What Indonesia’s Capital Move Really Means

From the moment that news broke about Indonesia’s decision to move its capital from Jakarta to East Kalimantan, on the island of Borneo, the hot takes sizzled. The BBC piece that broke the story internationally mentioned another investigation they had reported about Jakarta sinking due to water overuse and rising sea levels connected to climate change. Immediately, less informed journalists and pundits around the world connected the two facts, conflating the decision to move the capital as a direct response to climate change. Some even assumed this meant, bizarrely, that all 10 million of Jakarta’s residents would be relocated to another island.

The reality is both simpler and more complicated.

The capital – encompassing the functions of the central government – is all that will be moved under the plan. The vast majority of Jakarta’s residents will stay exactly where they are. The city will have to deal with its own challenges regardless of whether it hosts the capital or not. Jakarta has plans to address sea level rise, while simultaneously embarking on a massive rail construction boom to reduce congestion and pollution. For the most part, Jakarta will remain Jakarta.

While the move is accompanied by significant environmental concerns for Kalimantan, the decision to shift the capital away from Jakarta is more a reflection of the mistakes of Indonesia’s post-independence Java and Javanese-centric development. What makes this different, however, is how the yet unnamed capital will be the ultimate legacy of the country’s first outsider president – Joko “Jokowi” Widodo – one who has made development and infrastructure the focus of his administration.

Centralization and Decentralization

Few remember that Indonesia was, for a short time after gaining independence from the Netherlands, a federal country that some even called the United States of Indonesia. It made sense for a country that was so ethnically, linguistically, and religiously diverse to be decentralized, like India or the United States, rather than centralized around a single urban megacity, like South Korea. Unfortunately, federal Indonesia never got a chance, as founding President Sukarno dissolved the entity in 1949, forming the Unitary State of Indonesia, which survives to this day.

A unitary state requires a strong capital and central government, and thus, under Sukarno and his successor, the dictator General Suharto, the island of Java, and, even more so, the city of Jakarta became the center of Indonesia. During the three decades long New Order, Jakarta became richer, bigger, and more crowded as it became the country’s financial, political, social, and cultural capital.

Since the fall of Suharto in 1998, Indonesia has embarked on an ambitious process of decentralization. It was not a return to the United States of Indonesia – the then-recent experience of Yugoslavia’s breakup led to a real fear that giving power to the provinces would empower regionalism, which could lead to a violent breakup. So the provinces would remain, essentially, weak – as they had been during the Suharto era. Indonesia would stay a unitary state, but the country’s myriad districts and cities would be empowered and democratized.

“One of the main changes is that there is now much more local accountability in terms of how government functions,” says Paul Hasan Thung, a Ph.D. student in social anthropology at Brunei University focusing on conservation and development in Indonesia. “The regency heads, and governors are chosen democratically – and the village heads are also chosen by their constituencies.”

At some levels, decentralization has worked. Indonesia has more districts and provinces than ever before, and some cities, such as Bandung and Makassar, have seen strong economic growth. But at another scale, it has not. Jakarta remains central, and its percentage of the nation’s population and economy has grown since 1997. Java still dominates Indonesia, and outer islands – especially in East Indonesia – remain poor.

“For areas with high local revenues, it is good, they have a bigger share of those revenues, more budget, more money for their development. But not many regions are like that in Indonesia,” says Deden Rukmana, an Indonesia urban expert and a professor of regional Planning at Alabama A&M University in the United States. “So even though we have decentralization, in terms of development, Jakarta is still the prime city, and still a city that grows faster than other metropolitan areas in Indonesia.”

Rukmana is hopeful that moving the capital will remove some of the burden from Jakarta. To understand the real potential impact, there are numerous case studies from around the world. In itself, moving a country’s administrative capital is not unique. Several countries have done it, including Nigeria in 1991, when it moved the capital from crowded Lagos to the more centrally located Abuja; nearby Malaysia, which shifted some functions of government to Putrajaya in 1999; and Myanmar which made Naypyidaw the capital in 2008. While there were differing rationales in each move, several capital moves share at least one factor in common with Indonesia – the desire to have the capital be closer to the geographic center of the country.

“Indonesia’s situation is similar with Nigeria,” said Rukmama. “Lagos is a crowded, coastal city, the former colonial capital, so they moved to Abuja, another part of the country, [to] try to be the center, similar to Kalimantan.”

The result of those moves was the creation of smaller, government-focused cities. It did not result in Lagos, Kuala Lumpur, and Yangon losing population, and in fact, all three cities remain both financially and politically important. That is Jakarta’s likely future.

From Java to Javanization?

Some see similarities in this move to another Suharto era project – transmigration. Initially started by the Dutch, this initiative was ramped up in the late 1970s and early 1980s, when 2.5 million people were moved from Java to the outer islands. All across Indonesia, one can find villages full of Javanese in remote areas, and it is not uncommon to even see political advertising targeting Javanese migrants during elections. The wasn’t decentralization as assimilation – making Indonesia more homogeneous by forcing ethnic groups to mix – though in practice it meant making the whole country more like Java.

Transmigration continued, at a far smaller scale, after the fall of Suharto. It was only ended in 2015 by Jokowi. But a new capital could mean another wave of Javanese moving to Kalimantan. If the capital is moved, will locals or East Indonesians benefit at all?

“Part of the rational for moving the capital to Kalimantan is to say that they are doing something about the Java-centric nature of government,” says Thung. “But what will happen if you move 1 or 1.5 million people from Jakarta to Kalimantan? It could lead to the further Javanization of East Kalimantan.”

There’s another concern, too. The violence of 1997 in West Kalimantan, when amid an economic slowdown, the native population turned against transmigrants, killing an estimated 500 people, is still fresh in the minds of many. In fact, it might have just happened again, as recent riots in Wamena, Papua, resulted in the deaths of dozens of transmigrants, even leading to thousands of West Indonesians fleeing the increasingly restive province. Java-centrism is problematic, but making all of Indonesia like Java is likely not better.

There are environmental concerns as well – not because Jakarta is sinking, but because Kalimantan has become ground zero for deforestation, resource extraction, and environmental degradation. East Kalimantan, the future home of the new capital, is the center of Indonesia’s coal mining industry, which has left vast devastation in its wake. The region is also host to regular fires and haze, which, due to regional wind patterns, never affect Jakarta, but could affect the new capital. While government officials say that the new city will be green and sustainable, many are skeptical or want to see more details first.

“I’m very curious to see how it goes in terms of forests around it. You have these claims that they are going to strengthen the protection and rehabilitation of forests, but environmentalists are worried whether that will really happen,” says Thung. “I encourage people to keep bringing it up because I think that’s the way to put pressure on the government and make sure that the new capital does not lead to the loss of important forests.”

Jokowi’s Legacy

Jokowi is Indonesia’s infrastructure president. He focused heavily on development during his first term, to the disappointment of some of his supporters who hoped to see more action from him on corruption, or addressing Indonesia’s human rights history. He can often be seen at groundbreaking ceremonies for new power plants, toll roads, airports, or, more recently, at the grand opening for megaprojects like the Jakarta Mass Rapid Transit (MRT) rail system this past April. For the most part, he has been successful.

“Compared with other presidents of Indonesia, his record in building infrastructure is huge,” says Rukmana. “To me, this relocation, it is just a continuation of what he has done as president over the last five years.”

This leads to what might be the most remarkable thing about the entire planned move. Indonesia has, several times, considered or started plans to shift the capital to Kalimantan, but nothing ever came out of it. Yet this time, few have aired doubts that Jokowi will succeed in his plans. He has demonstrated the ability to be an effective planner and follow through. One of the signature achievements of his first term was getting Jakarta’s MRT built, after his predecessors, both as president and governor of Jakarta, failed repeatedly.

“Jokowi is a doer, a leader that can execute things based on his track record with the development of Indonesia,” says Rukmana. “This is the next step. He knows that he can do it, and that it is needed by Indonesia.”

The devil will be in the details, of course, as how the plan is executed will determine its impact for all of Indonesia. Only one thing is certain: Indonesia’s new capital will be another experiment in nation-building for the vast, diverse country. Whether it truly helps decentralize the country, or just becomes a mini-Jakarta, full of Javanese migrants, in Kalimantan, remains to be seen.