Spotlight on Indonesia’s Maritime Role

In early June, Fiji and Sweden co-hosted the Ocean Conference at the United Nations headquarters in New York, with the forum dedicated to helping support the implementation of the 14th Sustainable Development Goal: the conservation and sustainable management of marine resources. Indonesia was given a high-profile role, with its Coordinating Maritime Affairs Minister Luhut Pandjaitan serving as one of the vice presidents. The Southeast Asian state’s presence reflects the significance that the government of President Joko “Jokowi” Widodo has attached to the maritime domain in general and to oceans conservation more specifically.

At the most basic level, both Indonesia’s general attachment to the maritime realm and its importance in the stewardship of the world’s oceans should come as no surprise. After all, the country is the world’s largest archipelagic state, with around 17,500 islands, and it is located at the crossroads of the Indian and Pacific Oceans. Indonesia has also historically played an important role in several maritime developments, whether it be the negotiations leading up to the 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) or the confidence-building efforts with regard to the South China Sea disputes since the 1990s.

But Indonesia’s role at the Ocean Conference in June was also reflective of the current government’s commitment to the issue. Since coming to office in October 2014, Jokowi has stressed the importance of the maritime domain in his foreign policy. Though some of the other officials around him tend to couch this in geostrategic terms, for Jokowi, the maritime realm is critical to the success of his people-oriented, economic-centric outlook. Maritime protection makes sense because the fishing sector is a key part of Indonesia’s economic development, with the country being the world’s second biggest fish producer. Similarly, cracking down on illegal fishing is a priority because, as Jokowi has said before, the over 5,000 ships that operate illegally in Indonesian waters each year result in annual losses of over $20 billion.

This is why, as early as November 2014 during the East Asia Summit (EAS), Jokowi articulated a vision for Indonesia as a “global maritime fulcrum” (GMF) between the Indian and Pacific Oceans ). And though it has taken a while for this maritime doctrine to concretize and align with Indonesia’s global contributions, it was no coincidence that one of the seven pillars in the Presidential Regulation on Indonesian Sea Policy – an action plan meant to implement the GMF finally released this March – was “environmental protection and ocean space management.”

Beyond slogans, Indonesia has also begun taking concrete actions in support of the environmental protection pillar within the GMF. Though much of the international attention has unsurprisingly focused on the Jokowi government’s campaign to blow up illegal fishing vessels at home, Indonesian officials stress that beyond this, the government is also undertaking a major effort to boost its contributions to the world on this score. This includes supporting a widening campaign to categorize illegal, unreported, and unregulated fishing (IUU) as a transnational crime within the United Nations as well as convincing countries within the World Trade Organization to limit subsidies for large-scale, industrial fishing.

“This is not just about maritime strategy for us; it is our foreign policy contribution to the world,” one Indonesian official familiar with the government’s efforts in this realm told The Diplomat in early June ahead of the conference.

That statement masks both the significant challenges inherent in realizing these objectives as well as the self-interest inherent in Indonesia’s pursuit of them. Nevertheless, the level of effort by the Jokowi government is undeniable. Indonesia is already a partner country in several aspects of the realization of Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 14, including biodiversity promotion, disaster relief and hydrographic capacity-building, human resource development, and nutrition. And apart from its requests to the UN, such as the criminalization of IUU fishing, it has also made some rather ambitious commitments for itself, whether it be substantially enlarging its maritime conservation area to 20 million hectares by 2020 or pledging to reduce 70 percent of its plastic debris by the end of 2025.

Indonesia has been reinforcing its main objectives and reiterating its commitments at various regional and international fora during the past year, with the help of countries like Norway, Sweden, and Timor-Leste as well as organizations such as Interpol and the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime. Jokowi himself addressed the Second International Symposium on Fisheries Crime in Yogyakarta last October, while Indonesia’s outspoken Maritime and Fisheries Minister Susi Pudjiastuti spoke at the World Ocean Summit in Bali in February. At the Ocean Conference, the high-powered Indonesian delegation, which included Pudjiastuti as well as Pandjaitan, who is one of Jokowi’s closest advisers, only reinforced Jakarta’s seriousness in sustaining its momentum in this area.

Critics are certainly right when they point out that some of this is an admission of Indonesia’s guilt in this realm, as evidenced by the fact that it is believed to be the world’s second largest maritime polluter after China. There is also little doubt that actually delivering on some of these commitments will be no easy task. For instance, the success of Indonesia’s National Action Plan on Marine Plastic Debris – which spans a whole host of strategies from bans to cleanups to education initiatives – will require both massive coordination among the government, the private sector, and civil society as well as strict enforcement by local authorities: both notoriously difficult to achieve in the world’s fourth-largest country and third-largest democracy.

But what is clear is that over halfway into his five-year term, Jokowi’s maritime doctrine is already beginning to translate into gains not only for Indonesia domestically, but also the wider region and the world.