnerable to the New Order’s political economy. Yet, the underlying objective was capability accumulation.

In that sense, the N250’s most consequential legacy may be what Indonesia forgot after its cancellation. Over the following three decades, industrial policy gradually returned, but much of the institutional knowledge associated with building indigenous technological capability did not. In its place, the Indonesian state has resorted to instruments such as local content requirements and export bans, non-fiscal measures that divert the cost of industrial policy from the state to the private sector; perhaps bound by the trauma of attempting anything as ambitious as the N250 program, for fear of being accused of bankrupting the state.

What disappeared with the last flight of the N250 was not just an aircraft program, but rather a particular conception of development. It is the idea that Indonesia could deliberately acquire the organizational and engineering capabilities required to design, integrate, and eventually master complex technologies. As the country now rediscovers industrial policy, the harder task is to recover that ambition without reproducing the same institutional weaknesses that undermined it 28 years ago.

Want to share your views on public policy reforms or other political issues?

Write to us: connect@thinkpolicy.id

Ahmad Dhani, his Wonder Woman wife Mulan Jameela, his Roman Picisan vocalist Once Mekel, his Aku Jadi Aku co-composer Melly Goeslaw, and his son’s LDR castmate Verrell Bramasta. What do they all have in common?

They’re all rich celebrities — yes — but what we’re here to discuss today is that they are all currently sitting members of parliament (MPs). Our dear and esteemed political representatives. The people who make the laws that govern us.

“Gosh, no wonder our politics is a joke,” I hear you mumble under your breath. What will be of our country? What do these people know besides sounding or looking pretty on our screens? Have they even read a book in their lives?

Well, you may not be entirely wrong, but being smart isn’t mutually exclusive with being a good representative. If you disagree, this piece will likely disappoint you. And while I’d love nothing more than to join the bandwagon of making fun of politicians, what I’ve observed so far has led me to believe we really need more celebrities in parliament.

And no, I’m not kidding. In fact, I have never felt more serious than I am right now as I start jotting down my thoughts on this.

But why?

When this Prabowo administration started, I had a list of legislative bills that I suspected would get fast-tracked. But I’d be lying if I said that the Copyright Law amendment even made my long list. It has now been shot to the top of the parliament’s political agenda, largely thanks to the celebrity MPs who sit in parliament today.

What began as petty arguments between a few famous composers and performers had snowballed into a debate that at first seemed super technical: royalty payment.

Read this Reformist volume on music royalty if you’re not up to speed yet:

And while things have gotten a tad bit more complicated now — with artificial intelligence getting in the mix — the bill has proven one thing: an agenda can only be a priority when the people debating it have a real stake in the decision.

Don’t get me wrong. Copyright is a serious matter that should concern us. In today’s economy, however, the fact that these celebrity MPs have managed to champion a bill that concerns, first and foremost, their own livelihood is actually what they’re supposed to do with the power that they’ve accrued, which is to (surprise!) represent.

Have we gotten it all wrong?

The short answer is “no.” The long answer is “no, but we might have been guilty of underestimating celebrities who run for office and overestimating our own ideals.” By the end of this article, I’ll prove you’ve been guilty of one, both, or neither.

In the current House of Representatives, there are at least 23 MPs who made (or still make) a living in the entertainment industry, earning them a ‘celebrity MP’ status. That list includes the names I mentioned at the beginning of this article, alongside:

• dangdut singers Ashraff Abu and Iyeth Bustami;

• ABG heartthrob Tommy Kurniawan, Panji Manusia Millenium Primus Yustisio, Gerhana damsel-in-distress Dina Lorenza;

• Citra nominee Nurul Arifin, Citra winner Rachel Maryam;

• comedians Eko Hendro Purnomo and Denny Cagur, quizmaster Nico Siahaan;

• Perwira and Ksatria star Dede Yusuf, racer Moreno Soeprapto, supermodel Arzetti Bilbina;

• Ungu frontman Sigit “Pasha” Purnomo, Tenda Biru chanteuse Desy Ratnasari, Cinta Semu rapper Uya Kuya, Hati yang Kecewa minstrel Nafa Urbach, and Bajaj Bajuri sweetheart Rieke Diah Pitaloka.

If your gut reaction is to feel sad and concerned that these are the people representing our — the public — interests in parliament today, you’re not alone. After all, it only makes sense that the most capable among us occupy these high-stakes seats. If we took these celebrities from Senayan, everything would’ve been so much better, and politics wouldn’t be so frustrating.

… Right?

Of course not. But how many of you reading this have made fun of celebrities winning legislative elections before? Ahead of the 2024 elections, pundit Lucius Karus was quoted by many news outlets, including the BBC, as seen above, saying “They can sing, act in movies, joke on stage, but they’re not capable [of serving] as legislators.”

I’m not saying that they haven’t earned the cynicism. Khoirunnisa Nur Agustyati, then-chief of the Association for Elections and Democracy (Perludem), made a good case. “We have seen time and time again that some of these celebrity politicians do not take their new responsibilities seriously,” she said, concerned that “some of them still perform shows or appear in commercials.”

To an extent, I agree with these observations. But perhaps something else here needs closer inspection.

Why do we deride celebrity MPs so much?

I don’t know if there’s a single reason to explain why celebrities, collectively, are seen by many, if not all of us, as incapable, incompetent, or unfit for office. Hopefully, at least one of the following three hypotheses represents your view.

1. Celebrity MPs are shallow vote-getters

Even without the usual campaign posters and banners polluting the streets, many are already familiar with them. It’s almost unfair. If a regular politician has to spend billions to be acknowledged by the voters in their electoral district (‘dapil’), a celebrity joins the race having already built a ‘fanbase’ at best or a sense of familiarity at worst. This phenomenon earns them the permanent mark of a ‘vote-getter,’ meaning someone political parties nominate for no other purpose than to win as many votes as possible so they can pass the 4 percent parliamentary threshold.

In a country where celebrity news gains so much attention that it becomes an industry of its own — the ‘infotainment’ — any celebrity seeking to run in elections has an upper hand that other candidates don’t. Yet as we’ve already established, popularity is a disadvantage just as much as it is an edge.

Desy Ratnasari has a PhD in Psychology from Atma Jaya, with a dissertation on gender equality. But when she began her third consecutive term, some felt it was more appropriate to focus on the fact that she’s a widow.

Rieke Diah Pitaloka, also on her third consecutive term in parliament, graduated cum laude from Universitas Indonesia with a PhD dissertation on data governance. But, unsurprisingly, what makes the news is either her Instagram outfit or skincare regime.

This isn’t to say they represent most celebrity MPs, but they’re not outliers either. Beneath the glams and flashes, these celebrities are just like the rest of us. They are not a monolith defined by one thing. Ahmad Dhani is a controversial rockstar but also a Sufism observer. Nurul Arifin is a bona fide movie star but also a women’s rights activist.

I can go on, but I think I’ve made my point. Their visibility gives them a slight edge, but it also creates a problem the rest of the field doesn’t have to deal with (at least not as much): voters who assume their celebrity status automatically means a lack of depth.

2. Celebrities are in it for themselves

My next hypothesis is that people see celebrities as this group of rich, greedy opportunists who are using politics for their personal gains.

What’s another Rp 100 million a month for Melly Goeslaw, who in March 2025 posted on Instagram about receiving almost six times that from her collective management agency (‘LMK’) in royalties thanks to her massive pop song catalog.

But why are we so outraged about rich celebrities taking up space in parliament when the cost of politics in Indonesia is impossibly expensive? A research project I co-edited for the Westminster Foundation for Democracy (WFD) in 2024 estimated that the median cost of securing a parliamentary seat in Indonesia is 5 billion rupiah per candidate. For the average Indonesian, that’ll take 140 years of earning the national median income of Rp 36 million (annually) without spending a dime to afford a successful campaign. Well, at least theoretically.

My point is not that we should just sit idly by while politics continues to be a game exclusively reserved for and by the richest among us. Even the Finance Ministry’s most modest estimate still came out to Rp 1 billion in average spending per candidate — and that’s without even a guarantee of winning a seat.

Imagine spending that much money for a job that wouldn’t even earn you a net return after serving a full five-year term.

The argument that celebrity MPs are in it for themselves doesn’t hold up once we look deeper into the matter. What if it’s not as simple as a financial calculation? And while you’re at it, ask that same question to everyone who decided to run for Senayan, not just the celebrities.

3. Celebrities don’t have what it takes to make laws

Well, yeah, but it’s not like the remaining 557 MPs in parliament today are the most revered policy experts either.

Let’s get to the real point.

Representation is competence itself

Our political debate has completely missed the mark on this one. Every election season, we get into this heated debate over who is the most competent candidate to give our votes to. And every other election season, we bicker with online trolls and exit the unbearable family WhatsApp group chat because their political choices are not reflective of someone who prioritizes competence.

Deplorable.

Hold your horses. Entertain me for a second here. For every job out there, including being an MP, competence is never a fixed mathematical equation defined by a universal formula. By default, we expect competence to align with things like higher education, relevant experience, good standing, inspirational speeches, statistical mastery, language proficiency, and so on.

This is fair in most jobs, but in democracy — where the most valuable capital is a vote — I beg to differ. Competence comes in many facets, some of which will feel morally deprived and downright wrong.

Visiting the slums that never get attention, having photo-ops while climbing down into the sewers, slowing down your speech patterns so some voters relate better, plastering your face on rice bags so they remember who fed them that day, looking pretty while waving around on a campaign trail, organizing dangdut concerts at a village that only knows survival — all of these shouldn’t be dismissed as ‘cheap theatrics’ just because they don’t fit the list of skill sets we believe are necessary to run for public office.

If politics is a matter of who gets what, when, how — as American political scientist Harold Lasswell titles his seminal 1936 book — then celebrities have proven their competence for the job simply by winning in their dapil. Whether those who lost are more credible, have advanced degrees, and bring decades of public service does not change the fact that these celebrities have been chosen to represent. That, in and of itself, is the only competence that matters.

That, unfortunately, is the bitter truth. I don’t like it. Not at all. But not liking something isn’t enough to bring about change.

Every nation gets the government it deserves

“Toute nation a le gouvernement qu’elle mérite.”

A popular quote by Joseph de Maistre of Savoy, a historic region now in southeastern France. Often misattributed to Thomas Jefferson, many have misused it to shift the blame from a broken system to bad individual choices.

A counter-revolutionary, Maistre believed that a monarch is divinity itself and therefore should not be challenged. He did not mean that we are individually responsible for our own miseries, and it was never about voting in elections. Well, at least not in the way that we perceive it today. His writing, which I think would get him instantly canceled if published today, was much deeper: that a political system cannot be artificially engineered. Instead, he argued, whatever government rules a society is a direct mirror of the spiritual and moral state of its people.

But what does this have to do with celebrity MPs?

The celebrity MPs have proven one thing: if you want your priority to take precedence, then put your hand in it. Otherwise, we’ll keep relying on the people we’ve elected to represent us. Unfortunately for us, though, what they eventually represent doesn’t always align with what we believe when we make our decision in the voting booth.

Think about the three hypotheses I’ve presented above. We constantly undermine celebrities in politics because they’re shallow. We predetermine that celebrities are only in it for themselves. We reject celebrities because they’re not competent.

And despite all that, they are in parliament. And, as we’re witnessing with the advancement of the Copyright Bill, they are moving their priorities to the top of the political order.

Now I don’t assume that The Reformist readers are all the same. Each of us has different things we want to prioritize. For activists, it may be to pursue social justice. For women, it may be to be safe from violence. For the Indigenous people, it may be to protect their ancestral lands. For every one of us, it may only become a priority if we throw our hands in.

So, yes, I wasn’t joking when I wrote that we need more celebrities in parliament. But also more activists, even if everyone thinks that’s selling out, just like the celebrities who are shallow vote-getters; more women, even if their political party only nominates them to fill the 30-percent quota, just like the celebrities who are only in it for themselves; and more Indigenous people, even if their traditional wisdom does not come with fancy degrees, just like the celebrities who don’t have what it takes.

Perhaps this is what we’ve been missing all along: someone with personal stakes in the system. If we want to get the Indigenous Rights Bill prioritized, let’s get more Indigenous people in parliament. If we want the Human Rights Defenders Bill legislated, let’s get more human rights defenders seats in Senayan.

Just like the celebrities who stood up for themselves for their royalties, every single one of us should too. Even if chance says we’d end up right where we started.

Do it anyway.

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In 2023, local governments across Indonesia suddenly became busy firefighting at dumpsites, costing taxpayers billions of rupiah to extinguish a fire at a single dumpsite.

The budget for this firefighting came from the region’s annual emergency fund, or from whatever was left of its waste management budget (already sparse, typically less than 1 percent of the region’s total budget) that should have been used instead to improve the waste management system. And the impact went way beyond these numbers in the accounting report, potentially causing prolonged health hazards for anyone caught in the smoke.

This year, we are on course for the second episode of that chaos again. As we started writing this in July 2026, the Tangerang Regency administration was busy extinguishing the fire at Jatiwaringin dumpsite (‘TPA’). Meanwhile, similar events are flaring up at other dumpsites (e.g., TPA Cipayung, ex-TPA Panembong).

Interestingly, dumpsite fire frenzy was never a topic before 2023. Today, it is emerging as a recurring theme.

The claim that the 2023 dumpsite fire frenzy is bound to recur is not without merit. This year, Indonesia is facing another El Niño cycle. It is a cyclical climate pattern (typically every 2-7 years) in which trade winds in the south shift, creating hotter temperatures, stronger winds, and lower humidity in Indonesia. These conditions are perfect enablers of dumpsite fires, as they make it easier for surface- and deep-level piles of waste to ignite.

As if the cycle itself is not enough, this year we might be facing a super El Niño, with current indicators showing that this year’s impact would be double that of 2023. Conditions are expected to worsen and peak at year-end. Therefore, strictly from a climate standpoint, dumpsite fires can only become more frequent and more intense as we approach the end of the year.

We understand that the way we have written this article so far suggests we are cursed with the uncontrollable wrath of nature. However, that is not the case.

Like any combustion process, landfill fires require (1) a trigger; (2) a condition; and (3) fuel. The trigger is the buried waste getting very hot and catching fire on its own. The condition is the environment created by El Niño. And the fuel is the methane trapped in the dumpsite piles. While the trigger and the condition are practically out of our control, the fuel is different. The presence of methane in a dumpsite is manageable and can be reduced to a significant extent.

Now, we should all ask the real question: do we want to optimize the budget to fix preventable methane emissions, or do we want to waste resources by splashing water into dumpsites every 2-7 years?

Bear in mind, the more frequent this phenomenon becomes due to inaction, the greater the unnecessary fiscal burden, the less effective the waste management system becomes, and the higher the cost to long-term public health, which can translate to declining productivity.

Why dumpsite fires are rampant in Indonesia

Here’s how fire started at a dumpsite:

Methane is a product of the anaerobic decomposition of easily degradable materials, including food waste, garden waste, and paper. At a dumpsite, this process takes place in the deeper layers of the waste pile. As a new layer of fresh waste enters the dumpsite each day, the older waste is buried deeper and deprived of oxygen, allowing anaerobic processes to take place. This process continues in a loop for years, allowing methane to build up in a dumpsite. Compounded by new waste arriving every day, this effect can be amplified by orders of magnitude.

In Indonesia’s dumpsites and waste management, this process happens at a massive scale and is messy for three different reasons.

First, food, garden, and paper waste make up more than half of the waste that ends up in dumpsites, according to the National Waste Management Information System (SIPSN); in major cities, most of it is left to rot, underscoring the scale of methane generation there.

Second, more than 300 of Indonesia’s 500 dumpsites operate under an open dumping system without a well-designed gas ventilation system, allowing methane to leak to the surface and easily ignite.

Third, waste entering landfills is mixed, so the gas is not pure methane but a complex mixture that can harm living beings exposed to it.

These nuances explain the pattern of dumpsite fires in Indonesia, which are massive, hard to extinguish, and toxic. Because easily degradable waste is the most dominant waste composition in Indonesia overall, dumpsite fires occur at many dumpsites across the country. As explained in the mechanics, this abundance, combined with widespread distribution and surface exposure under the open dumping system, allows fires to spread easily from one point to another.

Finally, burning highly contaminated methane (and other combustible waste) releases toxic fumes into the air, which, when carried by strong winds, expose nearby locals and can eventually cause at least acute respiratory issues.

From this breakdown, we can see that the root of the problem is easily degradable waste in the dumpsite, compounded by heavy reliance on open dumping systems, creating the massive hazard faced by communities. That said, to minimize the risk of dumpsite fires, we must ensure organic waste does not enter the dumpsite, and there are attainable pathways to do so.

Summoning the “gotong royong” spirit for waste management

For too long, we spent too much time pointing fingers when it comes to solving the waste crisis. The truth is, we cannot solve it unless communities, waste workers, private entities, the government, and CSOs work together.

Now that we have a critical, urgent common goal, we need to rethink how we manage organic waste. We have to shift away from our typical downstream-focused mindset and focus on the upstream.

1. Decentralization

Handling many tons of organic waste — likely to be mixed — at a centralized downstream facility is a suicide mission. Instead, we can decentralize waste treatment by leveraging the smallest possible community level to independently treat its organic waste upstream.

A proven example is the ‘Neglasari’ pilot project in Bandung, led by Yaksa Pelestari Bumi Berkelanjutan (YPBB), which integrates organic waste treatment (composting and the BSF method) with food production at the sub-district level.

This project embodies Indonesia’s “gotong royong” (hand-in-hand) spirit, where community, academia, CSO, waste workers, government, and donors collaborate to build and operate the system. In just 1 year, the project reduced its methane footprint, developed a financially viable treatment system, improved community resiliency, and created jobs (soon-to-be published report).

From a cost perspective, this approach is not merely a utopian dream of practitioners in the waste management field, but a far more cost-effective alternative to centralized, high-tech infrastructure (you can read more in detail on page 30 of the linked report). Moreover, by enabling a decentralized approach, we reduce the risk of cross-contamination and allow recyclables management to thrive as well. This adds value to the circular value chain.

2. Organic waste treatment as a part of the food system

The product of organic waste treatment was never meant to be the finished product. Instead, it should be connected to the larger conversation of the food system in the community. By connecting these dots, treating organic waste expands into the conversation of improving communities’ quality of life and is not limited to hazard prevention.

The Bandung City government has set an example by integrating two programs: ‘Buruan Sae’ (food security and urban farming program run by the city’s Food and Agriculture Agency) and ‘Gaslah’ (the city government’s program for upstream organic waste treatment). The city government spearheads this initiative, in collaboration with communities and CSOs, to drive the integration.

The idea is that households and communities in the Buruan Sae program can use treated organic waste (in the form of compost or BSF larvae) from the Gaslah program as input or feedstock for food production, ultimately creating a closed-loop food system. This shows that with the right political commitment, waste management can be productive while also addressing multiple urban challenges.

3. Treatment-as-a-service?

Ultimately, the goal is to ensure as little organic waste as possible goes into dumpsites. Even more importantly, profiting from sales of products from organic waste treatment (e.g., compost and BSF larvae) should not be endorsed as the main revenue source for a sustainable waste management practice. This framing matters because waste management is a cost-heavy sector that often requires subsidies and, therefore, government commitment to allocate budget to sustain operations.

It is telling that even with a basic collect-transport-and-dump method, the system often collapses due to a lack of available government funds. Let alone introducing a treatment solution with more associated costs.

The key to this reform’s success lies primarily with the government. To drive this systemic change, the provision of essential waste management services for collection and separation, especially in the form of fixed capital assets as the highest cost component, will be crucial (see pages 28-29 of the linked report).

Political will to resolve the challenge will show in the budget it commits to support setup and operations.

A race against time

Those three reform principles are set with an overarching output in mind. By shifting the mindset on where and how to treat organic waste, and how the financial model should run, we enable a solution that is rapid, replicable, low-tech, and cost-effective. These are the characteristics we need to address the methane challenge.

This ongoing crisis demands a fast, actionable solution with a low barrier to implementation. Moreover, methane is a short-lived climate pollutant, which means we don’t have the luxury of preparing a dandy plan; we are in a race against time every day to prevent more from being generated in dumpsites.

More methane is being generated as you finish reading this article, which means more of your tax is likely to be spent on throwing water on a pile of garbage. Is that something that you consent to?

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We all remember ‘musyawarah’ (deliberation) from our civic education (‘PPKn’) class in elementary school. It is the embodiment of Pancasila’s fourth principle: democracy guided by the wisdom of deliberating representatives. It was not hard to believe, at least for me, because I’ve seen it everywhere.

I remember seeing it last month at the dining table of a friend’s family, deliberating on every familial issue — from Eid celebration menu to inheritance distribution — until they reached a consensus. A few nights ago, I saw it again on the way home from work: a group of men sitting in a circle inside a security post in a Central Jakarta neighborhood, deliberating on the reparation process of a local water channel.

I am pretty sure that you would see a similar picture in every other neighborhood across the archipelago: different elements of society finding consensus under different circumstances.

Musyawarah is indeed the beating heart of Indonesia’s democracy. But if deliberation is innate to Indonesia’s culture, making collective decisions every day in different layers of society, why does it feel distant, like it is missing from formal policymaking processes?

Regular citizens should be involved at the beginning of a policymaking process. But what often happens instead is that the public is deliberately (pun intended) involved at the end of the process. The public is thus not considered the ‘subject’ of a public policy creation – despite being right there in the name – but rather the ‘object’ of it. They only need to be ‘informed’ that a policy decision has been made.

Well, it’s no wonder that in the past few years alone, Indonesia saw constant public demonstrations protesting various policies affecting regular people’s lives, from the increase of value-added tax (VAT, or ‘PPN’) to costly flagship programs (infamously, the free meal program and Kopdes) that led to budget cuts in other essential sectors. The public is directly affected by these policies, but they are never involved in the deliberations!

So how can we bring deliberation back into our formal policymaking process?

A failing aspirational model

Before answering that question, it’s critical that we first look at the problem. Let me argue about this irony: I believe that the cause of the missing deliberation processes lies in the example I’ve observed before: we are too ‘reliant’ on our representation at the deliberation table. We let other people, our representatives, do the discussion for us. Well, but isn’t that the very essence of representative democracy? Hear me out.

Typically, local deliberations are limited to a specific group of people: mostly men (older men) who hold positions in the community (they are either the neighborhood head or their confidants). We trust them in making decisions about our neighborhood. This habit of ‘entrusting’ deliberation to select groups of people eventually carries over to the formal level of public policymaking.

This irony is reflected in Indonesia’s multi-stakeholder consultation forum for development planning (‘Musrenbang’). Musrenbang is, aspirationally, what citizen participation in a democracy should look like: through this forum, citizens can participate in policy formulation at the city or regency level. It comes in a tiered system, starting at the neighborhood unit (RW) level, then the village, district, and finally the city/regency level.

However, various research indicates inconsistencies in citizens’ participation and deliberation through musrenbang. A 2021 paper from the Australian National University found that although most of these forums were able to consolidate development plans from the village up to the national level, musrenbang is typically only attended by a handful of people, usually local elites, such as the village heads, or people who have been handpicked by these local elites.

Another study, conducted in Bandung in 2022, also found several systemic injustices in the implementation of musrenbang: from the dominant role of local elites and overly ceremonial, lengthy agendas to citizens being unable to propose their own agendas, instead having to consider only the policy options already provided by the government.

So, if the aspirational model our democracy adopted has somewhat failed to provide avenues for public participation in policymaking, what can we do?

Let’s reimagine how other forms of musyawarah can be implemented so regular Indonesians can actively participate in policymaking.

Introducing: Citizens’ assembly

If any local government wants to experiment, it can adopt a different approach: the citizens’ assembly. It does not have to replace musrenbang; it can complement it.

A citizens’ assembly, or a mini-public, is a deliberative and representative approach to policymaking. A group of citizens is randomly selected to join the assembly, where they will deliberate on a specific policy dilemma posed by the government. Harris (2019) argued that a citizen’s assembly (or a mini public) is a blend of participatory and deliberative democracy. It allows citizens to engage more directly in policymaking, from agenda-setting and decision-making to policy implementation.

In the 2023 De Gruyter Handbook of Citizens’ Assemblies, there are three main principles of a citizens’ assembly: deliberative, representative, and public influence. Deliberative means the assembly prioritizes discussion and deliberation among citizens. Representative means it ensures every part of the public is appropriately represented. Public influence means the assembly’s results should be action-oriented and could impact the public.

Although they seem similar, a citizens’ assembly and a musrenbang differ in three fundamental ways.

First (and most exciting) is how participants are selected. Unlike musrenbang, whose participants are open to the public but often filled by local elites, a citizens’ assembly employs a ‘sortition’ method to select its participants – it’s like a lottery, similar to how juries are selected for jury duty. The composition of participants for each assembly is determined to reflect the real conditions under which the assembly takes place, ensuring proportional representation; this process is missing in musrenbang, where intentional participant selection is undetermined.

Assembly member recruitment can take various forms. Some citizens’ assemblies use sortition based on government citizen records. Others use stratified random sampling. Some assemblies also let people self-nominate to join the possible assembly before being selected.

To further ensure inclusion, some assemblies also intentionally invite marginalized groups. The key feature of this randomized selection is to ensure proportionality and include ordinary people in policymaking processes.

Second (and probably the most fundamental) is our role as citizens. Instead of confirming or providing feedback on predetermined policies, in a citizens’ assembly our role is to address a policy dilemma the government faces. This way, participants can bring their own agenda — things that actually matter to them — into consideration when formulating policy.

Third, another core feature of a citizens’ assembly is the information-gathering phase. Before deliberating on the policy dilemma, assembly members can learn and unlearn about the issue from academic experts, stakeholders, or even witnesses. This information-gathering and learning phase helps assembly members better understand the policy trade-offs of each decision they will make.

All three features mentioned above position mini public or citizens’ assembly as a better way to involve the public in policy processes. In addition, best practices already exist worldwide, with governments implementing citizens’ assemblies at the local and national levels.

Where it has been done

Recently, a citizens’ assembly was held in Kerewan, The Gambia, to address an interconnected policrisis of environmental degradation that threatens their agricultural livelihoods and food security. Assembly members were selected through a sortition method that included a raffle, door-to-door visits in six villages, and open-source software, selecting 30 Kerewan citizens.

For seven days, these 30 assembly members gathered to deliberate and answer a question: how can they restore their lands and natural habitats while creating better livelihoods and economic empowerment? They mapped out problems faced in their respective villages and deliberated on what went into their recommendations. They then delivered their recommendations to the district governor, deputy governor, and a member of the national assembly.

In 2004, citizens of British Columbia, Canada, held an assembly to discuss their elections. Selecting 158 assembly members from a pool of 15,000 invited from across Canada, the assembly ran for around 10 months. The assembly also created space for First Nations citizens by adding two representatives. During the learning phase, guided by subject-matter experts — including political scientists from the University of British Columbia — assembly members developed shared values before moving to the public hearing phase and deliberating.

The assembly resulted in a change to the voting system in the province of British Columbia, giving the public a chance to decide the electoral system without intervention from political parties and ensuring the players are not in charge of setting the rules of the game.

Citizens’ assembly isn’t that groundbreaking, actually

However ‘radical’ a citizens’ assembly may sound, it is actually not. This policymaking method is not inherently groundbreaking. It is already rooted in our culture of deliberation. Indonesians have also been fond of representation – just that this time, we determined it through a lottery to ensure fairer representation.

This approach is also more politically beneficial for the government, as it can lend legitimacy to the policies it wishes to create. This is useful especially if they are about to enact an unpopular policy. Instead of having to bear the burden of the policy, the government can let its citizens decide on their own. If the result of the assembly is in line with the initial unpopular proposal, it will be an act of endorsement from the people. If the result is different from the initial proposal, the government will have one that is formulated by the public already.

Let’s imagine another real-life case as an example for a possible citizens’ assembly in Indonesia.

For the Jakarta provincial government, a possible assembly question would be about implementing an increase in Transjakarta fares. Since its creation in 2004, the government has kept Transjakarta fares at Rp 3,500 for more than twenty years. However, with rising fuel prices and the addition of new routes, the question arises: should the Jakarta government increase Transjakarta fares?

To assemble the minipublic, Jakarta can issue an open invitation for people to register for the lottery to be randomly selected to participate in the assembly. Alternatively, it can use available data from the Population and Civil Registry Agency to invite citizens to become an assembly members. They can assemble up to 100 citizens for the assembly, proportionally representing the six administrative cities of the province (including Kepulauan Seribu), age distribution, and gender.

Because we understand that a trade-off in increasing the Transjakarta fare is its implications to citizens’ economic condition, representatives from the Jaringan Rakyat Miskin Kota — a civil society network prominent for advocating for the city’s poor population — can be invited to be the speaker for the learning phase, in addition to the City planning experts, the Regional Planning Agency (Bappeda Jakarta), the Jakarta Transportation Agency, and PT Transjakarta. The learning phase is important because the assembly must understand what are the impacts of increasing and not increasing the fare, and what are the examples–including from abroad, if any–that Jakarta can learn from.

The result of the assembly might not be a simple yes–or–no answer. In fact, it should not be a simple answer. The assembly must be able to provide answers to questions pertaining to how to best approach the dilemma of to increase or not to increase the enduring Transjakarta fare. For example, who will bear the fiscal burden, if the fare is not increased? How would it work, should the fare be increased? Will the government give a special treatment to a certain group of demographics? How will it affect the development of new busways?

At the end of the day, Indonesia is a nation used to aligning our individuality with collective interest. Unfortunately, the elitist policymaking process is undermining this culture. This article is not only a reflection on our nation’s culture but also a call to action for the government: are you ready to truly involve citizens in the policymaking process? Deliberation is indeed lengthy, but by the time we reach common ground, it will all be worth it.

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Whenever an agreement is signed, whether for a trade deal, Foreign Direct Investment (FDI), or defense procurement, there is almost always a clause on knowledge transfer, capacity building, or what some call ‘offsets’. It has become customary among negotiators, officials, and delegations alike, while ministers often announce it as a major win.

But what of its implementation? In practice, the clause may shrink to a mere operational training program. Or to a group of engineers spending two weeks at a foreign factory before returning home to operate the same machine with the same instructions. This is where the real question begins: what is knowledge transfer actually supposed to achieve, and why should Indonesia revisit it as both an engine of economic growth and a pathway out of the middle-income trap?

Learning to “catch up” from East Asian countries

For developing countries, the importance of knowledge transfer lies within the convergence hypothesis. Economists often refer to it as the “catching-up effect.” The basics are simple: developing countries begin with low income levels, then they grow faster for several decades than countries that are already developed, eventually narrowing the gap. How? These developing countries absorb and adopt technologies that advanced economies spent decades building.

We have witnessed this pattern before. Japan rebuilt its industrial base after World War II by licensing foreign technology, systematically building domestic R&D capacity, and graduating from imitation to innovation within a generation.

Or, as the saying goes: “amati, tiru, modifikasi” — observe, imitate, modify.

South Korea followed a similar path through state-directed industrial policy, investment in human capital, and efforts to push up the value chain, from textiles to semiconductors and automobiles. More recently, China rose by leveraging market access to extract technology transfer commitments from foreign firms while simultaneously building domestic capabilities.

All of them displayed a familiar economic arc: poor beginnings, decades of high-speed growth, and eventual convergence toward the more stable, though slower growth patterns characteristic of developed economies like those in Europe

But what about Indonesia? Our country has started this journey as well. Indonesia entered upper-middle-income status in 2023, with a GNI per capita of approximately US$ 4,810 (the high-income threshold is around US$ 13,935). With growth hovering around 5 percent in recent decades, the catching-up effect remains, but is not strong enough. To escape the middle-income trap, Indonesia likely needs growth above six percent, which means we need stronger and more sustainable growth engines.

An engine that actually drives growth: Total Factor Productivity

According to basic economic theory, output is driven by capital, labor, and a residual factor that cannot be fully explained by the first two, which economists now call Total Factor Productivity (TFP), where knowledge, technology, innovation, and institutional efficiency reside.

This is where the Indonesian story becomes interesting. Data from the Penn World Table (PWT) show that Indonesia’s output per worker has remained sluggish (hovering below 2 percent) since 2019, while TFP growth has largely stagnated. A study published by Universitas Indonesia also found that Indonesia’s human capital growth has been among the weakest among peer countries, while economic growth has remained concentrated in a limited number of sectors.

This is deeply connected to our discussion on knowledge transfer. Put simply, when we talk about improving productivity, we essentially talk about raising TFP. Physical capital like toll roads, factories, ports, and machinery will eventually face diminishing returns. Labor expansion also has limits. But TFP, if managed correctly, can continuously raise the productivity of both capital and labor. Knowledge transfer, when done properly, is one of the mechanisms that drive TFP growth.

Knowledge flows like water, but our “pipe” is narrow…

There is, however, an important caveat in the catching-up literature: technology does not transfer automatically. Even if foreign parties are willing to transfer it freely, which many are not, the knowledge behind any technology flows like water through a pipe. The width of that pipe can be understood as absorptive capacity: the ability of a country’s firms, workers, and institutions to receive, understand, adapt, and build upon foreign knowledge. A country with weak absorptive capacity may receive massive inflows of FDI and still extract very little meaningful knowledge or technological gain from it.

Absorptive capacity itself rests on at least three foundations: human capital; R&D investment; and institutional quality.

A technically skilled workforce improves the ability to absorb knowledge. Firms and universities engaged in active research can adapt technology tailored to local conditions. Strong institutions can create incentives for innovation through legal, regulatory, and market frameworks.

Indonesia still faces significant challenges in all three areas.

On R&D spending alone, Indonesia allocates only around 0.28 percent of GDP, roughly the same level as in 2019 and 2020. Compare this with South Korea at 5.32 percent, Japan at 3.4 percent, and China at 2.65 percent. Even Thailand, our peer in the upper-middle-income group, allocates more than 1 percent.

Some studies also find an uncomfortable reality: R&D spillovers from multinational corporations (MNCs) can negatively affect domestic firms’ TFP due to intense product-market rivalry. In other words, foreign firms do not automatically create learning effects for local industries. Without domestic capability, they may simply dominate the market instead.

What are we missing?

The simplest diagnosis is that Indonesia is underinvesting in its ability to absorb knowledge transfer.

The discourse on knowledge transfer in Indonesia has remained fixated on the operational and managerial capability. How do we run this turbine? How do we follow these safety protocols? These are important questions, but they are questions about operating technology, not creating it. The deeper layer that separates a technology-adopting country from a technology-creating one involves understanding why the machine works the way it does. This includes the ability to modify it for local conditions and eventually design a better one ourselves.

Most training programs, operational courses, and manuals only transfer codified knowledge: procedures, modules, instructions, and technical documentation. But tacit knowledge is different. It lives inside the minds of engineers, researchers, doctors, and practitioners who have spent years solving problems in the field. It cannot be transferred through a two-week training session alone.

Tacit knowledge moves through deep collaboration, co-research, joint ventures, and sustained local involvement in real problem-solving processes. This is where the core ideas actually reside. Yes, Indonesia demands training programs from foreign firms, but often captures only the codified layer of knowledge and leaves the tacit layer untouched.

Decades later, despite numerous investment agreements, we may still find ourselves dependent on expatriate engineers for the most technically demanding operations within our own strategic industries.

What should we do?

This brings us back to the original point: Indonesia must revisit what actually constitutes knowledge transfer under agreements. Should the standard simply be operational training, or should it require measurable transfers of technical capability? There should be a stronger emphasis on joint R&D provisions, co-authorship in patents, localization of core engineering functions, and long-term collaboration between foreign firms and Indonesian researchers.

Indonesia’s downstreaming agenda is a promising start. But the goal should not stop at smelting nickel in Sulawesi (onshoring). The long-term objective should be to ensure that Indonesian engineers are eventually capable of designing the smelting process itself.

Scaling up R&D investment is also essential. Reaching at least 1 percent of GDP should be treated as a minimum target. We agree we have fiscal constraints, but incentives for private-sector R&D can be expanded, for example, through tax policy. Institutions such as BRIN should also be more closely aligned with industry-linked research that has clear commercialization pathways.

At the same time, Indonesia must better utilize its demographic bonus while addressing the mismatch between universities and industry. Prioritizing which technologies to pursue is equally important. As the World Bank has repeatedly argued, escaping the middle-income trap requires combining investment with both the absorption of foreign technology and the development of domestic innovation.

Thus, Indonesia cannot, and should not, attempt to catch up across every technological frontier simultaneously. Instead, we need a technology prioritization framework built around sectors where Indonesia possesses natural endowments, market scale, and demographic leverage: green energy technology, agri-food processing, and digital infrastructure.

In short, capital multiplied by labor becomes far more productive when boosted by TFP.

The knowledge transfer clause should be seen as an entry point, an institutional mechanism through which TFP can be seeded. But this only works if knowledge transfer is treated seriously, not as a diplomatic gesture or a checkbox requirement. It must instead be understood as a vehicle for one of the most consequential transformations available to a developing country: the shift from importing other people’s technology to creating our own.

Our founding fathers’ dream of a prosperous Indonesia will not be realized through the accumulation of machines and workers alone. It will be realized when Indonesian engineers, researchers, and entrepreneurs produce the knowledge that future agreements will require others to transfer.

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This article responds to The Reformist vol. 29 on BPJS Ketenagakerjaan, which discusses the shortfalls of the program and how relevant ministries responsible for social security have fumbled protection amid a flailing economy. Read here.

The Reformist recently asked in a volume whether BPJS Ketenagakerjaan can “save” Indonesia’s vulnerable workforce. It is a sharp, well-sourced piece, and it is right about the danger: seven out of ten workers stand outside the employment social security system.

As the article pointed out, the clock is ticking toward financial deficits by 2038. Without genuine reforms, BPJS Ketenagakerjaan, as a social protection program, faces the risk of collapse.

But the article seems to put BPJS Ketenagakerjaan, an implementing agency, on trial for “crimes” committed by the legislature, the Finance Ministry, and the Manpower Ministry. This misdirection risks letting the actors who actually hold the levers walk away free from the consequences of their misdeeds.

An operator on trial for laws it never wrote

Let’s begin with what BPJS Ketenagakerjaan legally is. Under Law No. 24/2011, it is a public legal entity, or, in plain words, an operator. It can collect contributions, manage Social Security funds, and pay out claims across five programs.

It cannot, however, decide the rules of the game it plays. Contribution rates, benefit formulas, eligibility criteria, investment mandates, and enforcement powers are all set upstream. They are stipulated in Government Regulations (PP) and in Ministerial Regulations issued by the Manpower Ministry, the Finance Ministry, the National Social Security Council (DJSN), and ultimately the House of Representatives (DPR).

BPJS Ketenagakerjaan can’t legislate its own coverage, just as a cashier can’t rewrite the menu.

Therefore, please allow me to “defend” BPJS Ketenagakerjaan by redirecting the problems listed in the Reformist’s article to those who are actually responsible:

I. The JHT withdrawal scandal was a policy reversal, not an operator’s blunder

The article treats the hemorrhage of Jaminan Hari Tua (JHT) funds, with more than a million workers cashing out in a single year, as evidence that the program is misdesigned.

It is misdesigned. But BPJS Ketenagakerjaan did not design it.

The lump-sum withdrawal upon resignation or layoff was stipulated in PP No. 60/2015, when the government reversed its own retirement-preservation principle under pressure from organized labor.

The agency administering that rule, BPJS Ketenagakerjaan, had no vote in the matter. To blame the operator for honoring a regulation it is legally bound to honor is to mistake obedience for authorship.

II. Weak enforcement is due to a lack of sufficient manpower (in the ministry inspectorate)

The article correctly references the Ombudsman’s 2021 finding on weak enforcement, especially towards non-compliant employers. Yet it then splits the blame between BPJS Ketenagakerjaan and the Ministry of Manpower, as though the two share the mandate.

They do not.

Labor inspection is the exclusive authority of the Directorate General of Labor Inspection. BPJS Ketenagakerjaan cannot impose sanctions on a non-compliant employer. It can only refer to one.

With roughly 2,400 inspectors stretched across a workforce of more than 150 million, the 523,000 unregistered employers are not a symptom of operator negligence. They are a symptom of a state that funded an obligation without funding the means to enforce it.

III. The missing subsidy is a budget decision

The article accurately notes that BPJS Kesehatan, the country’s national health insurance program, has reached near-universal coverage, while BPJS Ketenagakerjaan languishes. This is true, but it’s not the operator’s fault that it doesn’t have the budget to provide universal coverage.

BPJS Kesehatan thrives in this area largely because the country introduced a scheme called Penerima Bantuan Iuran (PBI), a state-funded program that pays premiums for the poor. But there is currently no equivalent for employment social security.

That absence is not an institutional limitation of BPJS Ketenagakerjaan. It is a deliberate fiscal choice by the Finance Ministry and ratified by the House. Article 14 of Law No. 40/2004 actually mandates PBI for both BPJS, but this is not the case in practice today. In other words, the comparison The Reformist’s article uses to indict the operator is thus, in fact, an indictment of the government’s budgeting decisions.

What the operator can do once the architecture lets it

While it would be wrong to direct responsibility for solving the above-mentioned problems to BPJS Ketenagakerjaan, that doesn’t mean the agency is entirely absolved of blame.

It should also communicate more openly with the public about these constraints, especially the workers it serves, so that it does not bear the brunt of public frustration alone.

But these are second-order problems. The binding constraint is upstream, and that is precisely why the agency’s potential is being underestimated.

Consider what the operator already has: a national collection and investment machine, a grassroots agent network (Perisai), digital enrolment channels, and a growing web of cooperation agreements with sub-national governments. The premium cut of Rp 8,400 for informal workers, stipulated in PP No. 50/2025, shows the instinct is there.

What this machinery lacks is not competence. It lacks a mandate with teeth, a fiscal instrument to subsidize those who cannot pay, and an enforcement partner that is actually resourced.

If we give BPJS Ketenagakerjaan a statutory coverage mandate backed by a functioning inspectorate, a PBI-equivalent subsidy carved out of the APBN, and the DJSN’s willingness to coordinate rather than spectate, the coverage curve that has crawled fourteen points in twenty-eight years will bend. The limiting “ceiling” is not the operator but the policy architecture. In fact, the operator has been trying to break it with one hand tied behind their back.

What genuine cooperation would actually look like

If the constraint is the architecture, the remedy must be architectural, and it requires that every party move at once. The point is not that BPJS Ketenagakerjaan is blameless. It is that no single actor can close a thirty-point coverage gap alone. Here is what the actors’ orchestration could look like:

The government holds the heaviest instruments. The Finance Ministry should carve a contribution subsidy for the poorest informal workers out of the State Budget, a PBI for employment modeled after the health version, beginning with the cheapest and highest-impact floor (work accident and death coverage, JKK and JKM, at roughly Rp 16,800 a month) before layering pensions on top.

Enrolment should become automatic immediately after a regulation is formalized, bolted onto the OSS business-licensing system, the issuance of a business identification number (NIB), tax registration, and the Regsosek social registry. This will ensure that protection follows the worker instead of waiting for the worker to discover it.

The Manpower Ministry must properly resource its Directorate General for Supervision and Occupational Safety and Health, with more inspectors reaching the district level and a live data bridge to BPJS so that non-compliance becomes visible and actionable. And the DJSN must finally start coordinating rather than merely spectating, gradually restoring JHT’s retirement-preservation purpose.

Employers will comply when evasion costs more than compliance. Registration should be tied to procurement eligibility, license renewal, and tax and export clearances, so that the billion-rupiah fine written into the 2011 law stops being a useless deterrent it is today. Firms that comply should be rewarded with recognition and lighter reporting, not merely spared punishment.

Workers, especially in the informal and online gig economy, will not enroll on their own through a counter they do not know exists. Gig workers should be automatically enrolled, with the right to opt out, as a condition for platforms (e.g., Gojek, Grab, Maxim) to operate at all.

Everyone else is best reached through the associations they already trust, the ojol communities, the market-trader cooperatives, the fishing and farming groups, rather than through atomized individual sign-ups. And, importantly, JHT must stop being treated as a severance ATM, which requires both financial literacy and a redesign that makes the long-term products genuinely worth holding.

Trade unions, including this author’s own, must own their share of the problem too. The 2022 campaign that forced the reversal of JHT preservation protected short-term liquidity at the direct expense of long-term retirement adequacy.

The labor movement should now spend its considerable mobilizing power on the opposite goal: an adequate retirement pension (Jaminan Pensiun) and stronger job-loss insurance (Jaminan Kehilangan Pekerjaan), so that defending workers no longer means defending their own poverty in old age.

Unions should also drag the tripartite forums from grievance toward genuine co-design, and extend their organizing to the informal and platform workers that the whole system currently forgets.

This is what cooperation between the State and individuals, in Beveridge’s phrase, would actually require. Not just a slogan, but a synchronized set of decisions by the very actors the original article left out of frame.

Let’s stop asking the wrong question

So the question is not whether BPJS Ketenagakerjaan can save Indonesia’s vulnerable workforce. The honest question is whether the other actors will finally do their part by writing the laws, funding the subsidy, and staffing the enforcement that an operator cannot conjure on its own. The agency can carry the load. But it cannot be asked to build the road, pass the budget, and hire the inspectors while doing so.

The time bomb is real. But it was assembled in the ministries’ and the parliament’s meeting rooms, not in the operator’s offices. Pointing the spotlight at BPJS Ketenagakerjaan makes for a tidy villain. But it also lets the people holding the detonator stay comfortably out in the shadows.

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The latest K-Drama craze, “Teach You A Lesson,” has sparked heated discussion about the roles of schools, teachers, and the government in teaching kids to be good people. Watching it made me think about our own education system: Do we have anything in our curriculum that ensures our kids know how to be good people and, by extension, good citizens?

In the upcoming 2029 elections, Gen Z (born 1997-2012) is predicted to dominate the voting demographic. Meaning, the next election year will be a big day for the digital natives and, for some, first-time voters.

Voting is a pivotal decision-making process for a good citizen. The question is: are they prepared? One is choosing their leaders and regulators, so two minutes in a voting booth could affect a voter’s life for years to come (it is, quite literally, life-changing). So, shouldn’t voting be something that one is well-prepared for? And even more importantly, shouldn’t students be aware of their duties after casting their ballots?

If a student could spend days and nights preparing for university entrance exams, shouldn’t an important civic duty get a somewhat similar preparation?

Gen Z has proven to be more politically aware. Thanks to the internet, they grew up with endless information at their fingertips, which has affected their media consumption and literacy, as well as their exposure to global socio-political and economic issues. A UK study in 2024 even showed that Gen Z are more willing to express their moral convictions, including through civil disobedience. In a nutshell, younger generations are more digitally literate and unafraid to express themselves.

But one question remains: Where is the best place for young adults (17- to 19-year-olds) to learn about this, if not school, where they already spend a great chunk of their time?

We already have the answer to that: Civic Education, or, as you might be more familiar with it, ‘PPKn’. The tool for teaching kids about civic duties has been part of our curriculum for decades. Though whether or not it has been effective–or even enough–remains to be seen.

It’s time we take PPKn at school seriously

Let’s first walk down memory lane. What do you remember from your PPKn class at school? We had it in elementary school, junior high, high school, and even at universities. But if you’re like me (the old me, at least), you might only remember being taught that civic duties are helping the elderly to cross the street, never skipping classes, or joining the neighborhood rotating night watch (siskamling).

That was how a “good citizen” was portrayed for years, and unfortunately, it is still the case today. Grab a 12th-grade PPKn book now, and this is what you will find.

Civic education is one of the most strategic platforms through which a state can deliberately reproduce its ideological values across generations. In Indonesia, PPKn clearly reflects this pattern. It has undergone multiple name changes and curricular overhauls, but its core logic has remained consistent; it adapts to serve the political needs of the era in which it operates.

The pattern is visible across our history. After independence, our civic education focused on instilling the value of patriotism and guiding the newborn country as it began its journey. Over time, its scope expanded to discuss the role of government, civil rights, and civic duties. During the New Order, PPKn taught the country’s history, our geographical presence, our constitutions, and the manifestation of Pancasila as our core value.

So, is PPKn, our civic education, good enough? Before we answer that question, let’s take a quick world tour.

PPKn around the world

In democratic countries, civic education is a platform for nation-building. Most civic education subjects worldwide cover topics such as history, core values and principles, culture and norms, and political awareness. Some Scandinavian countries (e.g., Denmark, Finland, and Sweden) even incorporate intergenerational topics such as climate change and justice, digital citizenship, and economic inequality.

Some newly democratic countries, on the other hand, shared a common tendency to teach their “dark” history by building the discourse around “unity”.

South Africa, for example, has reformed its high school history curriculum to “heal the divisions of the past” — taking lessons from its painful apartheid history to build a united and democratic country. Another example is Rwanda, which in 2007 launched its civic education program, called “Itorero,” aimed at enabling Rwandans to reacquaint themselves with the values and taboos of their culture under a post-genocide government.

What about Indonesia?

Well, if it’s up to me, I say that our civic education has long been stuck in a superficial portrayal of a utopian society, in which no conflict is ever clearly and rightfully explained (why did conflicts happen, and how?), and reality is too distant (or perhaps too scary) to be put in the book.

Bad things that have happened in our past, particularly those we can clearly draw lessons from, are just swept under a metaphorical rug. Take the New Order-era mass murders. In PPKn books, we are taught that murder is wrong and violates basic human rights. Yet, the books never fairly mention why and how the mass murders that happened during 1965-1966 happened, who ordered them, and why communism was to blame. Students at school are expected (or rather, forced) to go on with their lives without learning about the dark sides of our history, pretending all is well.

It is as if, no matter our past, as long as we help the elderly cross the street, never skip classes, and join siskamling, our democratic society would be fine.

But this kind of civic education ultimately risks offering our younger generations smoke and mirrors about democracy, civic duties, and being a good citizen.

If we want the younger generation to actually be better citizens who exercise their duties and know how to demand their rights from the state, so that they can live better lives in a well-maintained democratic society, we need to start taking PPKn seriously.

Reforming the education space, even just one subject, is a complicated task that would require years to complete and involve multiple actors. But what can we start doing now?

Reimagining the PPKn that we deserve

First, we have to rebrand the idea of what a “good citizen” is.

Being a good citizen can actually take many forms: paying our taxes, keeping public areas clean, respecting different opinions, and following the law. But in a growing democracy, good citizens are also responsible for keeping the government in check.

This is what is currently missing from our PPKn curriculum. Yes, it already taught about voting as our constitutional right. It also taught about voter abstention (golput) and its implications for democracy. But it stops there. It doesn’t teach students what happens after we elect a leader.

A good PPKn should teach that a citizen’s duty does not stop at the voting ballot. Monitoring, offering opinions and feedback, and criticizing policies that seem not to be working are also duties a good citizen must perform.

Civic education should inform students that criticizing the shortcomings of the government, state administrators, policymakers, and their policies or programs is a civic duty. This would prevent the false belief that many, unfortunately, subscribe to today: that criticism of the government is an attack on democracy.

Here is an analogy. If we love someone, don’t we want our partner to be the best version of themselves—to fulfill their potential? Wouldn’t we want to stop them from making the same mistakes over and over again? Apply that to our relationship with our country, and it would be the same.

Second, talk about real problems in class.

PPKn teachers can start by encouraging students to talk about the past or any ongoing issues in their own city. Let them realize that they do not live in a vacuum.

For example, students in Bekasi and Tangerang can talk about the waste management problem in their city; students in Gresik can talk about the correlation of growing industries in their city to people’s quality of life (or the lack thereof); students in Jakarta can talk about how integrated public transportation can change people behavior and relationships to green public spaces; or students in Maluku can talk about why renewable energy options like solar panels are more reliable than state-provided electricity.

My point is that schools should broaden their students’ horizons. Then, only after the class has become a safe place for students to breakdown real problems in their surroundings, teachers then can tune up the conversation level to more complex issues, such as Indonesia’s dark history of mass murders and activists kidnapping in President Suharto’s New Order dictatorship, or signs of state’s oppressions to our rights and freedom of expression, or the juxtaposition between the Nutritious Free Meal (MBG) program’s well intent and its problematic implementation on the ground.

Third, “overlay” the online world into the classroom.

The internet is a whole different world, and Gen Z and their younger counterparts, Gen Alpha, spend half their time there. They not only learn and get information online, but also participate in political discourse, build community, and shape new culture.

Civic education should actively respond to this by incorporating a digital literacy curriculum. In class, students (and teachers) can learn together to differentiate real and fake news, critically assess AI content, and detect misinformation, cybercrime, and cyberbullying. Students and teachers can also benefit from understanding algorithmic biases, such as confirmation bias, sampling bias, and representation bias.

This digital fluency has direct implications for civic participation.

With the abundance of information available online, young people theoretically have every opportunity to be well-informed before they cast a vote — candidate track records, professional backgrounds, and business affiliations are all publicly accessible.

Teachers can play a crucial role here: guiding students to verify whether what they read is accurate and not misleading, and facilitating open, critical discussions about power structures in politics.

When students encounter information that a political candidate has ties to or is heavily affiliated with certain business interests, they should be equipped to ask how much that would factor into the candidate’s future decision-making — and whether the candidate’s personal interests might override their mandate to serve the public.

That kind of critical readiness is ultimately what prepares students for election years.

Lastly, the way students learn about citizenship should change.

We can learn from Germany for this one, unironically. Their foundational frameworks for civic and political education, called the Beutelsbach Consensus, adopt three principles:

First, civic education classes should be free from indoctrination. Students should not be overwhelmed, caught off guard, or hindered in forming an independent judgment. Second, controversial issues must be taught as controversial. Teachers should not, by any means, only present their own opinions or favor only one opinion. Different opinions should be discussed and compared. Third, students should be given fair weights to express their personal interests. Teachers must facilitate students’ analysis of real political situations.

While that model is still being tested for its effectiveness to protect democracy, we can learn a thing or two. The banking model of education — where teachers remain the sole authority in the classroom to “deposit” knowledge into students, a practice Paulo Freire criticized — is no longer an appropriate tool for cultivating critical thinkers.

To counter that passive model, Freire proposed “problem-posing education”, where teachers and students co-produce knowledge and co-examine their reality through dialogues, reflections, and mutual engagements.

A bet for cultural change

Look, I’m arguing for a cultural change here. Let us take a minute to imagine.

What would it look like in 2029 if young, first-time voters learned this version of PPKn? Would they critically assess the presidential candidates’ track records in class with their peers and teachers? Would learning about Indonesia’s dark history inform their voting decision to not repeat the cycle? Would openly discussing political dynasties discourage Tangerang high school students from voting for a candidate who will retain power for years?

It is only in my imagination (and now yours) today, but changes like these can, and will, happen if we design our civic education responsibly.

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This article first appeared in Kenapa Harus Peduli in Indonesian, written in response to The Reformist’s vol. 28 on cultural heritage and museum management reform.

In recent years, public discourse about cultural heritage has gotten increasingly popular. At first glance, it gives the impression that the state has been paying serious attention to the largely ‘abandoned’ cultural sector. However, such narratives primarily grapple with surface-level debates that overlook a fundamental issue: how is culture actually understood, and for whose interests are these agendas executed?

That is why we found this Reformist article titled “Why is it so difficult for ‘Wonderful Indonesia’ to make culture a priority?” both intriguing and ironic.

First of all, we’d like to concede that the author has commendably mapped valid problems. The Indonesian government has indeed paid little attention to its cultural heritage, as proven by the lack of budgetary support. They also astutely contextualize the repatriation of artifacts within the history of Dutch colonialism in the archipelago.

The problem, however, is the author’s state-centric approach, reducing the cultural crisis to mere managerial issues. Cultural heritage is imagined as an inanimate object that needs to be “managed well” in museums, strictly through administrative reform.

While this perspective is not entirely wrong, it becomes problematic when it fails to recognize that neither cultural heritage nor museums is ever a neutral entity.

We’d like to offer three critical notes. First, The Reformist’s article positions the government as the primary actor in managing cultural heritage, while it might not be. Second, the article’s illusion of decolonization stops at the repatriation of artifacts, without dismantling coloniality. Third, the article tends to center institutional reform as the primary solution without examining its accompanying limits and contradictions.

What is a “cultural heritage” and who decides?

Just as our understanding of inheritance often becomes an object of dispute, cultural heritage is equally an arena of contestation. Something becomes cultural heritage not simply because of its high intrinsic value, but because an authority in power deems it worthy of preservation and institutionalization.

This dynamic is captured by the concept of the Authorized Heritage Discourse (AHD), which describes the professional practices that institutionalize cultural heritage to legitimize an “official interpretation” of the past. The government has a structural advantage that enables it to play a dominant role in defining the nation-state’s identity.

In the context of The Reformist’s article, AHD is highly apparent when the Indonesian government is positioned as the principal actor in determining the direction of cultural preservation. But studies have indicated that this framework poses significant problems for public participation, or the lack thereof.

The current regulation, Law No. 11/2010 on Cultural Heritage, has yet to fully grant latitude to non-governmental actors to independently determine what cultural heritage is important to them and the best ways to preserve it for future generations.

Indigenous peoples and local communities are treated as the Other, whose voices and knowledge are not truly considered a valid epistemic foundation. Furthermore, heritage discourses tend to fixate on material dimensions alone.

Stripped of its living context, cultural heritage is prone to being reduced to something purely technical: a problem that can be resolved simply through governance reform, institutional modernization, and regulatory improvements.

It is unsurprising, then, that the “success” of cultural heritage is measured by how professionally it is managed and by the extent to which it meets global standards that stem directly from Western knowledge paradigms.

Half-hearted decolonization

If we are to truly address the “elephant in the room” when talking about Indonesia’s cultural heritage issues, the next necessary step should be to deconstruct the reality that its management systems and interpretations remain highly centered on the interests of those in power—and the coloniality that has yet to crumble.

Obviously, Indonesia is no longer under Dutch East Indies rule, but many of its cultural heritage institutions operate with a mindset akin to that of the former colonizer. Even the National Museum of Indonesia participates in reproducing the colonial gaze in its representation of Indonesian history.

This coloniality feels increasingly palpable when we observe the celebrations surrounding the repatriation of artifacts to Indonesia.

Repatriation becomes a stage for state political performance; celebrated as a diplomatic victory and a resurgence of national dignity, with state ceremonies and heroic narratives about bringing the nation’s history home.

Cultural heritage, here, manifests as “symbolic capital”. A value of prestige and honor that converts into political legitimacy for the regime.

Such is the very issue that needs to be criticized about the approach taken in The Reformist article. The author moves too swiftly toward institutional optimism without sufficiently challenging the colonial nodes that still shape the understanding and management of cultural heritage in Indonesia today.

We could see it in the way the state fails to resolve various crucial issues within the domestic cultural landscape, from evicting indigenous people from their living spaces and the commercialization and illegal sale of artifacts, to the destruction of cultural heritage and the marginalization of local communities from decision-making processes related to their cultures.

Indigenous communities’ cultural heritage, having been uprooted from its living context by European colonialism during the Dutch occupation, is at risk of undergoing a second uprooting through the centralization of Indonesia’s cultural heritage authority.

Repatriation brings heritage items home—yes. But it merely shifts the center of historical legitimacy from the colonial metropole to the national capital.

Another problem arises when museum reform in Indonesia is directed to follow the standards of Western institutions. The Reformist article views the British Museum model as a crucial step toward more professional museum governance. The issue is that the British Museum itself grew from the accumulation of colonial wealth and to this day remains the most naked symbol of colonialism itself.

Therefore, we must be deeply cautious when adopting such institutional models, as blindly replicating them risks importing the very power dynamics we seek to dismantle.

Reform, or commodification?

During his tenure as the Director-General of Culture in the then-Ministry of Education and Culture, Hilmar Farid proposed improving and utilizing “cultural infrastructure” as a form of “cultural investment”. But the use of cultural infrastructure, including museums, should not limit public participation, technological upgrades, or improvements in internal management.

Enthusiasm for the repatriated artifacts must be followed by practical understanding of their management and use, for the good of the people, education, and science. Even if some repatriated artifacts possess neither sacred value nor functional use in our modern society, access to them as research objects must be guaranteed.

Law no. 66/2015 on Museums specifically mentions the use of museums, among other things, for research, thereby making such research compulsory for museum administrators, individuals, or customary law communities (masyarakat hukum adat) under the authorization of the head of the museum.

But despite being legally mandated, information on the authorization process for conducting research in museums is not yet widely available. Thus, the stereotype of museums as decrepit institutions hinders effective research efforts.

The establishment of the Culture Ministry, however, has led to significant changes in the conception of Indonesia’s cultural policies, focus, and budgets. But even before making Cultural Affairs a standalone ministry, the establishment of the Indonesian Heritage Agency (IHA) as a Public Service Agency (BLU), which manages state-owned museums nationwide, shifts a considerable share of operational costs onto museums, forcing management to address funding challenges.

This has led museums to be rebranded as recreational destinations. For instance, the installation of Imersifa room in the Indonesian National Museum, which on the surface provides a pragmatic solution: the public goes to the museum, pays the entry ticket, enjoys the installation, takes some pictures, and then departs.

This approach to public participation could be misinterpreted as viewing the public as a market for the museum, shifting museums from activating their spatial place as a part of public space in a balanced way to extreme commodification. The selection of artifacts installed in the exhibition hall and the museum’s main narratives would become subjects that constantly adapt to changing public tastes and political interests.

Indeed, museums have recently become photogenic weekend destinations, yet all the artifacts on display become meaningless. It looks modern, but the relationship between society and its cultural heritage becomes severed and distant.

If we keep on positioning the state as the authoritative party on interpreting and developing Indonesian culture, every change of ruling groups in Indonesian politics, with their own logic on the collection management issues, would impact the public access to the artifacts and the kind of narratives that have been manufactured by it, in turn reducing public initiatives.

Beyond our time

Cultural heritage always becomes an arena of negotiation between political and economic interests. It also became an arena for creating kinds of memories that would be passed down to future generations.

Museum reforms should be understood as an interactive process. Both the public and the government should act as equal partners in utilizing the obtained cultural heritage for the betterment of all. Limiting our view to the government as the only authoritative party would narrow the room for exploration together. The public has the right and the capacity to participate even more deeply in the cultural ecosystem, since they are, in fact, the main engine driving it.

The repatriated cultural heritage as a part of the assets of the Indonesian cultural ecosystem offers massive potential to explore new fields of research, development of new disciplines and methodological approaches, and even provides a new career pool for humanities scholars and workers, especially with the emergence of new opportunities for researching the artifacts, or other activation programs.

Following the 2022-2023 Indonesian repatriation program, the Cultural Heritage Scholarship Programme for Indonesia (CHS) was established in 2024 through a joint Dutch-Indonesian effort, targeting early scholars and master’s students from Indonesia interested in enrolling in graduate programs at four leading Dutch universities.

Intensive cooperation between Indonesia and the Netherlands also commenced via the Rijksdienst van het Cultureel Erfgoed (RCE), which itself is part of the Ministry of Education, Culture and Science of the Kingdom of the Netherlands. Other overseas counterparts on the joint works also include the cultural consultative agency DutchCulture and a bipartisan agreement between Dutch and Indonesian universities.

The “caderization” of new researchers using education as the channel is the first important step. Preparing the implementation of the new knowledge gained by these first waves of cultural heritage specialists who are intended to manage the Dutch repatriated artifacts should become the next top priority.

Another issue is knowledge reproduction. The development of cultural heritage management in Indonesia should never depend solely on frameworks and methods derived from foreign countries or foreign researchers. Specific problems of cultural heritage management in Indonesia would never be similar with other countries.

There would also be different interpretations of the artifacts and their utilization for the Indonesian public. This would breed different results, methods, theories, and actions. Foreign researchers’ contributions in this field should be positioned as guidelines and tools for comparison.

Active public participation in cultural heritage issues would help foster a closer connection with the objects themselves, ensuring a more reflective and grounded approach to the creation of Indonesian history as a shared collective memory. This subsequently produced a more critical approach to Indonesian national consciousness.

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The authors are analysts at the Supreme Audit Agency (BPK). This article reflects the authors’ own analysis and views and does not necessarily represent the official positions of their employers or those of The Reformist.

Every year, over 200,000 Indonesian Muslims perform the annual Hajj pilgrimage in Saudi Arabia. With millions of registrants, hundreds of thousands of annual departures, and coordination across domestic agencies and partners in Saudi Arabia, managing the Hajj is one of Indonesia’s most complex public services.

A sharp lens on these complexities can be found in the 2025 Hajj audits conducted by the Supreme Audit Agency (BPK). The report flagged financial inconsistencies and highlighted the need to address segments of Hajj governance that must be accounted for.

Successful Hajj governance should not be measured only by the absence of major issues during the pilgrimage. It requires fair queue management, rigorous data verification, clear cost structures, and readiness of health and operational services before any pilgrim touches down in Saudi Arabia.

A previous Reformist article has noted public expectations for the Hajj around four key principles: transparency, care, reliability, and spirituality. This is where the 2025 BPK audit findings sharpen the discussion, providing valuable insights into principles that must be translated into tangible controls well before pilgrims depart every year.

Satisfaction is commendable, but it does not tell the whole tale

The 2025 Hajj saw several positive results: the Pilgrims Satisfaction Index rose from 88.20 to 88.46, over 99.9 percent of the pilgrim quota was filled, and pilgrims received improved meal services. The government also introduced Istithaah (the Islamic principle that a pilgrim must be physically, mentally, and financially capable of performing Hajj) requirements before final payments are made. These achievements are important and deserve recognition, since organizing departures and services for so many pilgrims in a short time can be very challenging.

But satisfaction indexes alone do not capture the full pilgrimage experience. For example, it does not capture whether the queue was fair, whether procurement was properly controlled, or whether public funds reached the right people. A pilgrim can feel well served in Makkah, while the system that determined their departure contained weaknesses in queue integrity, digital control, and fiscal discipline.

1. The integrity problem behind Indonesia’s Hajj waitlist

One main concern from the audit findings is that planning to fill the regular Hajj quota is incomplete and does not fully comply with Law No. 8/2019 on Hajj and Umrah Pilgrimage Administration. Indonesia’s national Hajj registration and queue management database (SISKOHAT) remains faulty with glaring weaknesses.

For instance, the system lacks sufficient controls to verify data for merging mahram—a male guardian whom Islamic law requires to accompany a woman during Hajj, typically a husband or close blood relative—nor can it transfer quota numbers from ineligible pilgrims to new replacements.

Other weaknesses include missing checks for file completeness, reliance on manual verification, inadequate control over verification steps, the use of shared accounts, and poor separation of duties. These increase the risk of abuse and can delay eligible pilgrims.

Another finding revealed that Rp 161.73 billion in public Hajj funds was spent to cover the pilgrimage costs of 4,760 individuals who did not meet departure requirements. This group includes 504 pilgrims who had performed the pilgrimage within the past ten years, 2,682 with non-familial mahram combinations, and 1,574 with portion transfers that did not comply with regulations.

With long queues, every seat matters. Poor verification burdens potential pilgrims who are sidelined despite meeting all Hajj requirements.

2. More providers, more coordination gaps

In 2025, the Multisyarikah model—a system in which Hajj services are distributed across multiple providers in Saudi Arabia—was used for the first time, allowing services to be shared among several providers. However, this poses significant coordination challenges, especially when a flight group is linked to more than one provider.

BPK finds that visa services for regular pilgrims are still lacking. Preparing pre-manifests and manifests is not fully in sync with how services are divided among companies. As a result, some groups are served by more than one company, and service allocation does not always follow the rules.

These coordination problems are especially clear in Armuzna services, the collective term for the three sacred sites of Arafah, Muzdalifah, and Mina, where key Hajj rituals are performed. Changes to the departure plan were not well planned. This led to delays, insufficient transport fleets from Muzdalifah to Mina, too many pilgrims at the markaz, overcrowded tents, and supplies being sent to the wrong places. These problems show the need for clearer work instructions and better coordination in using the Multisyarikah model.

3. The medical service blind spots of Hajj administration

Health services also need special attention. The BPK report found that some health goods and services have not fully met contract terms or have not been used enough. The Indonesian Hajj Health Clinic in Mecca is underused because its Civil Defense certificate—an official emergency-safety license required by the Saudi Civil Defense before any facility can legally operate—had not yet been issued at the time of the audit.

Medicines and health supplies worth Rp 2.61 billion were also reported to have a shorter shelf life than legally required, meaning that they will be ineffective come next year’s Hajj season.

On top of that, Rp 1.74 billion in polio vaccines have not been used despite Indonesian pilgrims being elderly or having pre-existing health risks. The volume of resources maintained does not align with actual needs in the field, resulting in public funds tied up in vaccine stocks that fail to provide adequate protection.

In this regard, the planning and procurement stages of Hajj health-related goods and services must be tied to verified needs and certification, which are to be completed before the season commences. That way, the government can detect weaknesses and mitigate risks before departure, rather than rediscovering them in the next audit report.

4. Addressing the corruption in the room

Improving Hajj governance also means looking at how costs are structured. BPK found that last year’s pilgrimage included Rp 64.37 billion in costs that were not directly related to pilgrim services. These include management activities, financial manager fees, financial operations, monitoring and evaluation, and support for asset maintenance in Indonesia. Taken together, these concerns paint a sad picture of potential rent-seeking that has no place for a sacred event like the Hajj.

Some governance activities are necessary to organize the pilgrimage, but it is important to separate costs that directly benefit pilgrims from those that are purely administrative or supportive. Without this clear separation, the Rp 87.4 million pilgrimage price point—determined by the government—becomes opaque, raising corruption concerns that have long plagued the Hajj sector.

Reforming the sacred, one institution at a time

Corruption and rent-seeking in Hajj affairs are not novel. A few years ago, corruption investigators alleged irregularities in the allocation of additional Hajj quotas, with state losses calculated at Rp 622 billion during the 2023-2024 season. In 2014, a former minister was convicted of misusing state Hajj funds. The structural lesson is consistent. Allocation rules that can be altered through opaque discretion create an avoidable risk of corruption.

Fixing this requires more than better administration. It requires governance architecture. The most urgent starting point is the institutions that govern the Hajj themselves.

SISKOHAT, for example, should function as an auditable rights engine rather than a passive database with no executive functions. Saudi Arabia’s Nusuk platform offers a useful design reference by integrating registration, verification, payment, and service authorization into a more traceable digital process. Indonesia does not need to replicate Nusuk, but it may benefit from the same design principle.

The Indonesian government should require Hajj authorities to build a parallel set of risk indicators that track system health before pilgrims depart. These indicators should cover visa mismatch rates, manifest revisions, procurement exceptions, unresolved complaints, and the follow-up status of BPK’s recommendations.

Public dashboards need not expose private pilgrim data. But they should make governance performance visible and contestable. A system that publishes its own risk scorecard before each departure season signals that it takes accountability seriously. One that waits for the next audit to surface the same recurring problems does not.

Indonesia already has the institutional experience, digital infrastructure, and audit diagnosis needed to improve Hajj governance. What remains is the discipline to turn them into enforceable controls before the next season begins.

Indonesian pilgrims deserve institutional justice, especially when millions of them have spent decades waiting patiently behind queues that can span over three decades, whilst having to deposit tens of millions of Rupiah, for a once-in-a-lifetime sacred act like the Hajj pilgrimage.

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“A policymaker is cursed to live in the second-best world,” warned Chatib Basri, the former finance minister who prefers to be called Dede (‘without Pak, please!’), as he has reminded me more than once.

Anyone who studied economics or public policy understands this: at its core, public policy is about tradeoffs. When faced with Options A and B, choosing one means letting go of some degree of opportunity cost. The discipline is all about minimizing this ‘loss’ across scenarios. For example:

• Should a government increase the number of sugar imports? Hold off, and domestic prices spike, leaving households squeezed and headlines unforgiving. Act too quickly, and the imports flood a market that didn’t need flooding, hollowing out local farmers.

• Technology C or W for a digitalization program? Option W avoids locking in annual subscription costs but demands a steep upfront price. Option C spreads the cost over time but ties the agency to a vendor for years.

• Should Rp 268 trillion go towards the free nutritious meal (MBG) program? For this one, I’m not entirely sure what the deliberation looked like. You’d have to ask the people in the room.

No decision can please everyone. There will always be winners and losers in any scenario. That is why criminalizing public policy decisions has a fundamental flaw: it fails to understand what public policy actually is about.

Of everything I studied in public policy school, this insight blew my mind the most. Managing something as complex and layered as national-level governance means accounting for a vast range of risks, including those that cannot be predicted at the time a decision is made.

A good decision, therefore, cannot be measured by good outcomes alone. It must be evaluated by the quality of the decision-making process itself:

1. Was it made based on the best available expertise and information at the time the decision was taken?

2. Was it made in consultation with those who would be significantly affected?

The world is puzzled as Indonesia continues to criminalize policy decisions

A policymaker is accountable for weighing all factors carefully, but they should be given room for bad outcomes.

When a legal provision is defined with rubber-like elasticity, every single decision becomes vulnerable to potential criminalization. Especially when, as we are all well aware, judicial processes are not always free from political pressure.

It’s worth acknowledging that not all cases are identical in degree:

• Tom Lembong’s sugar import case last year comes closest to a pure example. The decision he made—authorizing sugar imports to stabilize supply—was a textbook tradeoff call.

• Nadiem Makarim’s and Ibrahim Arief’s Google Chromebook case is more complicated. There are unresolved conflict-of-interest allegations that go beyond policy judgment.

Regardless, what these cases expose is a law that allows the line between administrative error and criminal liability to be drawn by whoever holds political power at the time, despite the absence of criminal intent.

Being a policymaker is a moral vocation that demands the highest level of competence. It is a job requiring genuinely hard skills, but one that is also a calling. Policymaking should be an arena filled with the nation’s best problem-solvers, with the strongest moral fiber. Criminalizing their judgment—without evidence of corrupt intent—does not invoke justice. It empties the room of anyone with the audacity to make hard calls.

So how do we prevent or punish a policy that actually harms the public?

The answer is governance. We can design processes that enable deliberation and accountability to occur before and during decision-making, rather than retroactively through criminal charges.

1. Layers of bureaucracy within the executive. There’s a reason mandates and authority are distributed across the President, ministers, and layers of civil servants below them. Those layers exist to create filters before any decision touches the ground.

2. Legislative and judicial checks and balances. For consequential decisions—like the national budget—the executive must secure legislative approval. In a healthy democracy, elected representatives have the power to halt executive policies deemed harmful.

3. Meaningful public participation. From formal mechanisms like Regional Development Planning Forums (Musrenbang) and public hearings to social media and street protests, governments should have ways to genuinely understand what the public wants—and why.

4. Capitalize on the electoral cycle. If nothing else, casting our vote is how we choose whether to continue a policy direction—or change course entirely.

I said that to my husband after watching the verdict videos for Ibrahim Arief and the prosecution’s charges against Nadiem. I cried for quite a while that night. I didn’t know why it caught me off guard because I already expected this to happen—I am not naïve about the politics of law and what is at play here.

My grief, I think, stems from witnessing the loss of humanity and agency of the entire legal system under political pressure.

I would never fully understand what incentives or threats each legal professional faces when they sit in that prosecutor’s chair or on that judicial bench. It’s impossible to know what they’re thinking, who they need to protect, or what other difficult considerations they carry.

What I do know is that millions are watching and understanding what is happening (the context beyond whether Nadiem is guilty or not guilty), worrying over the same potential injustice, while those with slightly more agency to change the outcome decided to stay put.

In the middle of all this, I hold on to a thread of hope in Josepha, the high school student from Pontianak who called out the panel of ‘expert’ judges in the Lomba Cerdas Cermat MPR. She used her agency to resist injustice.

Sometimes, what separates us as human beings is the split-second when we get to choose to let something happen or actually attempt to do something about it. Or in her case: to raise a hand, question a verdict, and try to change the outcome.

Perhaps we are all deeply invested in Josepha and Team C, because if we can’t get justice anywhere else, let us at least protect it for the next generation.

May those who still have the privilege to resist injustice keep resisting, no matter how small the space may be.

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Indonesia’s digital financial ecosystem is now expanding at unprecedented speed, but regulatory scrutiny has struggled to keep pace with the growing influence of social media personalities who provide investment commentary to millions of followers.

This governance gap was sharply exposed in February 2026, when the Financial Services Authority (OJK) imposed a Rp 5.35 billion fine against Belvin Tannadi, an online financial influencer, for manipulating stock prices and disseminating misleading information through social media platforms.

Investigators found that the influencer used multiple securities accounts to “pump and dump” shares of at least three listed companies, posting promotional recommendations while executing counter-directional trades and profiting from followers’ reactions. The conduct was found to violate Articles 90, 91, and 92 of Law No. 4/2023 on the Development and Strengthening of the Financial Sector (UU P2SK), which prohibit market manipulation and deceptive practices in the capital market. This episode underscores how unchecked social media influence can distort markets and undermine investor protection.

The problem extends beyond isolated misconduct. Across social media platforms, influencers routinely promote cryptocurrency tokens, speculative stocks, and alternative investment schemes, and often frame their content as “financial education” while monetizing engagement through advertising, affiliate links, or undisclosed commercial arrangements.

Retail investors, as many of them are first-time participants in capital markets, may struggle to distinguish between independent analysis and paid persuasion. In volatile markets, such narratives can amplify herd behavior and exacerbate losses. Without clear regulatory classification, enforcement agencies face difficulty determining when online commentary crosses the threshold into regulated advisory activity.

Indonesia’s legal framework for financial advisory services remains anchored in the Capital Markets Law and implementing regulations issued by the OJK. Licensed investment advisors must satisfy competency standards, ethical obligations, and fit-and-proper requirements. These safeguards exist because financial advice directly influences capital allocation and public trust. However, the regime was designed for conventional advisory firms, not a decentralized digital ecosystem where influence is algorithm-driven and monetized through visibility.

The core legal question is thus substantive rather than formal. If a person provides investment recommendations that influence market behavior and receives economic benefit directly or indirectly, should that activity fall within the scope of regulated advisory services?

If regulatory responsibility depends solely on formal titles, then digital actors can operate in a gray zone while licensed professionals bear disproportionate compliance burdens. Such asymmetry undermines fairness and weakens investor protection. The OJK possesses the authority to clarify this boundary through interpretative guidance or regulatory refinement.

Law often trails behind technological innovation and social development, resulting in delayed and fragmented regulation. Proactive measures, such as predictive frameworks and comparative studies, are essential for governing emerging innovations, particularly in the financial sector.

Regulating financial influencers

The OJK has adopted a regulatory sandbox approach, allowing new business models to be tested in isolation from general regulations, helping authorities assess potential risks before full-scale implementation. Under OJK Regulation No. 3/2024, which replaced OJK Regulation No. 13/2018, digital financial business models, processes, and products may undergo limited testing before obtaining full licensing. The challenge lies in striking the right balance between oversight and innovation.

The sandbox framework should extend beyond business models to include influencers or other entities functionally tied to financial innovation. Such an approach is critical to prevent individuals from exploiting regulatory gaps for personal gain at the expense of retail investors. While criminal provisions exist to address violations, preventive and administrative regulations are equally vital, ensuring that punitive measures remain a last resort rather than the primary regulatory response.

Comparative jurisdictions provide useful guidance. In the United Kingdom, the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) requires authorization for regulated investment advice and has warned that unauthorized financial promotion on social media may constitute criminal offenses.

In the United States, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA) enforce registration requirements and fiduciary duties under the Investment Advisers Act. Enforcement increasingly targets unregistered crypto promoters and influencers who fail to disclose paid endorsements. The principle is consistent: the substance of influence determines responsibility.

In China, financial advisors are overseen by the National Administration of Financial Regulation (NAFR) as of 2023, while the China Securities Regulatory Commission (CSRC) continues to supervise securities and futures markets. Regulations require firms and individuals to hold CSRC licenses, a framework that has now been extended to internet-based financial services. Authorities have introduced rules to address risks linked to online platforms, covering cross-border service provision, internet information management, and activities such as client profiling, asset allocation, and trade execution.

Indonesia stands at a regulatory crossroad. Digital participation in the capital market is expanding exponentially, particularly among younger demographics. Which is why the objective is not to criminalize online discussion, but to ensure that those who materially shape investment behavior meet proportionate standards of competence, transparency, and accountability.

A credible reform agenda should therefore begin with definitional clarity. The OJK must articulate when digital financial commentary becomes a regulated advisory activity. Disclosure obligations should apply to monetized investment content. Coordination between financial regulators and digital platforms should be institutionalized to address cross-sector risk. Trust is the foundation of the capital market, and it cannot thrive in regulatory ambiguity.

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The strains around the Strait of Hormuz once again highlight how fragile global energy systems can be. For Indonesia, the risk is notably critical because the country consumes around 1.6 million barrels of oil per day, while domestic production has declined to only around 600 thousand barrels per day. The nearly 1 million barrels-per-day gap must then be met through imports. Instability in strategic chokepoints like the Hormuz is thus a direct threat to our energy security, not merely a distant geopolitical disruption, given our exposure to global supply routes.

It is tempting to conclude that Indonesia is facing an energy crisis. But is it really?

​Traditionally, an energy crisis is associated with visible disruptions: blackouts, fuel shortages, or soaring prices. Indonesia has experienced some of these pressures, including rising energy subsidies, vulnerability to the fluctuations of global oil prices, and increasing dependence on imported fuel, though not yet at the level of systemic collapse seen in some countries.

Today, Indonesia is facing a more subtle and structural challenge than simply a supply crisis: a mismatch between the country’s energy consumption trends, resource base, and long-term system readiness.

Indonesia’s energy challenge is paradoxical: We hold vast coal reserves (the world’s 3rd-largest coal producer) and are among the countries with the largest renewable energy potential (estimated at more than 3,600 GW, including solar and geothermal). However, we are still heavily dependent on imported oil to sustain daily economic activity.

All of this boils down to the conclusion that Indonesia’s energy problem lies in how our energy system is managed: which resources are given priority, which infrastructure is built, and which consumption patterns persist.

Structural paradoxes

Currently, Indonesia’s energy system has three structural contradictions:

First, more than 80 percent of our energy mix still relies on fossil fuels, with coal accounting for the majority of electricity generation.

Second, we import nearly 1 million barrels of oil per day, despite being resource-rich, exposing the country to global price volatility and geopolitical risk.

Last, but not least, while the country possesses immense renewable potential, less than 1 percent has been effectively harnessed.

These dynamics do not exist in isolation. They reinforce one another, forming a system that is stable in the short term but vulnerable in the long term.

Further, public discourse on energy challenges is frequently framed as a supply issue. Build more power plants, deploy more renewables, reduce imports. But this is an oversimplification of a fundamentally systemic problem.

Take solar energy as an example. President Prabowo Subianto’s ambition to develop 100 GW of solar capacity is a bold step. However, solar power is inherently intermittent, so the conversation should continue to explore how we will provide adequate grid flexibility, storage systems, and operational preparedness.

Adding new capacity alone could destabilize the very system it aims to improve. Thus, we need to focus on redesigning the system and its management when discussing the energy transition.

System readiness is a missing piece

The question is: Are our energy systems ready?

On the supply side, the bottleneck in our system readiness goes past infrastructure alone. Several challenges endure:

• Our power grid is still largely designed for baseload generation.

• Energy storage infrastructure is limited.

• Regulatory and investment frameworks are evolving, but not yet fully aligned.

• Human capital for managing a more sophisticated energy system is still developing.

However, our system readiness is also reflected in how we consume our energy.

Now, let’s talk about the demand side

In Indonesia, conversations on energy transition remain heavily supply-driven. While they are absolutely essential, they overlook a simpler yet powerful lever: energy conservation at the demand level.

Small behavioral changes can have a significant impact collectively. Something as simple as turning off unnecessary lights, setting air conditioners at efficient temperatures (24–26°C), and adopting more conscious energy use could change the way we think about energy transition, beyond the governmental agenda.

The transport paradox and rethinking the real solution

To illustrate, let’s now examine Indonesia’s transport sector, one of the largest consumers of fossil fuels.

The government has taken important steps to endorse electric vehicles (EVs) and reduce emissions. However, this raises a critical question: Does reducing emissions automatically solve our energy challenges?

In cities like Jakarta, it’s not that simple. While EV adoption may reduce emissions, it does not address the underlying issue that has long afflicted the metropolitan: vehicle overpopulation.

Policies that provide privileges to EV users, such as tax breaks and exemptions from traffic restrictions, may unintentionally favor those who can afford to buy more private vehicles. Meanwhile, structural problems remain unresolved.

If the goal is to meaningfully reduce both emissions and energy consumption, switching technologies (from coal to solar, from fossil fuels to EVs) alone is not enough.

For example, investing in accessible public transport offers a more systemic solution. Unlike private vehicle electrification, it reduces both per-capita energy demand and vehicle volume simultaneously.

Towards a complete transition

Ultimately, Indonesia should aim to transition to cleaner, more sustainable, and more resilient sources on one end and change how energy is consumed across society on the other. Otherwise, the transition risks becoming incomplete.

Reframing Indonesia’s energy challenge as a management issue leads to a different set of priorities.

In the short term, the country should improve energy security by reducing vulnerability, managing demand, and decreasing dependence on imported fuels.

• In the medium term, the focus needs to shift to infrastructure: modernizing the grid, scaling storage, and aligning regulatory regimes.

• In the long term, the goal should be transformation, in which renewable energy is not merely added but fully integrated into a resilient and adaptive system.

The question, then, is not whether Indonesia has enough energy. It is whether Indonesia is ready to manage the energy system of the future. Because the real challenge is not a lack of solutions, but the ability to implement them coherently, consistently, and at scale.

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Last month, the Communications and Digital Affairs Ministry officially classified platforms like Instagram, TikTok, X, and Roblox as ‘high-risk’ for children, effectively banning under-16 users from accessing them.

The regulation is outlined in the recently enacted Government Regulation No. 17/2025 on the Governance of Electronic Systems for Child Protection, also known as ‘PP Tunas’. The ministry framed this regulation as a landmark policy, positioning Indonesia as the first non-Western country to adopt such a comprehensive approach to online child protection.

What does PP Tunas govern?

In a nutshell, PP Tunas introduces a set of obligations for electronic system providers (ESPs) to safeguard children in the digital environment. These include features requiring age verification and parental controls, stronger content moderation to remove harmful material, user reporting tools, and restrictions on the commercial use of children’s personal data.

The government argues that these measures are necessary given the scale of children’s exposure to digital technologies. Almost half of Indonesian Internet users are under 18, with estimates suggesting that many children spend up to seven hours online each day.

UNICEF data indicates that a significant proportion of Indonesian children have encountered harmful online content, including sexual material. Further, a growing body of research suggests that excessive social media use may be associated with increased risks of addiction, anxiety, stress, and other mental health challenges.

These concerns have strengthened the urgency for regulatory intervention to ensure safer online environments for children.

Global effort to protect children online

Efforts to create a child-friendly digital environment have gained increasing global attention. International frameworks from UNESCO and the OECD consistently emphasize that protecting children online requires more than regulatory intervention; it demands a holistic approach that combines governance, education, and platform accountability.

Policy developments in Australia highlight both the importance and the limits of regulation in creating a child-friendly digital environment. As one of the early movers in this space, the Australian government has introduced measures to protect children from harmful online content. However, these efforts have also attracted criticism for risking an overly restrictive approach that may undermine children’s agency and do little to address the broader ecosystem in which digital harms occur. This suggests that regulation, while necessary, cannot function as a standalone solution.

Finland offers an example of a more holistic approach, integrating digital literacy into its national curriculum from an early age. This equips children not only with technical skills but also with critical thinking abilities and awareness of online safety. Rather than relying primarily on control, the Finnish model emphasizes empowerment, preparing children to navigate digital spaces responsibly and independently. Such experiences demonstrate that building a safe digital environment requires long-term investment in education and capacity-building, not only technological safeguards.

These global experiences offer important lessons for Indonesia. The recently introduced PP Tunas represents a significant regulatory step, but it largely operates at the downstream level by focusing on controlling risks on digital platforms. Platforms are required to strengthen content moderation, governments are obliged to enhance blocking mechanisms, and parents are urged to increase supervision. While these measures are important, they do not address the full scope of the problem.

Beyond regulatory interventions

Building a comprehensive child-friendly digital environment requires upstream interventions, too. This means policy must be accompanied by:

First, systematic digital literacy initiatives across multiple levels, including children, parents, and schools. Children should be supported to grow into empowered digital citizens capable of navigating online spaces safely and critically.

This also requires equipping parents and educators with the knowledge and tools to guide children’s digital engagement, including issues related to well-being, online safety, and responsible technology use. Without sufficient understanding, protective measures are unlikely to be effective in everyday contexts.

Second, children are not merely objects that need protection, but subjects with rights in the digital environment. Digital spaces must be safe, yes. But it should also enable children to learn, express themselves, and participate. Policies that emphasize restriction too heavily risk overlooking other important dimensions of children’s digital experiences. For example, excessive limitations on access may reduce opportunities for children to develop digital literacy, foster creativity, or build positive social networks.

More importantly, the regulation raises questions about what happens when children turn 16 and suddenly gain access to previously restricted platforms. Without adequate preparation, children may enter digital spaces without the skills and resilience necessary to navigate online risks. This transition period highlights the importance of not only protecting children but also preparing them to participate meaningfully in digital society.

Third, there is also a need for stronger platform accountability. Not all Indonesian children have equal access, capacity, or digital experiences. Given this diversity, regulation needs to move beyond content moderation obligations toward greater transparency of algorithms and safety-by-design approaches. For instance, platforms should be encouraged or required to reduce exposure to harmful content, limit features that may foster addictive use, and provide child-friendly reporting mechanisms.

Ultimately, child-friendly digital environments cannot be achieved through a single policy instrument alone. Regulations such as PP Tunas provide an important foundation, but they are not a standalone solution. Protecting children online should not only focus on reducing risks. It should also enable meaningful and safe opportunities for children to learn, participate, and develop as empowered digital citizens. Policies, therefore, need to move beyond a purely protectionist approach toward one that strengthens children’s autonomy, resilience, and digital capabilities.

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The recent escalation of tensions around Iran and the Strait of Hormuz is often framed as a geopolitical risk for oil markets. But for Indonesia, it is better understood as a stress test of structural exposure, unveiling the need to move away from coal dependence and treat decarbonization as a key to maintain industrial competitiveness. Let me explain:

Indonesia has long wrestled with a quiet yet consequential problem: premature deindustrialization. Manufacturing peaked early, way before the country could fully capture the productivity gains typically associated with industrial transformation. Data show Indonesia’s manufacturing share at about 19 percent of GDP in 2024, down from a historical peak of 32 percent in the early 2000s.

In recent years, the government has responded with a renewed ambition, placing downstreaming at the center of its economic strategy. Indonesia aims to move up the value chain and reclaim industrial momentum by prioritizing strategic sectors, including fisheries, agriculture, energy, and mineral-based industries. The scale is significant. Government estimates suggest that downstreaming initiatives could mobilize close to Rp 600 trillion (~US$ 35 billion) in planned investment, positioning Indonesia as a key node in global supply chains linked to the energy transition.

But as I reflect on this strategy, I find myself returning to a critical tension that is often left unspoken: while downstreaming is framed as a forward-looking industrial policy, its energy foundation remains firmly rooted in fossil fuels.

Much of Indonesia’s mineral processing industries, particularly nickel, is powered by captive coal plants, built specifically to supply industrial operations. The data is striking: captive coal capacity has expanded rapidly in recent years, reaching around 30 GW when including projects in development, with nickel smelters alone accounting for a significant share. In effect, coal is embedded in the very architecture of Indonesia’s industrial strategy.

This matters because energy is an important determinant of competitiveness. If the industries Indonesia is betting on are structurally tied to carbon-intensive energy, then fossil fuel dependence is more than an environmental issue. It is shaping the future viability of those industries.

This is where events far beyond Indonesia’s borders suddenly become relevant.

The Strait of Hormuz carries roughly 20 million barrels of oil per day (about a quarter of global seaborne oil trade) and nearly 20 percent of global LNG flows. Around 80 percent of that oil is destined for Asia. Any disruption, even temporary, sends shockwaves through global prices.

Indonesia may not import all its oil directly from the Middle East, but it does not need to. As a net oil importer, Indonesia is exposed primarily through prices, not routes. And those price shocks have real consequences. A research shows that a 10 percent increase in global oil prices can lead to roughly a 3 to 4 percent increase in Indonesia’s consumer price index (CPI) over time. The transmission mechanisms are well understood: higher subsidy burdens, adjustments in administered fuel prices, rising transport costs, and broader inflation expectations.

The fiscal implications are equally significant. Estimates suggest that even a modest US$ 1 increase in oil prices can add about Rp 7 trillion to Indonesia’s fiscal burden, once subsidy and compensation mechanisms are taken into account. In other words, oil price volatility is not just an abstract risk anymore. It directly affects Indonesia’s budget, inflation, and macroeconomic stability.

What strikes me is how this intersects with Indonesia’s long-standing policy approach.

For decades, energy policy has been anchored in a simple logic: affordability supports growth. Fuel subsidies, price controls, and compensation mechanisms have been used to shield consumers and industries from global volatility. This has delivered short-term stability, but it has also entrenched a deeper vulnerability. When affordability depends on global fossil fuel prices, stability becomes contingent on forces outside Indonesia’s control.

The lesson from Hormuz, then, is not that Indonesia needs to secure more fossil fuel supply. It is that fossil fuel dependence itself is the source of insecurity.

This raises a more fundamental question: if not cheap fossil fuel, what should underpin Indonesia’s growth?

Here, international experience offers useful contrasts. Malaysia, for instance, has historically relied on subsidies to maintain affordable energy. While effective in the short term, this approach has imposed persistent fiscal costs and required repeated reforms. China, on the other hand, has pursued a different trajectory. Over the past two decades, it has systematically invested in energy efficiency, electrification, and industrial upgrading, enabling economic growth to increasingly decouple from energy consumption growth.

For Indonesia, the implication is not to abandon affordability, but to redefine how affordability is achieved. Stable, predictable, and increasingly domestic sources of energy, particularly from renewables, offer a more durable foundation than imported fossil fuels subjected to geopolitical risk.

This is where decarbonization takes on a different meaning.

Too often, decarbonization is framed narrowly as a climate agenda. But in the context of Indonesia’s current trajectory, decarbonization is fundamentally about industrial competitiveness. If downstreaming continues to rely on coal-based power, Indonesia risks locking itself into a high-carbon production model just as global markets shift toward low-carbon supply chains. Investors, buyers, and regulators are increasingly sensitive to the carbon intensity of production. What is competitive today may not be competitive tomorrow.

At the same time, the opportunity is equally clear. There is growing evidence that renewable energy can support the next wave of economic growth, particularly when combined with efficiency improvements. Energy efficiency alone is estimated to deliver returns of three to five times the initial investment, while reducing overall system costs.

For industrial sectors, this translates into lower operating costs, greater resilience to price shocks, and improved market positioning.

In practical terms, this means Indonesia’s industrial policy must evolve. Downstreaming should focus beyond scaling production towards transforming the energy systems that power it. Reducing reliance on captive coal, integrating renewable energy into industrial zones, and prioritizing efficiency are not peripheral adjustments anymore. These efforts are central to ensuring that Indonesia’s industrial strategy remains viable in a changing global landscape.

As I think about the implications of the Iran crisis, I do not see it as an isolated geopolitical event. I see it as a signal that reinforces a broader pattern we have witnessed repeatedly. Fossil fuel dependence exposes countries to risks that are increasingly difficult to manage, whether through fiscal policy, subsidies, or market interventions.

For Indonesia, the response should not be reactive. It should be strategic. Decoupling from fossil fuels, particularly oil, will reduce exposure to external shocks. Investing in clean, reliable, and efficient energy systems will strengthen industrial competitiveness. And doing so while maintaining Indonesia’s non-bloc foreign policy stance will preserve the country’s strategic autonomy in an increasingly fragmented world.

In the end, the question is not whether Indonesia can afford to decarbonize.

It is whether Indonesia can afford not to.

Because in a world shaped by both energy transition and geopolitical uncertainty, the countries that succeed will not be those that simply extract resources but those that build resilient systems around them.

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Making amends with tense geopolitical realities

Pertalite fuel is still Rp 10,000 per liter today. The price will stay like this at least until Eid comes. At the pump, nothing appears to have changed. What has changed is everything behind it.

Since the Iran conflict escalated, oil prices have become deeply volatile. Brent oil surged past US$100 a barrel for the first time since Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, briefly touching US$119 before pulling back as markets processed mixed signals from Washington about the conflict’s duration.

As a result, the state budget absorbs a net Rp 6.7 trillion for every dollar oil climbs above the government’s own benchmark. Every dollar rise in the Indonesian Crude Price adds Rp 10.3 trillion in subsidy expenditure while generating only Rp 3.6 trillion in additional revenue. The net loss is Rp 6.7 trillion per dollar, based on the figures from the Coordinating Ministry for Economic Affairs.

Indonesia has budgeted Rp 210.1 trillion for energy subsidies in 2026, up from Rp 203.41 trillion the previous year. That allocation represents more than a quarter of the entire national education budget, an inversion of priorities worth sitting with.

At the same time, Indonesia still consumes 1.6 million barrels of oil per day, while producing less than half of the consumption. The consumption gap is now filled with imports. Of all petroleum imports, gasoline alone accounts for 45 percent, which is heavily subsidized.

The subsidy structure compounds the problem further. Designed to protect low-income families, such as the online ride-hailing driver or the factory worker commuting by motorcycle, the subsidy instead disproportionately benefits upper-income households who own cars and consume more fuel in absolute volume. Redirecting even a fraction of that allocation toward incentives for lower-income households would reach the commuters the subsidy was originally designed to protect.

Indonesia became a net oil importer in 2004 and formally left the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) in 2008. For decades, every major oil shock has produced similar measures: subsidies, absorption, and monitoring. From the 2008 shock to the Ukraine conflict in 2022, the response was always the same: hold the price and absorb the cost.

Today’s geopolitical escalation, however, is different in degree. Oil prices surged 35 percent in a single week, the largest weekly gain for U.S. crude futures in the history of the contract dating back to 1983. Indonesia’s 2026 state budget assumed oil at US$70 per barrel. It is already trading above that, with no solution to the conflict in sight.

Furthermore, the fiscal burden has not come in one dimension. A waning rupiah means more pressure on the state budget. These two vulnerabilities reinforce each other, and neither resolves without structural intervention from the government.

An electric solution to the structural gap

There is a structural exit from this exposure. Indonesia has already partially built it: transport electrification.

In Indonesia, the transport sector accounts for 36% of energy demand. A huge part of it is consumed by two-wheelers, which comprise more than 130 million registered vehicles as of now. Almost every household now owns at least one motorcycle.

Each gasoline motorcycle, averaging 30 to 40 kilometers of daily commuting, consumes roughly one liter of gasoline per day. A significant part of it is imported, globally priced, and exposed to whatever happens next in the Strait of Hormuz.

Given that dependency, electric two-wheelers offer a structural alternative. At current tariffs and oil prices, electric motorcycles carry up to 72percent lower total cost of ownership (TCO) over five years compared to gasoline motorcycles.

For lower-income households running on tight margins, that operational saving is not abstract. It is money that stays in the household rather than going to the fuel pump and straining the state budget with costly fuel subsidies. Electricity is domestically priced and, while not yet fully renewable, is structurally insulated from geopolitical disruption.

The Asian Development Bank (ADB) estimates that aggressive two-wheeler electrification, backed by consistent policy and urban mobility measures, could save Indonesia US$3.4 billion annually from reduced fuel imports and emissions costs. With the state budget under mounting pressure, those savings are a fiscal necessity.

Presidential Regulation No.55/2019 targets 13 million electric motorcycles by 2030, a framework the government actively reinforced as recently as 2023 through Presidential Regulation No.79/2023, adding new incentive mechanisms and updated provisions.

A valiant push forward for a more resilient future

The destination was never abandoned. The policy mechanism was temporarily removed. What is required now is policy consistency from all levels.

The electric passenger car market can be the ideal example. With coordinated policy on incentives, the battery electric car market share surpassed 5 percent in 2024 and reached 13 percent by 2025. A key driver was a consistent incentive policy that brought more models to market and increased price competition.

Electric two-wheelers can follow the same path even at a far greater scale with policy certainty. At a lower price point and a larger market base, the two-wheeler transition has stronger structural conditions than the car transition that already succeeded.

On the other hand, the upfront purchase price remains the clearest barrier. Sticker price parity, the stage at which an electric vehicle is equal in price to its non-electric counterpart, is not expected until around 2030, which remains a real constraint for lower-income households making immediate purchasing decisions.

Nevertheless, the total cost of ownership for electric two-wheelers is now competitive, especially when the oil price fluctuates. By switching to an electric motorcycle, a commuter riding 30–40 km daily saves meaningfully on fuel and maintenance, with those savings compounding over the first five years of ownership.

Deploying even a portion of the subsidy budget as electric vehicle purchase incentives would make the transition more equitable and more durable, targeting the commuters the current subsidy was meant to serve. The question is whether Indonesia wants to spend that money absorbing the current shock or building insulation against the next one.

After all, the incentives program for electric two-wheelers is not new for the Indonesian government. The government introduced an electric motorcycle incentive program, then terminated it abruptly in 2024, just as the market was responding.

Electric motorcycle sales peaked at 1.4 percent of total sales in Q2 2024, then fell to 0.6 percent by the end of the year. The lesson is not that the subsidy failed the market. It worked well, but the program withdrawal ended the sales growth prematurely. The car market succeeded for precisely the same reason the motorcycle market contracted: policy consistency, not product readiness, determines the outcome.

That misstep must not be repeated. Reinstating and sustaining commitment to enabling policies is essential, especially during oil price spikes. Electrification is not an immediate answer to this crisis. It is the structural answer to the next one if Indonesia commits now.

Nothing has changed at the pump. The price of oil still reads Rp 10,000 per liter. But behind that stillness, the state budget is silently absorbing Rp 6.7 trillion for every dollar oil climbs. The oil price is climbing faster than the budget can accommodate.

The structural answer is already within reach. The next war is not a matter of if. The only question is whether Indonesia is still paying for it at the pump.

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Sixteen months in, President Prabowo Subianto’s first term has been eventful… to say the least. From announcing the 100 gigawatt solar power ambition to nominating himself for mediating geopolitical rows, you can say that his plate’s been full.

Yet one program continues to stand out from the rest: the “free” nutritious meal or Makan Bergizi Gratis (MBG). With a Rp335 trillion price tag—roughly 8.7 percent of the 2026 state budget—this is, in every way, shape, or form, Prabowo’s flagship program.

A year ago, I read The Reformist’s piece on MBG. I recommend reading this one first, as this builds on the strong case it already made.

Read it

Unfortunately, things have not improved much since then. MBG’s problems unraveled over time: from food poisoning to fictitious partner kitchens (Satuan Pelayanan Pemenuhan Gizi or SPPG).

Before you dig in…

A 2025 report by the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) estimates that 43.5 percent of Indonesians cannot afford healthy and nutritious food. That said, I think we can all agree that MBG is not an inherently bad policy in and of itself. In fact, school meals provision is common across the world. What is alarming from MBG is the “how.”

MBG is a signal that President Prabowo prioritizes electoral appeal over structural improvements. Of course, he is far from the only politician who think this way. However, the problem lies in the fact that MBG has evidently constrained Indonesia’s already-weak fiscal structure: a low tax-to-GDP ratio, heavy reliance on income and value-added taxes, and significant spending on social, infrastructure, and vanity initiatives.

One might argue that perhaps MBG’s current implementation is plagued with problems because we’re not giving it enough time to succeed. Perhaps things will fall into place as we learn more about how to do it properly. But the thing is, MBG is not the first program of its kind. We already had a version of it—way before—and it is a superior one, I would argue, as it didn’t trade off prudent decision-making for the sake of scaling up.

New Order-era school meal program that made sense, unlike MBG

Okay, I know that putting the “New Order” regime and “sense” don’t really, well, make sense, but hear me out.

In 1997, then-President Suharto issued Inpres No. 1 of 1997, formalizing the Supplemental School Feeding (Pemberian Makanan Tambahan Anak Sekolah, hereafter ‘PMT-AS’) project. Some forms of it had already existed since earlier in the decade, but this regulation established a structure and remit around the practice.

Here is how it differs from present-day MBG:

I. Clarity in intention

PMT-AS was specifically designed for students in underdeveloped areas first and foremost. Unlike MBG, it did not create a massive infrastructure and hierarchy that required trade-offs across other sectors to run.

It’s almost like PMT-AS was designed as a trigger: over the course of 9 months, elementary students get PMT-AS intake at least 3 days per week for a total of roughly 108 days. That means no food delivery while the students are on school break, also unlike MBG.

Moreover, PMT-AS was targeted and anchored in how nutritious meals are leveraged to improve education. Whereas MBG clearly lives by “the bigger, the better” principle.

See how PMT-AS is distinct from MBG on key aspects from this comparison table:

After reading the table above, it’s tempting to think that MBG is the superior project. After all, it feeds more people and the government centrally manages it—something that we often read as a signal of stronger political will.

Interestingly, the evidence suggests otherwise.

Consider this: The World Food Programme (WFP) advocates school feeding programs globally as they are widely recognized as an effective tool for very specific purposes: improving school attendance, increasing short-term concentration and learning, enhancing dietary diversity, and providing social protection buffers for students from low-income households.

But this is where MBG stops making sense. It sets out to do one thing and then claims to have accomplished something entirely different.

What MBG does is provide school lunches. What it purports to achieve is—let’s pick one from the many on the list—to reduce stunting. There is a logical acrobat here. To start with, science says that stunting prevention is concentrated in the first 1,000 days of life, roughly until a child reaches age 2. That is years before they begin receiving MBG in schools, which typically starts at age 6–7.

Alas, this “confusion” may not be surprising if we look at the governance of the institution mandated to implement MBG: the National Nutrition Agency (Badan Gizi Nasional, or BGN). Among its 10-person leadership structure, none has public health or education credentials, and six are retired police and military personnel. Infamously, Deputy Speaker of the House of Representatives, Cucun Ahmad Syamsurijal, claimed that MBG does not need nutrition experts to run effectively. Well, what gives?

Ultimately, there was one thing that PMT-AS was clearly superior in: intention.

It did not try to make the grandiose claim of providing lunches and magically eliminating stunting abruptly. It was honest about what it was aiming for: promoting local food with its “I love Indonesian Food” (Aku Cinta Makanan Indonesia, or ACMI) jargon, healthy diet, and the importance of breakfast for children who otherwise would have skipped it. Most importantly, PMT-AS was run by the aunties and uncles; the moms and pops of your communities, who wanted nothing more but to put great care into the food served on the table.

II. Procurement irregularity risks

Both PMT-AS and MBG require the government to deal large-scale, centralized contracts with many vendors. This process should be transparent, competitive, and accountable. In Indonesia, government procurement is overseen by the Government Procurement Policy Agency (LKPP), the Supreme Audit Board (BPK), and the Business Competition Supervisory Commission (KPPU).

But MBG operates within a hollow space where procurement rules do not seem to apply. Deploying such a budget size within a single fiscal year is a feat—sure, but it comes with major risks. It is particularly worrisome when you consider that, according to the Anti-Corruption Commission (KPK), procurement fraud is the second most common after gratification and bribery.

I am not saying that corruption risk is entirely absent from PMT-AS. But the decentralized model does mitigate risks better compared to MBG’s direct appointment model.

But if the government must initiate an open tender process for every MBG partner kitchen (SPPG), how long would that take?

Well, exactly. That’s my point.

There is a reason why procurement is designed in sequence. It is exactly to prevent hasty decision-making, conflicts of interest, and irregularities that cause the misuse of public funds. Building a programme with a daily turnover year-round like MBG requires a vast, complex supply chain that simply cannot—and should not—be rushed, as it has been made apparent.

Imagine if Borobudur were built on a swamp. That’s what President Prabowo is doing now. MBG drains so much of the state budget, but there is no structural integrity that protects it from crumbling down.

By all means, go big, but do it at scale, please.

III. The lost opportunity cost

So many others have made this point already—most especially this Project Multatuli’s masterpiece—so I’ll be brief.

For every rupiah spent on MBG, the government is sacrificing another priority. From healthcare provision, school expansion, early childhood support, climate adaptation, infrastructure maintenance, to so many other things that could create a bigger, more sustainable impact lasting beyond the day’s lunch break.

The main contrast between MBG and PMT-AS in this respect is that PMT-AS was financially “controlled” and geographically targeted. It didn’t claim to create impact beyond what it actually did. It had an effect on attendance, dietary habits, and dropout rate—nothing more. Because of that, it was able to actually achieve its goals.

MBG’s model of SPPG kitchens also defies FAO’s recommendations, which advocate home-grown school feeding models that link local agriculture to school meal procurement. And this goes beyond “local wisdom” or creating jobs. It supports smallholder farmers, stabilizes demand and supply at the local level (hence more resilient and independent communities), encourages economic diversification, reduces transport costs, and most importantly, instils community ownership of the feeding programme.

But PMT-AS was not without its flaws

In 2013, a thorough evaluation of PMT-AS underlined several structural problems: lack of funding, unclear guidelines, insufficient training for technical staff, inconsistent food quality, insignificant nutritional increase, poor hygiene, and weak integration with other social assistance initiatives.

MBG, as things stand now, seems to have “solved” the first of these problems—lack of funding—and glossed over the rest.

But there is a reason universal programmes like MBG are politically popular. After all, they are an effective tool to build broad constituencies of support—even if they do not materially and structurally make lives better for people in the longer term.

After all, how can anyone hate feeding children?

This debate is not about whether or not feeding children is a good policy. There is virtually no argument there. It is about whether Prabowo’s policy ambition comes at the expense of other key sectors or, even worse, a fiscal collapse.

MBG neither builds on nor improves the foundation established by its predecessors. It instead rolled back the objectively good aspects it had already been on track to achieve.

To fulfil the promise of MBG, President Prabowo must first begin at the most fundamental part: Reframe it as an education-linked social protection initiative, not a public health policy.

Only once that happens should he revisit scaling MBG nationwide—with a phased rollout plan that begins from the most disadvantaged regions and only expands into wider locations once operations mature at the top-priority spots.

In doing so, adopting an open, transparent procurement process through public tendering would be key to ensuring that MBG doesn’t haunt him in the future. Otherwise, I think it’d be remiss not to end with the cautionary tales of Hambalang in Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono’s otherwise net-positive legacy or KPK’s disarming which continues to define Joko Widodo’s administration and weakens government accountability today.

It’s just like when you climb a mountain too fast, and your body collapses from not having enough time to adjust to lower oxygen levels and reduced air pressure. MBG’s hasty redirection of trillions in public funds risks collapsing the country’s fiscal health and, when that happens, nobody benefits from saying, “I told you so.”

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Since 2013, Indonesia has sent around 58,000 students to higher education through its championed scholarship programs under the Indonesia Endowment Fund for Education, or LPDP. Half of these awardees pursued their degrees abroad, but what if they came home to find that the skills and knowledge they’ve obtained have no place in their homeland?

This is unfortunately not a hypothetical scenario, and I fear the Indonesian government is raising an army of scientists with no place to exercise their expertise. At the end of the day, no country wants a horde of unemployed talented experts. The question is, what can LPDP do to prevent this and actually foster national growth?

LPDP needs to change the way it’s spending money

At the time of this writing, the LPDP was kicking off another year of awarding scholarships to Indonesian students. An online debate would usually ensue, revolving around the awardees’ ethics and contributions, or whether or not they deserve the scholarship. Finally, by the end of the year, we would have the annual evaluation by the House of Representatives (DPR), often reiterating the same point as the previous year, closing the loop that feels destined to repeat.

While we remain stuck in this endless cycle of debating the fairness of the selection, we overlook why LPDP exists in the first place. To the public, LPDP looks only like a scholarship provider, a machine that hands out tickets abroad. However, when you look at its conception, LPDP was never just meant to print diplomas. LPDP’s raison d’être was (and is) to establish a national innovation ecosystem so that high-caliber individuals can thrive and contribute to the country’s growth.

Conceptually, helping nationals get diplomas and establishing a national innovation ecosystem would complement each other. But the current situation tells a different story, because LPDP has been focusing only on the sending-people-to-school part.

We could first look at LPDP’s past spending. Each year, they spend more than 80 percent of their budget on scholarship programs, hitting an all-time high of 92 percent in 2024.

What is confusing is that with the total budget spiking by 137 percent between 2022 and 2024, research and ecosystem development programs saw a meager increase. This leaves them fighting for a shrinking slice. This spending decision suggests the government believes that by going all-in to produce more highly educated individuals, the dream of national growth will simply fall into place.

Now, here is the core question: given the goal to pursue national growth, prosperity, and inclusion, does the way LPDP utilizes its budget make sense?

I don’t think it does.

Producing more supply without growing the demand

Harvard’s Economic Complexity Index (ECI) tells an uncomfortable truth. Despite spending more than a decade investing in sending people to school abroad, Indonesia’s economic complexity remains at the same rank as it did in 2010.

In 2023, we still do the same thing we did in 2010 to make money. To put it into perspective: We have people capable of making electric vehicles, but our economy still relies on making becak (pedicab) to generate wealth.

Some may argue that 10 years is not enough time to see the ROI of education. However, this data serves as a warning sign: our highly educated individuals lack the tools to translate their knowledge into real economic value. The pressing challenge now lies in providing the tools to materialize this advanced knowledge into productive outputs.

Another study confirms this disconnection. It finds that Indonesia suffers from an education-occupation mismatch: a majority of our university graduates are overqualified for the jobs they take. In other words, there are not enough appropriate jobs for the level of education we have.

This all means that Indonesia is at a critical point where it must develop an industry that can absorb the influx of highly educated Indonesians. If the government fails to do so, Indonesia is on the brink of a brain drain that, in recent years, has been amplified by younger generations through the “#KaburAjaDulu” (#RunAwayFirst) movement.

The missing link that leaves us in this critical juncture is the lack of a national innovation system. This is a system that must be deliberately grown and not left to chance. Conceptually, it will enable a network of institutions, usually government, industry, and research bodies, to coordinate and foster a well-oiled and synchronized innovation culture in a country.

Unfortunately, in Indonesia, the oil is pretty dry.

A key metric that best demonstrates this problem is the Gross Expenditure for R&D (GERD). Indonesia’s R&D spending took up just 0.28 percent of GDP in 2020 (this is Indonesia’s latest available data). To compare, present-day Malaysia and early-2000s China spent 1 percent of their GDP on R&D, while Vietnam’s latest spending stands at 0.42 percent. This commitment contributed to their good, if not great, ECI and national growth.

The bottleneck goes beyond the money. Reports have noted several issues that hinder Indonesia’s ability to improve its innovation environment, including the disconnect in our regulations, private institutions’ disengagement from the national innovation system, and the highly centralized innovation process. Although the same report deemed Indonesia’s conceptualization of the innovation system to be decent, the poor implementation has rendered its design ineffective.

We could contrast our situation with Vietnam. Despite its relatively smaller share of GERD compared to China and Malaysia, it has managed to establish its presence in the semiconductor industry through a robust implementation of its innovation system.

To sum it up, there is a huge disconnect between LPDP’s mission and its spending. The way they have been spending their budget is too concentrated on sending people to higher education without preparing the industry and innovation environment to absorb them. But, in theory, what can they do more?

From scholarship provider to innovation architect

While building the national innovation system sounds like a cross-ministry mandate, LPDP is actually well-equipped to lead this shift. It has the agility, the programs, the funds, and the talent pool to hit the ground running. To shift from printing diplomas to becoming an innovation architect, LPDP should shift three things: its mindset, its wallet, and its actions.

First, LPDP needs to challenge its definition of education. It is currently locked into the traditional frame of formal learning as the legitimate means of education, putting a red carpet for master’s and PhD, while sidelining other forms of education. This is a missed opportunity, since, as OECD has highlighted, non-formal and informal learning has its own merits in equipping individuals for actual industry needs.

A working model for non-formal learning can be seen in Australia Awards Scholarship (AAS) short-course programs, in which participants engage with industry-specific, highly relevant topics. Moving beyond a traditional definition of education will help LPDP establish not only credentialed leaders but also industry-capable leaders.

Secondly, LPDP should put the money where the mission is. The innovation system cannot be built if 92 percent of the budget is spent on creating supply, while the demand is struggling. Rebalancing the program portfolio is imperative.

LPDP has to increase its share of spending on its existing (but arguably underused) innovation-enabling programs, such as the productive innovation research (RISPRO) funds. As the supply of highly educated talent keeps growing in Indonesia, sectors that can absorb them (R&D, high-tech, creative sectors, etc.) need to catch up. This development is crucial to prevent exacerbating the current mismatch. In essence, we should avoid planting high-quality seeds on barren soil, where they are destined to wilt.

Finally, to fix the current disconnect with the private sector, LPDP must act as a matchmaker. It could establish strategic partnerships with major industries, providing spaces to foster high-impact research and match awardees’ skills and expertise with industry needs.

These steps could shift the dynamic entirely, pivoting LPDP from a scholarship provider into an active driver of the national innovation system.

These recommendations ultimately aim for one thing: ensuring our investment in education translates into real economic impact, not just vanity statistics. They could also address LPDP’s poor ROI risks by ensuring our graduates have a place to implement their expertise and flourish.

LPDP in itself is a great initiative. However, goodwill is not enough. It needs to evolve from just a scholarship provider to an innovation driver, ensuring that national growth is not just a pipe dream, but a delivered reality.

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There are moments in international affairs when history does not turn on wars or treaties, but on something far quieter: a word.

Last week, Indonesia’s language body changed the definition of ‘sawit,’ oil palm, from ‘plant’ to ‘tree.’ This single lexical shift has opened a debate that stretches far beyond linguistics. It reaches into forests, markets, climate diplomacy, and the future credibility of Southeast Asia’s largest economy.

Well, language is never neutral. Especially in policymaking, where words can shape incentives, unlock permissions, and redraw boundaries. Thus, it became important when the Great Dictionary of the Indonesian Language (Kamus Besar Bahasa Indonesia, or ‘KBBI’) classified oil palm as ‘tree’.

Oil palm is botanically a monocot, closer to grass than timber. It does not form wood in the ecological or carbon sense used by forestry science or international climate accounting. By redefining oil palm as ‘tree,’ the country collapses a long-standing legal distinction between agricultural crops and forests.

In Indonesia, that distinction governs where plantations may grow, how emissions are counted, and what qualifies as deforestation. Meaning, this language shift could create a new set of ‘rules’ for how we make decisions about oil palm.

The ‘sawit’ dilemma and the danger of its redefinition

The thing is, sawit is rather important for Indonesia. We produce more than 50 per cent of the world’s palm oil. It contributes roughly 4.5 per cent of our GDP and supports an estimated 16 million livelihoods directly and indirectly. For many rural regions, palm oil has meant roads, schools, and income where few alternatives existed. No serious conversation about Indonesia’s future can ignore this economic reality.

But neither can it ignore the costs. Research from Stockholm Environment Institute’s Trase platform shows palm oil expansion has been responsible for a significant share of Indonesia’s forest loss since the early 2000s. Between 2001 and 2020, more than 3 million hectares of forest were converted for palm plantations. These losses are not abstract. They translate into declining biodiversity, rising flood risks, peatland fires, and transboundary haze; costs borne not only locally but also across regions.

If an oil palm is a tree, then an oil palm plantation is a forest. This redefinition is not semantic pedantry. It risks turning deforestation into paperwork. A forest cleared and replanted with palm could, on paper, become reforestation. Carbon sinks could be counted where emissions are rising. This will be tricky as international partners, investors, and climate mechanisms rely on shared definitions. When those definitions drift in this direction, what’s going to happen to our credibility?

This matters for Indonesia’s strategic position. Jakarta has worked hard to present itself as a responsible middle power under President Joko Widodo: deforestation rates fell to the lowest levels in two decades, supported by a forest moratorium and international partnerships, including results-based payments from Norway and other donors (UNDP reported US$340.7M disbursed as of 2025).

Yet, something changed with the new administration in office. President Prabowo Subianto’s description of palm oil as a ‘miracle crop’ reflects a deeply held belief in sovereign development: Indonesia must not be constrained by rules written elsewhere, including by the international society. This instinct resonates strongly with domestic audiences and with many developing economies facing similar pressures.

The financial, environmental, and cultural costs

Sovereignty exercised through linguistic manoeuvre carries risks. The European Union’s deforestation regulation, delayed but not abandoned, hinges on verifiable land-use data. Australian supply-chain laws are moving in the same direction. Markets increasingly price not only commodities, but credibility. If Indonesia appears to be redefining forests to suit short-term goals, future access to green finance, carbon markets, and premium export markets could narrow rather than expand.

There is also a regional dimension. Southeast Asia’s forests are shared ecological assets. Fires in Sumatra darken skies in Singapore. Carbon released in Kalimantan warms the planet far beyond Indonesia’s shores. ASEAN’s strength lies in collective trust. If environmental data becomes contested, cooperation becomes harder.

The deeper issue, however, is cultural. Indonesia’s language has always been more than vocabulary; it is a social contract. When citizens sense that official language serves power rather than truth, confidence in institutions weakens. Environmental governance depends not only on enforcement, but on belief that rules are fair, data is honest, and sacrifices are shared.

None of this requires rejecting palm oil. The challenge is not palm versus forest, but short-term expansion versus long-term resilience. Yield improvements on existing plantations could meet much of future demand without clearing new land. Agroforestry, landscape restoration, and genuine reforestation can coexist with a profitable palm sector. Many Indonesian companies are already moving in this direction, driven by investor pressure and market logic.

Don’t weaponize language

What is needed now is alignment. Linguistic authority should not operate in isolation from ecological science or legal consequence. Definitions that carry regulatory weight must be developed transparently, with input from environmental scientists, legal scholars, indigenous representatives, and regional partners. Language can evolve, but it should not be weaponised.

Indonesia has a rare opportunity. As a country whose language is celebrated globally, whose economy anchors Southeast Asia, and whose forests matter to the world, it can show that development and integrity are not rivals. By anchoring policy in science rather than semantics, Indonesia can strengthen its negotiating hand, protect its ecosystems, and preserve the moral authority that has underpinned its rise.

In diplomacy, as in ecology, credibility grows slowly and is lost quickly. A nation’s words, like its forests, are most powerful when they are rooted deeply, grown carefully, and allowed to stand on their own truth.

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In Indonesia, using data to make policy decisions related to the environment is required by law. Article 16 of Law No. 2/1982 states, “every development plan likely to have significant impacts on the environment must be supported by an analysis of its environmental impact.”

Technological advancement has made this requirement, in theory, easier to fulfill. In forestry, for example, remote sensing, satellite mapping, and digital land registries have significantly increased the precision with which forest cover can be measured. However, improved technology hasn’t necessarily improved data use, especially in forestry.

Research conducted in 1991 by ORSTOM-IRD revealed significant inconsistencies in Indonesia’s official forest data. In 1989, the Forestry Ministry reported over 143 million hectares of forest. Yet FAO’s 1990 data reported 108 million hectares, with a 1.2 percent annual deforestation rate. The stark discrepancy was highly questionable, implying a loss of 35 million hectares within a single year and pointing to serious inaccuracies in national forest data reporting. Yet the availability of better, more sophisticated tools have not translated to better forest governance.

More than two decades later, in 2015, the Center for Indonesian Policy Studies (CIPS) reported that approximately 61 percent of forest land was inaccurately classified, failing to reflect the ecosystems that actually exist on the ground.

These inconsistencies were not isolated errors, but an early indicator of systemic weaknesses in our forest classification and reporting. It raises critical questions about how forest data is produced, validated, and ultimately used in policymaking. In this article, we inquire into the reasons behind the failure of our forest data governance.

Are we unequipped, or purposely creating loopholes?

A central obstacle to effective forest governance lies in the persistent deficiency of reliable data and planning tools at the local level. Recurring errors and distortions in forest management are due to the lack of precise and compatible maps. In many cases, spatial data produced by different institutions are inconsistent or incompatible, making it extremely difficult to establish a shared understanding of how much forest actually remains and where it is located. This problem is exacerbated by a shortage of trained field staff capable of physically demarcating and enforcing the boundaries of regulated land on the ground.

It has become increasingly difficult to find official data sets that agree on the true extent of forested land. These discrepancies are particularly visible at the subnational level. In South Sumatra, for example, local forestry authorities have estimated that more than 40 percent of the land under their care is no longer forested, despite still being officially classified as such.

Similarly, while the Forestry Ministry reported more than 5.1 million hectares of forest in the region, the Regional Physical Planning Project for Transmigration maps from the 1980s indicated that only about 3.5 million hectares of primary forest remained. These discrepancies reveal not only technical inconsistencies but also structural and technical failures in how forest status is defined and updated over time.

We’ve then become compelled to interrogate a systemic feature that benefits vested interests inside: when ministries, local governments, and the National Land Agency (‘BPN’) cannot agree on what constitutes a forest, this creates what we call a “Gray Zone of Legality.” Within this zone, large corporations and investors can secure forestry or plantation permits in areas where forest status is unclear, effectively expanding land use rights without triggering strong regulatory enforcement.

In regard to this, Transparency International recently reported that forest cover in key watersheds across Sumatra has declined sharply, with degraded river basins losing their ecological buffering capacity, yet formal planning systems continue to lag what satellite data reveal. Trend Asia estimated that about 3.68 million hectares of forest across Aceh, North Sumatra, and West Sumatra, for example, were cleared between 2014 and 2024, much of it for plantations and mining activity.

Why decades of deforestation data failed to warn us

Despite decades of scientific warnings, deforestation persists in Indonesia. The reason behind it might be best explained by the structural priorities embedded in Indonesian policymaking.

From the early 1980s, short-term economic stabilization repeatedly outweighed long-term environmental sustainability. A notable instance is what happened between 1980 and 1988: in response to severe budget constraints following the second global oil crisis, the government accelerated transmigration and agricultural expansion as instruments of economic recovery. This policy was made to ensure forests can produce long-term sustainable yields. But enforcement was lax.

Here, two interrelated factors reinforce one another. On the ground, logging companies routinely exceed extraction limits, while farmers move into logged and even protected areas. Forest land is then opened rapidly for cultivation, often without adequate irrigation or spatial planning, producing fragmented plots and uneven productivity.

At the same time, this laxity is enabled by a political–economic incentive structure: local governments have become increasingly dependent on revenue from private plantations. This dependence creates strong pressure to tolerate over-logging and informal settlement, as immediate fiscal returns are prioritized over ecological preservation.

Incentives to delay: The politics behind bad data governance

The attitudes of Indonesian decision-makers toward economic “development” at that time constitute a central driver of deforestation. However, one should acknowledge that these attitudes are deeply rooted in colonial experience and reflect a Western understanding of development: prioritizing economic growth over environmental and social considerations.

Under Suharto’s New Order regime, many senior civil servants were trained in the United States. Consequently, Western development paradigms largely shaped state policies. As argued by William Leiss, Western environmental values tend to define nature primarily in relation to the demands of continuous economic growth, measured through rising Gross National Product, granting legitimacy to policies that promote industrialization, often regardless of their political, social, or ecological consequences.

This growth-oriented logic was institutionalized in our forest governance. Marc Pain demonstrates how forest reserves and protected agricultural zones were repeatedly reclassified to serve short-term economic interests. Such administrative changes were often omitted from official maps, leaving enforcement agencies unaware of shifting legal boundaries and eroding accountability. Official responses to environmental disasters further illustrate the perception of forests as expendable assets.

Following the 1983 fires in East Kalimantan, the Forestry Ministry described the burned areas as “conversion forest,” framing the disaster as a cost-free method of land clearing. This reveals a utilitarian understanding of nature, in which forests are valued primarily for their potential contribution to industrial and agricultural expansion rather than for their ecological or social functions.

Now, it is comprehensible that these attitudes are reinforced by political and economic structures that disproportionately benefit powerful actors.

Gov’t should stop ignoring data and start using it to inform policies

Last year, we watched as floods devastated Aceh and Sumatra. These were not merely the result of unusual weather patterns. While heavy rainfall associated with tropical storms and cyclonic interaction certainly played a role, the disaster’s magnitude was amplified by decades of environmental degradation. Data from government bodies show significant net forest loss in these provinces, and independent monitoring finds that Sumatra’s watersheds have been severely degraded due to commercial land conversion.

Viral videos showed logs, presumably remnants of upstream land clearing, being swept through towns, a visual proof of extensive deforestation that weakened natural water retention and slope stability. Local and international environmental groups have explicitly linked years of deforestation and weak enforcement of environmental regulations to the severity of the floods.

As early as 1989, Marc Pain observed that policies often changed on paper but not in practice. He said that research has long provided accurate data on how population movement, spontaneous settlement, and regional development interact.

But research and data mean nothing if there is no political will that could translate them into enforceable policy, supported by adequate resources and institutional coordination. Policy must not remain stagnant while social and environmental pressures evolve. Rows between the government and independent groups over the exact figures of deforestation also risk shrinking the civic space, which can lead to governance problems beyond the environmental management sector.

The state already possesses the authority to regulate land use, enforce boundaries, and act against violations. Thus, problems that recur due to a lack of prevention despite available data and warnings are not natural disasters, but governance failures. Their inaction reflects choice, not incapacity.

Now, the question is no longer what should be done, but whether the state is willing to listen before the next disaster forces it to.

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