Beyond Panacea: Rethinking Indonesia’s Governance in Diverse Archipelago

The current Indonesian administration increasingly employs uniform, top-down policies to address a wide range of complex national issues: from food security and housing to economic growth and environmental management. These policies, while often well-intentioned, are designed and implemented with little regard for Indonesia’s vast social, ecological, and institutional diversity. The nationwide free lunch program, for instance, aims to tackle food insecurity but disregards regional dietary cultures and the structure of local food markets. Similarly, the establishment of Special Economic Zones (Kawasan Ekonomi Khusus / KEK) prioritises a narrow model of industrial growth, overlooking the locally embedded moral and market economies. In education, the national curriculum constantly fails to preserve regional culture, language and history, leading to the widespread inaccurate history and the extinction of regional languages.

At the roots of these issues is the failure to recognize the immense size and complexity of the country. The distance from Sabang to Merauke spans over 5,000 kilometres—roughly equivalent to the stretch from Portugal to Turkmenistan, a region that includes almost 50 sovereign nations, each with its own set of national and regional policies. In this sense, what is framed as a “national policy” in Indonesia would, by scale and diversity, be functionally comparable to a policy of a supranational or intergovernmental body—such as the European Union—which, by design, must accommodate significant institutional variation across member states. Yet in Indonesia, national legislation is often overly detailed and prescriptive, intervening at the operational level in ways that leave little room for adaptation. This rigidity undermines the ability of local organizations and institutions—especially those at the districts and subdistricts level—to interpret, implement, or modify policies according to their own needs, capacities, and contexts.

One of the most striking examples is in the land use and forestry sector. Spanning over 1.9 million square kilometres, Indonesia is more than five times the size of Germany (357,000 km²) and over 45 times larger than Switzerland (41,000 km²). Yet both Germany and Switzerland—despite their much smaller scale—adopted governance systems that emphasize regional autonomy and policy flexibility. The Indonesian government has proposed a plan to convert around 20 million hectares (which is approximately twice the size of Java) for food and energy production across multiple islands in Indonesia—without considering the ecological characteristics, existing land tenure systems, or customary rights of local communities in each of the allocated areas. This top-down initiative risks eroding biodiversity, marginalizing indigenous populations, and displacing long-standing systems of local forest stewardship.

In contrast, forest management in Germany divides responsibility to the 16 Länder (federal states), each of which formulates its own forest legislation within the overarching framework of the Federal Forest Act. For example, in Baden Württemberg it is mandatory for developers to compensate for biodiversity loss through pre-approved restoration measures, while in Lower Saxony, such compensation will be voluntary. Switzerland, despite its smaller size, takes decentralization. The authority of forest management rests with 26 cantons and, in many cases, municipalities. As a result, forest policy is highly tailored: in mountainous regions like Graubünden, avalanche protection and natural hazard mitigation are the main focus, while in peri-urban areas like Zurich, it emphasises on urban green space and biodiversity corridors.

Indonesia’s reliance on methodological nationalism and centralized governance has led to the production of panacea policy: standardized, one-size-fits-all solutions applied to deeply diverse and context-specific challenges. The consequence is more than just policy inefficiency: it poses a serious threat to the institutional diversity that exists across Indonesia’s regions. Each (sub-)district harbours its own forms of social organization, norms of negotiation, cultural expressions, and political dynamics—together forming what might be called Indonesia’s regional civil societies. Rather than seeking to homogenize these civil societies, national policies should be designed to co-exist with and support them.

Take another example of the infamous free lunch meal program. Ideally, it could have been implemented to promote and support regional dietary diversity, with food sourced through households, existing school canteens, or village cooperatives. Instead, what we see is the opposite: a nationally imposed regulation that standardizes kitchen size and applies a payment upon delivery system—regardless of local capacity or food systems. Such design overlooks the realities on the ground and disrupts the existing ecosystem of micro and small-scale food vendors who previously supplied student meals and can’t afford to fulfil the program’s requirements. In many cases, these vendors are being displaced by large enterprises—often politically connected—which are incentivized to scale up and dominate the supply chain. This dynamic then sets in motion a deeper path dependence: national policies become reliant on few large actors for implementation, further consolidating power and side-lining the local economies and stakeholders. Rather than co-creating locally adaptive solutions, the state begins to overwrite them: ultimately weakening local initiatives and autonomy. In doing so, the potential for place-based, adaptive governance is lost, and national policy becomes an instrument for subjugation.

To escape the panacea trap, national policies must move beyond top-down, nationalist and centralist paradigm, which has operated for as long as Indonesia has existed. An “Indonesia-centric” paradigm must be reinterpreted as integrating the diverse conventions, social norms, and shared values of the local actors across regions into the policy making processes. After all, the spirit of Bhinneka Tunggal Ika—unity in diversity—demands more than symbolic recognition; it requires a governance design that reflects and respects plurality. Thus, the state shall accommodate the institutional diversity of the civil societies; where both national and local political institutions can engage dialectically, not one dictating the other.

The road forward begins with humility: the recognition that good policy is not about grand solutions, but about learning from the grassroots and designing it with the people, not for the people. When scale becomes the starting point, not the afterthought, Indonesia can (potentially) escape the illusion that big problems require bigger interventions. Instead, the government can begin asking a more meaningful question: What works here? And why?

Authors:

Sekar Yunita is a doctoral researcher at the Department of Forest Economics and Sustainable Land Use Planning, University of Göttingen. Her research is part of Small4Good, an EU-funded project exploring payments for ecosystem services and small forest owners across Europe. Before her PhD, she worked as an advisor with GIZ Indonesia on forest governance and sustainable development.

Geraldus Martimbang is a doctoral researcher at the Technical University of Munich, where he researches the social, economic, and spatial history of colonial tea plantations in Priangan, West Java. Trained as an architect and urban planner, he has worked in Germany and France as an architect and now at project management consultancy.