New Administrative Territories in Indonesia and its Implications to Fisheries Extension Activities

Trend of New Administrative Territories Establishment In 1999-2012

On May 7, 1999, the Law No. 22/1999 on Administrative Territory Autonomy was launched formally. About one year before (May 21, 1998), Soeharto resigned as President of the Republic of Indonesia (ROI), after ruled the country for about 32 years. After ROI’s independence on August 17, 1945, up to 1999 (54 years interval), there were only 319 administrative territories (ATs) in Indonesia, in the forms of Provinces and Municipalities/Cities [5]. Both Soeharto’s resignment on May 21, 1998, and the launching of the Law No. 22/1999 were considered as the triggers for massive proposals of new ATs in Indonesia [6]. In the period of 1999-2009, there were 205 new ATs established, that consisted of 7 new provinces, 164 new municipalities, and 34 new cities [7]; in ten years, more than a half of the number of previous ATs was generated…! (Table 1).

Source: adapted from Herawati, et al. [7]. Table 1: 7 New Provinces in Indonesia, 1999-2012.

There were 2 important chapters of the Law No 22/1999 that were seen as important legal supports for the immense proposals for new ATs: Chapter 6 and Chapter 115. It was mentioned in Chapter 6 that a territory could be divided into two or more territories, while Chapter 115 mentioned about the role of a special body related to the establishment of the new ATs, and its rights to recommend the establishment of new ATs to the President. In 2004, a new Law No. 32/2004 was launched. It was the updated version of the Law No. 22/1999. In this new Law, it was explicitly mentioned the objectives of the establishment of new Ats:

• To improve the quality and the equality of services provided to the communities;
• To promote economic development, especially for the periphery regions;
• To improve democratization process in all regions of the country;
• To promote safety and stability of all regions of the country, and
• To contribute to the unity of the nation. Nevertheless, It was realized that different motives were found in the process of the establishment of ATs. According to Herawati, et al. [7] those were, among other things, creating more effective governance, homogeneity motive (in terms of ethnic, language, religion, income level), financial motive related to the valuable financial supports of the central government to the newly established ATs, rent-seeking motives, in terms of the eagerness to be the new ATs ruling classes and securing the old “dynasty”.

Related to the issue of Decentralization, the establishment of ATs is also followed by significant changes regarding to greater authority, political power, and financial resources to the regencies and municipalities authorities [8]. A couple of sectoral activities are also assigned to be the regencies and municipalities’ responsibilities; those are, among other things, responsibilities for managing health, primary and middle- level education, public works, environment, communication, transport, and agriculture (including fisheries aspects). It is expected that regencies and municipalities could optimally managed their local resources effectively and could improve people’s welfare in those regions. Due to different managerial capabilities in each region, Nasution further indicated that not all authorities could achieve the ideal goals of the decentralization. Related to this concern, Wardhana, et al. [9] supported Nasution’s conclusion; he found that there was no significant correlation between decentralization and local service delivery/social protection for the people, and also on poverty reduction. These might be connected to the earlier warning specified by Darmawan (2008) that the decentralization practices in Indonesia was still characterized by poor institutional arrangement, lack of local finance contribution, and low human resource capacity. Nevertheless, current study showed that decentralization has improved the political practices mechanism in political and legislative aspects, while a special effort should be directed toward lessening the interregional disparity [10, 11].

Moratorium of New Administrative Territories Establishment

The 6th President of Indonesia, General Yudhoyono (known popularly as SBY), had seen that the tendency of forming new ATs, both at provincial and municipality/city level, could impacted negatively to Indonesian political stability, when no proper restrictions were applied. Therefore, General Yudhoyono introduced the concept of “Moratorium” for further proposal for new ATs establishment. He mentioned this notion in 2006 and repeated it again in 2009. Since then, no further new ATs were established, except in 2012, when SBY thoughtfully signed the law of establishing the 34th province of North Kalimantan. Table 2 shows the massive development of administrative areas in Indonesia so that the moratorium policy is implemented.

Source: adapted from Nasution, 2016. Table 2: Administrative Unit Development in Indonesia, 1980-2013.

In the next Jokowi Presidency, the idea of Moratorium is still implemented consistently. In 2021, for example, Vice President Ma’ruf stated that there would be no new ATs except for Papua. There were some political considerations for Papua, especially related to the government’s efforts to speed up development processes in Papua region. In June 2022, Minister of Home Affair Karnavian repeated that the government would continue to implement moratorium policy. He underlined that the evaluation to the newly established ATs showed that 5 new provinces, along with 5 other “old” provinces, could not reach the minimum target of generating their own regional income up to 30 percent. This situation was among the most important reasons for the continuation of Moratorium policy.

The impacts of the New Administrative Territories Establishment on Fisheries Extension

In developing country like Indonesia, agricultural extension activities, including fisheries Extension activities (FE), are still needed by small-scale farmers and small- scale fish growers or aqua culturists [12, 13]. In the case of FE, it is proposed that each sub-district in Indonesia will be served by at least 1 FE worker. This target could not still be contended up to the year of 2022. There was an average of 1,14 sub-district/FE workers by April 2022; 5 provinces with average less than 1, 20 provinces with average of 1,1-1,9, and 9 provinces with the average of more than 2. Limited budget allocated by the government to the government-supported FE workers’ (GSFE) activities lead to the limited activities could be performed by GSFE workers. This situation led the government to convince community leaders and experienced fish growers to become Voluntary FE (VTPE) practitioners for their community. On the average, there were 29% of VTFEs of the total FE workers in Indonesia.

By using % VTFE, average sub-district per FE (SD/FE), and average sub-district per GSFE (SD/GSFE), the situation in 8 new provinces (Table 1) compared to their provinces of origin were analyzed. The three indicators could be perceived as general indicators of FE approximately. The results are shown in Table 3.

Sources: calculated from the Ministry of Marine Affairs and Fisheries Data Bank (2022). Notes: Provinces in bold letters are Provinces of Origin (PO). Table 3: Fisheries Extension Indicators in 16 Provinces in Indonesia, April 2022.

Further analyses were applied to compare Province of Origin (PO) with the New Provinces (NP), in terms of the 3 FE indicators. Table 4 showed the results of the analyses. From Table 3, there was no clear indication whether the establishment of the NP would positively improve the performance of FE for the 8 pairs of provinces.

Moratorium of the establishment of new ATs is still adopted in Indonesia up to August 2022, due to some financial, political, and manageability of administrative territories in Indonesia. The results of the general analysis of FE strengthen the reason that the moratorium policy should still be implemented; in these circumstances, no clear indication that the establishment of new provinces would lead to a better FE performance. In this situation, it is hard to fulfill the expectation that fisheries extension activities should improve fish farmers’ well-being that would further support the economic development [14, 15, 16].