STS, Governmentality, and the Politics of Infrastructure in Indonesia

How do new infrastructures for the movement of goods, people, and ideas get built, and how do they change? How do infrastructures function as instruments for new modes of political power and control? Can social actors mobilize to shape the direction of infrastructure change? These are the core questions that animate this excellent set of articles written by an emerging cohort of STS scholars with an interest in Indonesia. Each of the articles presents a case study of a specific infrastructure project: Mohsin traces the history of a state-led project to build out the electrical grid in Bali during Indonesia’s New Order; Padawangi examines the politics of a community-based project aimed at expanding piped water service to poor neighborhoods in Jakarta; Fatimah analyzes a university-based project to establish a new biofuel industry in Sumbawa; and Budiastuti describes the deployment of a new DNA tracking system for Indonesian timber exports. Taken together, these case studies contribute to an emerging picture of sociotechnical change in Indonesia that draws sharp contrasts between how infrastructures were built and organized during the New Order period (1966–98) and how they are coming to be built and organized now.

During the New Order, new infrastructures were built mainly by the state in a top-down fashion and aimed to modernize Indonesian society by incorporating Indonesians into the expanding global capitalist economy while retaining centralized state control. In more recent years, infrastructure innovation has been driven by private firms and nonstate actors and has focused much more on expanding the reach of capitalism by developing distributed forms of governance and control. In what follows, I describe the central features of the New Order pattern of infrastructure innovation and show some of the ways these features have become “unbundled” and are being refashioned for use in the post–New Order era. I then draw on the case studies to ask, how is the old politics of infrastructure being rearticulated, challenged, or subverted now that the state’s role has been diminished?

1 Infrastructure Innovation in the New Order

Mohsin’s article on electrification in Bali is a helpful entry point for understanding patterns of infrastructure innovation during the New Order period. This was a time when Jakarta was building out core infrastructures—paved roads, airports, telecommunications systems, electricity grids—at a fast pace. Mohsin shows that within this broader, nationwide expansion of infrastructure Bali enjoyed special status because it was an important site of international tourism and thus a “show window of Indonesia” for the rest of the world, as President Sukarno memorably put it (15). During the New Order, as the government sought to project abroad an image of a modernizing nation making great strides in rural and urban development, Bali became a special site for reinforcing this image.

Mohsin’s account of the electrification of Bali confirms that a major focus of Indonesian development in the 1960s and 1970s was building infrastructure to host a growing number of international visitors. Already in the colonial period, electrification in Bali focused primarily on areas where there were large numbers of Europeans. After independence, this approach continued, with priority for electrification given to tourist enclaves and resorts. These efforts received a great boost in 1974, when Bali hosted the Pacific Asia Travel Association and plans were made to turn Bali into a major destination for worldwide tourism. From that point forward, efforts to expand the infrastructure for international hospitality and efforts to build out the electrical grid became mutually reinforcing: having electricity made hosting foreign delegations possible, and increasingly foreign delegations began coming to Bali to get a firsthand look at the government’s success at rolling out electricity across the island. As the number of foreign delegations and international meetings grew, the pressure to modernize infrastructure likewise grew, particularly when the subject matter of these meetings was electrification.

In key respects, the story of electrification in Bali thus follows a pattern that was established in Jakarta previously, when the decision to host the Games of the New Emerging Forces in 1963 provided the impetus to build Indonesia’s first...