INTRODUCTION

In March 2022, several activists applied for a Constitutional Court judicial review of Indonesia's Law on the State's Capital (UU IKN). The law had been passed by the legislature and signed into law by President Joko Widodo in February 2022. The applicants included the Head of Legal Affairs of Muhammadiyah, Busyro Muqoddas, the Indigenous Peoples’ Alliance of the Archipelago (Aliansi Masyarakat Adat Nusantara, AMAN), the Mining Advocacy Network (Jaringan Advokasi Tambang, JATAM),3 the Indonesian Forum for Living Environment (WALHI) and the people of North Penajam Paser district, whose residential area is the designated core zone of the new capital city, Nusantara.

The applicants claimed that the government had hastily passed the law without clearly stipulating the rights of the local residents; that the Parliament's deliberation of the law had been overly brief, taking only seventeen days from first reading to its passage, which meant that there had been little to no public participation in the deliberations; and that this lack of public participation meant that the IKN Law conflicted with Laws No. 12/2011 and 15/2019 on the Creation of Laws. The applicants, therefore, claimed that the law-making process had not sufficiently considered the constitutional rights of the affected indigenous communities in the designated IKN area at a time when the communities were struggling with the COVID-19 pandemic and economic difficulties.

Unfortunately, the Constitutional Court rejected this application due to the technical reason that it was submitted on the forty-sixth day after the issuance of UU IKN, a day past the stipulated timeframe that applications for judicial review must be submitted within forty-five days after a law is first gazetted.

The fact that many prominent civil society organizations (CSOs) had banded together to voice their concerns about the IKN Law has highlighted Indonesian civil society's stance against the IKN megaproject and its potential adverse impact on a range of issues and individuals. This chapter will explore civil society's concerns through the examples of AMAN's and JATAM's advocacy. Due to civil society's traditional position between “state” and “society”, CSOs usually take on the task of articulating society's concerns against what they perceive as potentially unfair or detrimental state policies.

Introduction

The end of Indonesia's authoritarian regime in 1998 was the turning point for the state to apply substantive democracy and decentralization by devolving authority to local governments. The commitment to abandon centralization was shown in the amendment of Indonesia's 1945 Constitution by emphasizing the devolution of authority. The Constitution allows regions to have special autonomy, national recognition for those that have a history related to nation-building, and the uniqueness of local cultures and identities.1 Thus, the autonomy granted to all local governments is not limited to administrative and fiscal aspects. Decentralization policy also allows political autonomy, where local governments can administer their regional policies after deliberations in democratically elected regional parliaments. Direct popular elections for the heads of local governments were introduced in 2005.

The commitment to adopt extensive decentralization was also shown in giving the Indonesian capital of Jakarta the status of a special region with greater autonomy under Law No. 34 of 1999 on the Provincial Government of the Special Capital Region of Indonesia. In this arrangement, Jakarta as the state's capital can exercise local government authority in all areas of government affairs excluding five national competencies: national defence and security, fiscal, monetary, judicial and religious matters. The difference (from other local governments) is that only a single structure of autonomy is applied to Jakarta at the provincial level: districts of Jakarta have only administrative power, which allows Jakarta to respond agilely, efficiently, and effectively.

In 2007, in amending Law No. 34 of 1999, the national government granted the special capital region of Jakarta more political autonomy by enacting Law No. 29 of 2007. In this regulation, the Regional House of Representatives (DPRD) no longer decides who the governor of Jakarta is. The new arrangements give more political autonomy by allowing the direct (popular) election of the governor and vice-governor of Jakarta. As a special region, however, a gubernatorial candidate must obtain a majority (50 per cent + 1) vote to win the election.2 This differs from the electoral system in other local governments, where a candidate can win the election by earning the most votes (even if this is less than 50 per cent majority).

INTRODUCTION

Law No. 3 of 2022 on Indonesia's State Capital City (Ibu Kota Negara, IKN) has provided a legal framework for the development of Nusantara, the new capital city of Indonesia. The IKN's development is estimated to be accompanied by the mass in-migration of construction workers, civil servants and their family members, academics and researchers, and tertiary students. Around 1.7 to 1.9 million people are estimated to inhabit the new capital by 2045.

The residential mobility of around 250,000 construction workers and civil servants in 2024 would be the main feature of the initial phases of the capital relocation. Public service workers from particular institutions are prioritized to move earlier to Nusantara. These include the coordinating ministries, the triumvirate of the Ministries of Home Affairs, Foreign Affairs, and Defence, government agencies supporting the offices of the president and vice president and those responsible for development planning and budgeting, and law enforcement. In addition, civil servants from ministries that directly support the development of the IKN and agencies that work on basic needs services and human capital development are also targeted to migrate earlier. However, Annex II of the law states that not all public sector workers would be posted to the IKN. Several criteria have been defined as bases to assess how qualified civil servants are for the relocation, including their highest educational attainment, retirement age and performance evaluation.

In addition to being the centre of government-related activities, the IKN is designed to provide world-class tertiary education institutions focused on science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM), as well as specialized skills training. Although Indonesia has become one of the largest and fastest-growing tertiary education systems in the world, with approximately 7.6 million students enrolled in over 3,100 institutions, Indonesia's tertiary education system still faces problems like considerable variations in the quality of institutions. Based on the clustering of higher education institutions (HEIs) by the Ministry of Education and Culture in 2020, only fifteen Indonesian universities are acknowledged to have “excellent” academic performance and are classified in the first cluster.

Introduction

“Citizen participation” can be defined as the active involvement of the general public in the government's decision-making process to influence and address issues of public concern. It covers a range of practices, from volunteering to political participation. Civic participation is similar, although it includes involvement in non-political activities. The advancement in digital technologies has enabled collective participation and civil actions, encouraging greater participation, better decision-making and more trust.

Among different forms of civic participation, crowdfunding has emerged as one type of public participation in a democratic environment. The ability to accept small amounts of money from a larger number of people positions crowdfunding as a platform for citizens to express their views on services that they require and their civic rights. It allows citizens to participate in society and the government by donating their resources as an act of support for particular programmes or projects. It also allows social movements to pool financial resources from the public relatively quickly. This potential should be emphasized because a system that handles and provides civic services would result in increased citizen participation. Crowdfunding also allows citizens residing outside the country, or diaspora, to participate in the projects. The diaspora community is said to be more willing to participate in smaller-scale but beneficial initiatives that many larger project backers would not pursue. With an expected number of 8 million Indonesians in the diaspora with an average monthly income of US$1,999,7 this potential should not be overlooked.

In August 2019, the Indonesian government announced its plan to move the capital from Jakarta to a new city in East Kalimantan province. The new capital is named Nusantara (also called IKN) and its construction is targeted to be completed by 2045. Government officials are set to move to the new capital in stages. The development is divided into three main stages: developing the urban infrastructure, developing the city along with the economic sector and moving government officials to the new capital, then finally increasing connectivity with other cities near the IKN.

INTRODUCTION

On 16 August 2019, President Joko Widodo officially announced the relocation of the capital city (or Ibu Kota Negara, IKN) in his state address. The new IKN, named Nusantara, is in East Kalimantan's regencies of Kutai Kartanegara and North Penajam Paser. It will have an area of 256,142.72 ha, including a core city of up to 56,180.87 ha and the main government zone of 5,644 ha. It is divided into three zones, the Central Government Core Area (Kawasan Inti Pusat Pemerintahan, KIPP), the State Capital Area (Kawasan IKN, KIKN), and the National Capital Development Area (Kawasan Pengembangan IKN, KPIKN). According to Bappenas, the goal of the IKN relocation is to realize the Golden Indonesian Vision 2045 (Visi Indonesia Emas 2045), one of whose aims is to create a new economic growth centre, apart from the previously Java-centric one.

East Kalimantan has a large forest, covering more than half of its total provincial area. However, the level of environmental damage, particularly in this forest area, is prominent. Its forest damage has reached 9.7 million ha (60 per cent). Thus, many parties, especially environmental civil society groups, at local and national levels, have been resistant to the development of the IKN, which is expected to further damage the forest. However, the Indonesian government, through Bappenas, has asserted that the IKN would be built by implementing a “forest city” concept, prioritizing environmental factors, to realize the vision of a “Smart, Green, Beautiful, and Sustainable City”. Based on the UU IKN (IKN Law), the new capital city is managed by Badan Otorita IKN Nusantara (Nusantara Capital City Authority, NCCA), including its environmental aspects.

This chapter discusses how the relocation of IKN, with its concepts of “Green City” and “Forest City”, can be an opportunity for improved forest governance. It uses a case-study approach with a qualitative method, using in-depth interviews and focus-group discussions as primary data collection techniques complementing secondary data from published sources. Based on the data related to forest management in Kalimantan, at least three forestry issues could become the cornerstone of the management model on a broader scale. They are: (1) deforestation and forest degradation, (2) overlapping land concession, and (3) human-wildlife conflict (HWC).

INTRODUCTION

The plan to move Indonesia's national capital from its historic site in Jakarta to a new purpose-built city in East Kalimantan Province is undoubtedly the most ambitious state infrastructure project of modern Indonesian history in terms of scale, logistics and cost. It has understandably provoked divergent responses, from praise as a visionary attempt to reimagine and modernize the nation, to criticism of the massive expenditure required and its environmental impacts, and scepticism that it is driven by political interests. Beyond issues of the economic and logistical feasibility of the plan's implementation at a time of investor wariness and economic uncertainty, significant questions emerge regarding how a purpose-built capital will impact the ways that Indonesia's national politics is imagined and conducted.

Purpose-built capitals are by no means a new or unique phenomenon. There have been twelve capital cities built since the 1960s, with several others underway or in pre-planning stages. Pojani notes that, regardless of whether the political setting is democratic, a hybrid regime or authoritarian, new capital cities have been almost entirely planned by those in power as “totalizing projects”, rather than being developed and built piecemeal over time through processes involving a range of social political and economic interests. This has generally resulted in a tendency for purpose-built capitals to reinforce and embody state and elite conceptions and “utopian” visions, of nation, state and spatializations of political order. In particular, the crucial role played by non-state and civil society actors in shaping political praxis and popular resistance in capital cities has often been omitted, by oversight or intent, from this state or elite vision, such as in Myanmar's junta-built capital of Naypyidaw or Nursultan, Kazakhstan's capital named after its former autocratic president.

This chapter will reflect upon two central questions in considering the implications of Nusantara for political praxis in Indonesia. The first is historical: What has been the relationship among space, rakyat and political change in Jakarta, the nation's capital and biggest city? Particular attention is given to the centrality of Jakarta's streets as political space, producing social and political movements and dialectical tensions that have shaped and constrained the political direction of the nation-stat

This book has provided a collection of academic writings examining the various aspects of the historic and momentous relocation of Indonesia's capital city from Jakarta to Nusantara. In this sense, this edited volume serves as the first academic summation of the myriad challenges and opportunities involved in the IKN's transfer, and simultaneously, as a call to Indonesia's policymakers and leaders to build or develop their new capital in a more balanced, more inclusive, and more sustainable fashion.

From the key takeaways and policy recommendations provided by the authors, there are a few central themes. First, as the overall level of practitioner and research knowledge on the IKN's relocation and development is still limited, this volume will hopefully inspire other researchers and organizations to conduct more detailed and focused studies on all aspects of the IKN's future development. This is particularly for areas related to the IKN's human and social capital, including the livelihoods and well-being of East Kalimantan's local and indigenous communities, the proposed physical and infrastructural development, existing and future environmental and ecological concerns and threats, and evolving social dynamics. Any future studies will need to be sensitive to the potential for unintended or unexpected consequences of IKN development, including widening socio-economic inequality and environmental degradation.

The editors hope that the present volume provides some direction for how the above themes and research questions might pan out, especially if certain recommendations are ignored or dismissed prior to the actual transfer of the national capital from Jakarta to Nusantara.

Generally, development initiatives need three frameworks for execution: a regulatory and policy framework, an institutional framework, and a system to trace and enforce accountability. While Indonesia's IKN Law is a start, the regulatory and policy framework and the actual implementation of the transfer still need regulations to operationalize the move at the ground level. Likewise, while the establishment of the IKN Authority marked the development of the IKN's institutional framework, this Authority is not fully operational yet and its accountability mechanism is not developed.

After many years of discourse, in 2019 the Indonesian government decided to build a new capital city (Ibu Kota Negara, IKN) in the Penajam Paser Utara and Kutai Kartanegara municipalities, East Kalimantan province. The new capital city is named Nusantara, which means “archipelago”, and it is planned that Nusantara will replace Jakarta as the main site of Indonesia's central government starting in 2024.

The capital relocation will mark significant transformations for Indonesians, not only in administrative, cultural and socio-economic aspects but significantly, in national politics. Jakarta has been the centre of gravity for Indonesia's government, business, culture and society since pre-independence days. Therefore, relocating the capital city to Nusantara, East Kalimantan, is perceived as a political commitment by the current administration to shift the national centre of gravity to a region outside Java.

Narrowing the developmental imbalance between Java and the outer islands has been at the heart of the capital city relocation narrative. Java, known for its overpopulation, is home to 152 million people (around 56 per cent of Indonesia's population), according to the most recent census in 2020.1 This contrasts sharply with the 6 per cent of Indonesians who live in Kalimantan, which is six times larger than Java island. With its massive demographic advantage, Java produces about 59 per cent of the country's GDP. East Kalimantan is nevertheless among the provinces with the highest gross regional domestic product (GRDP) per capita, second only to Jakarta. Yet, East Kalimantan is underpopulated, with just 3.7 million inhabitants or about a third of Jakarta’s.2 The opportunity for growth is thus significant.

The other main reason cited for the capital city relocation is that Jakarta is deemed increasingly unsuitable to be the nation's capital, given its numerous cross-cutting socio-economic and environmental challenges. Despite public policy efforts to control the effects of growth, worsening traffic congestion, pollution, and the increased risk and cost of frequent flooding have all adversely affected the quality of life in the city. IKN Nusantara, in contrast, is considered by some to be less exposed to natural disasters and is strategically located in the country's geographic centre.