Papers

• Migrant rights institutions: When a migrant worker is foreign Wayne Palmer Bielefield University

  By 2022, the number of foreigners permitted to work in Indonesia had reached almost 120,000, primarily originating from countries in northeast Asia. The small number of foreign workers is dwarfed by the 4.5 million Indonesian migrants working legally in other countries, such as Malaysia and Saudi Arabia. In Indonesia, these foreigners often earn much higher wages, which, according to the Indonesian government, enables them to protect their own rights. However, the population of foreigners working in Indonesia is much more diverse, including, for example, expatriates, digital nomads and foreign spouses. At any one time, then, the number of foreign workers in Indonesia is closer to 200,000. Different laws regulate their situations in Indonesia, and various organizations are involved in the protection of their legal rights.

  This paper examines the legal and organizational context for the protection of migrant rights for this diverse population of foreign workers in Indonesia. First, I introduce a sociological perspective on institutions, offering an alternative lens to perceive the comprehensive spectrum of laws and stakeholders engaged in protecting migrant rights. Subsequently, I provide background information on the aforementioned groups of foreign workers, highlighting a) how they are positioned in the Indonesian labour market, b) what this positioning means for their right to work, and c) how that shapes their experience of work. Finally, I discuss the Indonesian case in terms of a sociological perspective on migrant rights institutions, providing a more comprehensive understanding compared to the more state-centric perspective typically associated with legal viewpoints.

• “We kindly ask that you fulfil your responsibilities….” Translating national regulations on smoking into local laws in Indonesia Elisabeth Kramer Elisabeth Kramer

  A raft of tobacco control regulations were passed by Indonesia’s national cabinet in 2012 under Government Regulation No. 109/2012. However, to this day, many local governments have failed in their responsibility to fulfil their responsibility of creating local laws to allow for implementation of these cigarette and smoking restrictions. Given that creating and implementing regulations for national laws is often a key function of local parliaments, this paper asks the question: What stands in the way of national regulations being translated into local laws?

  Using data from three case studies, this paper offers a cross-comparison of three case studies of the implementation of smoke-free area regulations (Kawasan Tanpa Rokok, KTR). I discuss the challenges faced in creating new tobacco control laws in Aceh province and the cities of Bandung and Malang, also exploring the general process of local law creation and the context that influences it. These findings suggest that local political dynamics shaped unique regulations. In this paper, I outline how these differences manifested, both in the law-making process and in the resulting laws. In response to these national regulations, we see a patchwork of laws across Indonesia, with no guarantee that they will be similar from district to district. Furthermore, I will reflect on what this process can tell us about law making in Indonesia more broadly, including the problematic nature of top-down regulatory diffusion and the inefficiencies it fosters.

• Climate change, food security, agrarian reform: tensions and contradictions in Indonesia’s ‘Omnibus Law’ Anna Sanders Difa Shafira Josi Khatarina University of Indonesia Suraya Afiff

  In Indonesia, the Omnibus Law on Job Creation (Law 11/2020) is an ambitious and contested structural economic reform to liberalise trade and boost investment across a variety of sectors, including food, forestry, and agriculture. While significant critical public attention has been directed to environmental and labour issues, the sweeping reform eases the restriction on food imports while allowing more national strategic projects and land to be reserved for infrastructure and large projects such as food estates. This joint paper builds on collaborative discussion about tensions and contradictions in the Omnibus Law around issues of food security and climate change with reference to Indonesia’s Forestry and Other Land Use (FOLU) Net Sink 2030 that proposes integrated climate solutions. We situate our analysis in the context of a large food estate project being implemented in southern tropical peatlands of Central Kalimantan province, where historical interventions have diminished land for local food production and transformed the models of land utilisation, fire and disaster governance, and the capacities of Indigenous and rural communities to sustain livelihoods and adapt to climate change. Furthermore, land use change to establish food estates will potentially impact the forestry target mentioned in the FOLU Net Sink document. We reflect on the lack of civil society participation in the Omnibus Law and the tensions between dominant economic aspirations and environmental and agrarian reform agendas with reference to the food estate project in Central Kalimantan.

• “Sultans versus peasants”: Reproducing inequality through anti-corruption reforms in the Indonesian public sector Kanti Pertiwi Universitas Indonesia Susan Ainsworth

  Indonesia has been consistently portrayed as one of the most corrupt countries in the world, particularly its public sector (World Bank, 1997). Various types of reform initiatives have been introduced in the attempt of professionalising the bureaucracy, i.e., making it more investor friendly and less corrupt which resonate with international trends towards New Public Management (Lane 2000). However, we argue there are potential tensions between the drive to de-bureaucratize the public sector and introduce anti-corruption reform: improved governance often involves more explicit rules, transparency, accountability and monitoring – the hallmarks of functional bureaucracy (du Gay 2000).
  This research foregrounds these tensions and their implications through a study tracing how ideas about good governance are mobilised, who is seen as responsible for reform and how it should be achieved in post authoritarian Indonesia. We collected different artefacts including government policy documents, newspaper articles, and social media conversations to explore how the idea of good governance/bureaucracy reform plays out, the forms it takes in political and public discourse and how different actors are constructed (and blamed or scapegoated). We conducted critical discourse analysis (CDA) (Grant, Hardy, Oswick, & Putnam, 2004) to unearth the taken-for-granted assumptions in the bureaucracy reform narratives and discuss their ramifications. Our findings show how contradictory discourses from different registers (and places/histories/cultures) are combined in ways that severely constrain some actors such as public servants in certain less powerful ministries. We also found alternative discourses circulating which critique this power imbalance through the metaphors of “sultans versus peasants”, reframing the broader reform agenda as ineffective and revealing the underlying market-logic putting large sections of the public sector in a disadvantaged position. Overall, our study illustrates a different unintended consequence of anti-corruption and de-bureaucratisation - the exacerbation of inequality among those who work in the public sector – which could ultimately impede the effectiveness of reform.

Abstract