Thinking beyond success and failure: Dutch water expertise and friction in postcolonial Jakarta

Abstract

In 2014, a consortium of Dutch firms revealed the master plan for Jakarta’s Great Garuda Sea Wall project, combining urban development and flood risk management. Though a ground-breaking ceremony was held, little progress has since been made, and the yet-to-be materialized project faces an uncertain future. Taking this project as its case study, this article examines the efforts of Dutch consultants to realize the proposed Great Garuda Sea Wall project in Jakarta, and the frictions encountered during this process. This article contributes to a growing scholarship in policy mobilities that interrogates instances of policy failure. I begin from the premise that there are valuable insights to be gleaned by examining projects and policies that occupy the space in between failure and success. By using the lens of friction, this article aims to think beyond these categories and their limitations. I demonstrate how friction can be simultaneously productive and disruptive to policymaking and mobilizing, therefore complicating binary representations of success and failure. Abandoning these limiting categories holds the possibility of enriching policy mobilities scholarship by opening up space for analyses of the messy and indeterminate processes that are central to policymaking, and which categories of success and failure are unable to capture. This is especially important for understanding policymaking in the context of the “global South” where projects often remain unrealized and such categories are less analytically useful.

Keywords

Friction expertise policy mobilities policy failure flood risk management

Introduction

Though the Dutch have long occupied a privileged position as producers of knowledge relating to water management, their globally recognized expertise has taken on a renewed significance in a context of climate change. As Metz writes, “Now that the climate is changing (…) All eyes turn once again to the Dutch: how are they dealing with this? And what can the rest of the world learn from them?” (cited in Metz and van den Heuvel, 2012: 9). Presently, the Dutch government and Dutch Water Sector are working together to position Dutch experts at the frontier of water management, equipped with universally applicable, readily exportable solutions. A number of programs and initiatives have been designed to increase the profile of Dutch water expertise and foster partnerships with other countries. Key to these efforts is the drive to position the Dutch as experts in delta management. In 2014, the Dutch government launched The Dutch Delta Approach (hereafter DDA), an approach to sustainable delta management planning that “integrates sustainability, institutional, physical and social economic aspects” (NWP, 2017: 10). But how is Dutch delta expertise operationalized in localized sites? This article takes up this question through an examination of efforts to implement the proposed Great Garuda Sea Wall (GGSW) project in Jakarta: an ambitious, large-scale coastal defense project used to exemplify the DDA approach. It was designed by a consortium of Dutch and European firms in collaboration with the Indonesian government and provincial government of Jakarta (DKI Jakarta), with financial support from the Dutch government.

Since its publication in 2014, the master plan for GGSW project has been subject to much debate. In addition to generating concerns regarding its feasibility and speculation as to its actual purpose (flood management or urban development), activists, fishing communities, scientists, urban planners, and even some government ministries have criticized the project for its potential harmful social and environmental impacts, including evictions, restricted access to the sea for fisherfolk, and the environmental risk of closing Jakarta Bay. Three years after the GGSW project officially “broke ground,” little material progress had been made. The process of realizing the DDA in Jakarta appeared to have stalled. A 2017 Reuters article (Win, 2017) thus posed the question of whether the planned project would sink or swim; in other words, would the project succeed or fail? Rather than seeking to answer this question, this article examines the “grounded and messy ways” (Temenos and Baker, 2015: 842) in which consultants sought to implement the project in Jakarta. To do so, I use Tsing’s (2005) concept of “friction”. To attend to friction, Tsing argues, is to “[refuse] the lie that global power operates as a well-oiled machine” (6) and expose global capitalism as “an always unfinished achievement” (7). I find utility in this concept because it points to both the disruptive and productive qualities of friction, the ways friction simultaneously “gets in the way of the smooth operation of power” and “is required to keep global power in motion” (6). It captures both “the effectiveness, and the fragility” (77) of global capitalism.

This article contributes to a growing scholarship on the geographies of policymaking and advances theoretical understandings of policy (im)mobilities by moving beyond categories of failure and success. While productively interrogating “failure” and “success,” recent scholarship has generally continued to deploy these categories. Building on McCann and Ward’s (2015) critique of the “success/failure dualism,” I argue greater attention is needed to the interstitial space between these categories that projects and policies often occupy. The GGSW project is an instructive case for such an intervention. While by 2017, the Indonesian government had still not made a final decision on whether to proceed with implementation, the project nonetheless circulated through transnational networks as an example of Dutch expertise. Having yet to either “sink” or “swim,” the project fits into neither category of success nor failure, yet nonetheless had material and political effects, as I will illustrate. In illustrating the ability of Indonesian state actors to disrupt and facilitate the mobility of the DDA, this article also contributes to decentering private consultants, primary actors within policy mobilities scholarship. By bringing state actors into the frame and elucidating how Dutch expertise is met with resistance in postcolonial Jakarta, I also provide modest insights into contemporary Indo-Dutch relations. As a destination for Dutch expertise, Jakarta is distinguished by a history of Dutch colonialism; the effects on the city’s water/landscape can still be seen today (Colven, 2017; Kooy and Bakker, 2008). While this history sets the stage for Dutch involvement in Jakarta today, a full discussion is beyond the scope of this article. Therefore, I necessarily focus on contemporary relations, examining project development between 2014 and 2017.

This article draws on a critical analysis of the GGSW project master plan, policy documents, promotional materials, and other “policy artifacts” (Pow, 2014: 289) which illuminate the expertise and discourses consultants mobilized to promote the GGSW project. I draw also on in-depth interviews conducted in Jakarta and the Netherlands between 2014 and 2017 with actors involved in designing and planning the project: local and national state actors, (primarily Dutch) engineering and financial consultants, and water experts. Participant observation of three institutional meetings attended by state actors and consultants, and two field visits, where I accompanied consultants to North Jakarta and various sites of flood management infrastructure in the city, provided insights into the everyday practices of negotiation between consultants and state actors, little evidence of which is borne by the master plan.

The article is organized as follows. First, after examining recent policy mobilities scholarship on “failure,” I describe the concerted efforts by the government of the Netherlands and Dutch water sector to export their brand of expertise not only to Jakarta, but worldwide. Second, I examine how the actors who seek to render the DDA mobile frame it as a distinct yet adaptable approach, applicable across a range of contexts. Finally, by tracing interactions between Dutch consultants and Indonesian bureaucrats, officials and government ministries, I illustrate how friction can be both productive and disruptive in ways that transcend the categories of success and failure. These productive frictions reveal that success constitutes more than just successful implementation. I end by reflecting on the implications of this for understanding infrastructural projects in the context of the global South, and for policy mobilities scholarship.

Policy (im)mobilities

Success/failure

Emerging from a critique of policy transfer studies, policy mobilities constitutes a now-matured body of literature in geography that seeks to understand how policies are made mobile, mutating as they travel through transnational knowledge networks (Cook and Ward, 2012; McCann, 2008; McCann and Ward, 2012, 2013; Peck and Theodore, 2010, 2012; Temenos and McCann, 2012; Ward, 2006, 2012; Wood, 2015). Drawing on geographical theorizations of scale and relational understandings of space (Massey, 2005), this literature explores “the hybrid mutations of policy techniques and practices across dynamized institutional landscapes” (Peck, 2011: 774). While policy transfer studies examine how policymakers borrow from other contexts, policy mobilities attend to the role of power-laden policy regimes and networks of global consultants in shaping the movement of policies (Peck, 2011). This approach attends to the multiplicities and complexities of movements, and accommodates an understanding that policies have multiple origins (Roy, 2011). This scholarship analytically foregrounds the movement of knowledge, people, and ideas, as evidenced in the enthusiastic uptake of McCann and Ward’s (2012) method of “following the policy” wherein researchers themselves become mobile, traveling with the policy and actors involved in its circulations.

Jacobs (2012: 418) argues such an approach produces “a tendency for scholarship to stay fixated on policy presences,” resulting in an overemphasis on successful cases at the expense of attention to immobility. “Following” the policy has also led to a disproportionate focus on global consultants (Clarke, 2012), despite the full range of actors involved in policymaking, including engineers (Björkman and Harris, 2018; Larner and Laurie, 2010), practitioners, politicians, and activists (Lauermann and Vogelpohl, 2019). Bok and Coe (2017: 53), for example, argue that the state is typically represented as “a structural, functional backdrop to be negotiated, rather than a dynamic coalition of actors.” The demonstrated importance of national imaginaries in shaping policy mobilities (Bok, 2015) suggests a need to more closely examine the role of state actors.

Dolowitz and Marsh (2000) situate successful and failed policy transfer on a continuum, offering a typography of different “degrees” of transfer: copying, emulation, combination, and inspiration. This typology, however, reinforces a view of policy transfer as a linear movement from A to B. By contrast, recent scholarship in policy mobilities takes a social-constructionist approach to failure, interrogating how it is constructed, perceived, and mobilized (Davidson, 2019; Lovell, 2017, 2019; Müller, 2015; Nciri and Levenda, 2019). Heeding warnings against fetishizing mobility (McCann, 2008) and the disproportionate focus on the hypermobilities of models and best practices, researchers have explored how policies that fail to materialize or achieve their aims nonetheless continue to circulate in policy networks with material effects (Chang, 2017; Lauermann, 2016; Weller, 2009; Wood, 2019). In her examination of a failed World Bank adaptation project in Kiribati, Webber (2015: 33) shows how difficulties encountered during implementation were “recast as problems overcome, slipping from lessons learned to best practices” (see also Levenda, 2019). Rather than an exceptional event, Müller (2015) suggests policy immobility is an everyday reality of policymaking. Likewise, Wells (2014: 475) uses the term “policyfailing” to describe “the moments in which policies are defeated, stopped, or stalled.” Nonetheless such accounts continue to rely on categories of success/failure.

Also observing how failure is often re-scripted as a “necessary step on the road to eventual success” (887), Lisle (2018) argues this cannot explain, however, “the failure to produce anything at all, or the discarded projects that never get off the ground” (904). She calls for a more heterogeneous account of failure that captures both its productive and unruly nature. Such an approach builds on understandings of failure and success as relational, subjective and contextual, rather than distinct categories (Baker and McCann, 2018; McCann and Ward, 2015).

Friction instead of failure?

While success and failure remain meaningful categories to theorists and practitioners, they are unable to capture the messy, indeterminate processes through which policies move and are territorialized. As blanket terms, these categories have the effect of smoothing over differences between cases, reinforcing the misconception that they are mutually exclusive, and promoting a teleological view of policymaking. Thus, some scholars call for attention to processes falling somewhere between success and failure: “absences” (Lovell, 2017), “disruptions” (Bok, n.d.) or “moments” when “the making of a policy may fail temporarily, repeatedly, or permanently” (Wells, 2014: 475). Cresswell (2012) prompts policy mobilities scholars to observe “when the movement of ideas gets stuck, is made still, or is forced to wait for receptive audiences” (651; cf. Freeman, 2012). Evidently, more work is needed to interrogate absence or disruption not as end states (e.g. a “failed” project) but as constitutive of policy mobilities.

Instructive for this task is scholarship examining the awkward translation of “expertise” from one context to another (Ferguson, 1994; Goldman, 2005; Li, 2007; Mosse, 2005) in the name of “Development,” often with unintended outcomes. Domosh (2010) draws our attention to forces of friction and motion as global power is (re)made. By exposing the “uneven, contested, and messy ways” (419) that Citibank expanded globally, she illustrates how the bank’s development was shaped by particular encounters with people and places in unintended, unexpected ways. Also examining efforts to globalize expertise, Tsing (2005) argues that only by attending to “the friction between aspiration and practice achievement” (85) are we able to critically analyze efforts to render knowledge global. Such accounts complicate categories of success/failure, while utilizing neither.

This article takes as its starting point that friction is fundamentally different from failure, with which it is often conflated. To describe the project as an (failed) attempt to transfer the DDA to Jakarta would be misleading since, as Minkman et al. (2019) note, “There is no single definition of this policy model” (1563). Rather than being neatly transferred from one context to another, the DDA operates as an assemblage “of elements and resources: fixed and mobile pieces of expertise, regulation, institutional capacities, etc.” (McCann and Ward, 2013: 8) that mutates as it circulates through space. Instead of interrogating whether or not the GGSW project constitutes success/failure, this article aims to think beyond these categories and their limitations. I explore the productive and disruptive frictions (Tsing, 2005) have shaped the GGSW project. In doing so, I attend to practices that fall between (and beyond) success and failure, illustrating how these categories are interconnected. The following section examines efforts by the Dutch government and water sector to make Dutch expertise mobile. Such efforts constitute an important part of the institutional backdrop for the DDA.

The Dutch Delta Approach

The Dutch water sector and the Government of the Netherlands actively engage in “making markets” (Baker et al., 2016: 464), and new destinations for Dutch expertise are “painstakingly created in professional and ideological landscapes elsewhere” (465). Together, they have embarked upon a number of programs to strengthen the position of the Dutch as international leaders in water management, such as Partners for Water, a program to support Dutch projects abroad. In 2015, the Government of the Netherlands appointed its first Special Envoy for International Water Affairs, a role specifically designed to “[boost] the international market position of Dutch know-how and expertise” (Government of the Netherlands, 2015) through economic diplomacy. Dutch foreign policy also supports the global expansion of the Dutch water sector. In 2013, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Netherlands published A World to Gain: A New Agenda for Aid, Trade, and Investment, outlining the government’s plans for a shift away from development assistance, toward a policy of trade and investment, with the aim of creating business opportunities for Dutch companies abroad. For countries like Indonesia, with whom the Netherlands has a “transitional relationship” (characterized by both aid and trade relations), the government intends to phase out the use of grants and aid, instead promoting private sector involvement and the opening of markets. These efforts to provide institutional support for the venture of the Dutch water sector abroad illustrate the “continuous work” (Machold, 2015: 827) that goes into maintaining the position of Dutch experts as international leaders in water. The international prevalence of the Dutch water sector is thus a result of a series of orchestrated efforts to maintain a foothold in an increasingly competitive market.

One of the primary areas in which the Dutch seek to lead is delta management. In 2016, the Dutch ministries of Foreign Affairs, Economic Affairs, and Infrastructure and the Environment launched the International Water Ambition. Financed by Partners for Water, the initiative is intended to position the Netherlands at the forefront of efforts to achieve water security in urban deltas around the world, while pursuing economic opportunities for Dutch companies abroad (Ministry of Infrastructure and the Environment, Government of the Netherlands, 2016). From this initiative emerges the DDA: a “comprehensive,” “integrated,” and “adaptable” approach to sustainable delta management, based on the Netherlands’ Delta Programme. Representing this approach as an exportable form of best practice, consultants and officials point to the success of delta management in the Netherlands as evidence of their expertise. As one architect involved in the GGSW project elaborated, “we have the best controlled, the best managed, the best maintained, the best designed delta in the world” (December 2015, personal communication).

While stressing it is not a “blueprint,” the Dutch government and water sector market the DDA as “a characteristic and recognizable approach” (Netherlands Water Partnership, 2014: 6) applicable to other deltas across “various social, economic and cultural contexts” (Kingdom of the Netherlands, 2017: 3). Yet such representations obscure the specific institutional context from which the approach emerges. The Netherlands is distinguished from other sites in which Dutch experts operate by its long history of “anthropogenic modifications” to its delta (Netherlands Water Partnership, 2014: 9) and unique institutional context, exemplified by the Dutch system of waterschappen (waterboards), which have long afforded the Dutch protection. These successes are difficult to replicate, as one Dutch water expert explained in relation to public participation in the planning of large-scale projects:

… I think that’s also one of the strengths of the way we work in the Netherlands. But again, this is not easy to copy, and you cannot copy such things easily to another country because we’ve gone through a different system. (personal communication, December 2015)

Much work, therefore, has to be done to translate the DDA beyond its original context so that “the general can rise above the particular” (Tsing, 2005: 89). As Temenos and McCann (2012) write, “The process of creating equivalence where it may not apparently exist … involves a familiarity with specialized, technical, conceptual, or abstract language, and/or with calculative techniques like indicators or benchmarking” (1393). Such techniques are deployed within the DDA brochure, which visualizes the approach as 12 “essential building blocks” that are “essential for a delta approach and can also be applied in other delta countries/regions/cities” (10). This reflects the broader assumptions underpinning the DDA: “the preconditions for a sustainable delta are the same” (Netherlands Water Partnership, 2017: 10) and “the parameters (…) are comparable” (Kingdom of the Netherlands, 2017: 3) across space.

At the same time as rendering different geographical contexts commensurable, the DDA is presented as customizable and malleable. This illustrates the common tension between a demand for policies tailored to local contexts and off-the-shelf policies made “easily accessible in packaged, readily consumable, and mobile form” (Temenos and McCann, 2012: 1393). Demonstrating that “the solutions for each delta may be different” (NWP, 2014: 10), the brochure illustrates how the approach materializes differently across contexts: the Mekong Delta Plan orientates around agri-business industrialization and economic development; the Beira Master Plan for Mozambique emphasizes land development and investment projects; and Rebuild by Design in NYC features locally specific climate change solutions, designed by a coalition of NGOs, researchers, residents, and government officials. It is from this broader context of market- and policymaking that the GGSW project emerges.

Jakarta’s Great Garuda Sea Wall project

The master plan envisions the GGSW project in stages: strengthening the existing inner sea wall along Jakarta’s coastline, followed by construction of eastern and western offshore sea walls to close Jakarta Bay, transforming it into an offshore retention lake (Figure 1). High-capacity pumping stations will facilitate the discharge of the rivers into the Java Sea. The design integrates plans for extensive land reclamation, transportation infrastructure, real estate development, and construction of new Central Business District. The financing strategy relies on private sector investment in commercially viable aspects of the plan, while using public–private partnerships and State-Owned Enterprises to finance the construction of flood safety infrastructure.

Figure 1.

Architectural visualization of the Great Garuda project, as seen from the sky.

Though used as an example of the approach at work abroad, the history of the project in fact precedes the publication of the DDA brochure in 2014. In 2007, following Jakarta’s worst flood event in three centuries (Brinkman and Hartman, n.d.), the Indonesian government requested the assistance of the Dutch government. Deltares, an independent research institute based in Delft and Utrecht with a local office in Jakarta, subsequently prepared a hydrological model and completed a flood hazard mapping exercise, identifying the threat of flooding from the sea and high land subsidence rates. The JFM project provided the basis for the Jakarta Coastal Defense Strategy (JCDS). Undertaken between 2010 and 2011 under the umbrella of bilateral cooperation between the Indonesian and Dutch governments,¹ the JCDS identified different options going forward, one of which was to convert Jakarta Bay into a retention lake using an offshore sea wall, financed by 3000 ha of land reclamation. This recommendation became the basis of a tender for the preparation of a master plan for Jakarta issued by the Dutch government in October 2012. This was awarded to a consortium led by Dutch engineering and consulting agency Witteveen+Bos, who coordinated with the Indonesian Ministry of Public Works, Ministry of Coordinating Economic Affairs, The National Planning Development Agency, and DKI Jakarta in preparing the master plan. The master plan, which integrates flood management with urban development, was completed in 2014. However, some four years later, the Indonesian government had neither officially committed to the project, nor taken it off the table. The project thus provides an apt case study through which to interrogate the frictions inherent to policy mobilities.

Productive and disruptive frictions

This section examines the disruptive and productive frictions that shaped the design, planning, and (attempted) implementation of the GGSW project between 2014 and 2017. Disruptive frictions operate to interrupt policy mobilities, while productive frictions are generative of outcomes (intended or unintended) considered by actors to be beneficial. I organize the following discussion around two themes. The first is the uneven reception of the project by DKI Jakarta and the Indonesian government. While some publicly embraced the project, touting it as the solution to Jakarta’s water woes, others expressed concerns relating to funding; feasibility and institutional capacity; and potentially negative social and environmental impacts. I discuss each of these concerns in turn below.

The second theme concerns the relationship between the GGSW project and the Indonesian real estate market. While intended to be a flood management project, the project quickly became entangled in longstanding ambitions to develop Jakarta Bay, manifested most recently as plans for 17 reclaimed islands. The centrality of land reclamation to the proposed design meant that it aligned with and was propelled by the goals of politicians and property developers. However, it was simultaneously tarred with the same brush by critics of Jakarta’s market-led mode of development that, they charge, has catered to the wealthy middle class while (in)directly displacing poor communities. In exploring these themes, I examine the disruptive frictions encountered by consultants in their struggles to realize the project, the hesitancies and concerns of Indonesian bureaucrats, and the productive material and political effects of the unrealized master plan in and beyond Jakarta.

Between resistance and patronage

Notwithstanding the time, staff, resources, and funding committed to the GGSW project by the Dutch government and the consortium, by the time I began fieldwork in September 2015, progress had evidently stalled. Strengthening the existing sea wall was unanimously agreed upon by the provincial and national governments as a necessary “no regret” measure,² but a consensus regarding the outer sea wall construction and land reclamation had not been reached. In interviews, consultants told stories of stalled progress and delays, and doubts were cast over the project’s future. During fieldwork, I found myself experiencing the methodological limits of policy mobilities studies’ emphasis on policy presence. I struggled to “follow” much of anything: it was difficult to arrange interviews with individuals in the ministries who were, on paper at least, closely involved in the project and would be in its implementation. Those I did meet often spoke of the project in vague, noncommittal terms, not least in part because President Joko “Jokowi” Widodo had still not made a final decision on the project. As one consultant explained, “unless everything is settled in the PerPres [Presidential Regulation] and everything is arranged, people have difficulties to commit” (November 2015, personal communication).

While consultants were contracted by the Dutch government to work full time on the project, I was struck by what I perceived to be inaction on the part of the Indonesian government, which had not committed the equivalent staff, resources, or funding. This proved to be a point of contention in the early stages, as one consultant closely involved described:

… the original agreement was that the Netherlands government would pay their staff, and the Indonesian government would assign their own staff. The first happened, there was a consortium, it was about fifty engineers. The latter never happened. (…) that led to frictions. (September 2015, personal communication)

Despite recommendations by consultants to establish a dedicated organization (modeled on the Dutch Delta Commissioner) to oversee implementation, by 2016 this still had not been established (consultant, August 2016, personal communication). It seemed that the project was not being given priority by DKI Jakarta or the Indonesian government. Evidently, Dutch consultants struggled to utilize their expertise in ways that would “reach so far or deep as to change everything according to plan” (Tsing, 2005: 195).

In Indonesian culture, there is often a reluctance to directly say no, as this is considered impolite: in order to save face or avoid giving a negative response, a common strategy is to say “not yet” (belum). I therefore read the lack of action on the part of the Indonesian government as an implicit form of resistance, a quiet refusal. Interviews with consultants and Indonesian bureaucrats illuminated three primary factors contributing to this resistance to the GGSW project, each of which I will discuss in turn. The first relates to funding. In interviews, Dutch consultants and Indonesian bureaucrats presented the Indonesian government as reluctant to allocate funding from the national budget, preferring instead to use private sector financing. Indonesian government staff suggested this reluctance might stem partly from the responsibility of President Jokowi to fairly allocate funding across Indonesia. While Jowoki was a keen advocate for the project as Jakarta’s Governor (2012–2014), a staff member from the Water Resources Department, BAPPENAS (Indonesian Ministry of National Development Planning) explained that he faced a different set of responsibilities as President of Indonesia:

I think [that] is the biggest challenge, how to finance that because (…) we cannot put all the money in Jakarta. We have many other area [sic] in Indonesia that also need the development. That’s why we encourage to have the PPP [public-private partnership] instead of using all the government money (…) Jokowi really wants to spread out the economic development (…) when he was a governor, he just wanted to know about how to make Jakarta better. When he is president, he has to think about broader [issues]. (August 2016, personal communication)

Regardless of the exact reason, the reluctance to commit state funding to the project presented a significant challenge for the consultants tasked with ensuring its financial viability, particularly since the master plan relied on large upfront investments. As one consultant explained:

It’s also difficult because the amount of money is huge (…) if you’re not ready to pay for it (…) it’s quite a difficult discussion to get anywhere. So, I would say that, as one of the biggest problems [of realizing the project]. (November 2015, personal communication)

It was also evident that DKI Jakarta, particularly then-Governor of Jakarta, Basuki “Ahok” Tjahaja Purnama, had less interest in the longer-term plans for the outer sea wall and reclamation. As the same consultant explained: “[Ahok is] focusing on the current sea wall, that’s his priority (…) the only thing he does not want to do is look at the outer sea wall yet, because it’s past … his ruling period” (November 2015, personal communication). Thus, far from operating in a frictionless environment, consultants had to contend with the priorities of different ministries and officials, who emerged as “capable of actively creating and steering transnational trajectories of policy mobilization” (Bok and Coe, 2017: 53).

A second factor for the lack of progress related to the institutional context and a perceived lack of “institutional capacity” within the provincial and national governments, which consultants described as an ongoing challenge. Institutional capacity in this context refers to the knowledge, skills, and resources of institutions and staff to oversee successful project implementation. For example, consultants considered only a few individuals within the Indonesian government to have a sufficiently deep understanding of the project:

… we were working with a consortium, two people from Public Works and actually only one person from the Coordinating Ministry for Economic Affairs (…) you have good key players there, but only a few people. (December 2015, personal communication)

This partly reflects the fact that many staff who had been involved in the GGSW project were no longer in office after the 2014 presidential election of Jokowi, and those who replaced them lacked prior knowledge of the project. A perceived lack of institutional capacity to implement the project was also reflected in the comments of a staff member in the Water Resources Department at DKI Jakarta (cited previously), who expressed apprehensions about the complexity of the project and the Indonesian state’s ability to meet funding and staffing needs:

… many of us still don’t believe that we can reach this, we can finalize this. Because this is really huge, you need to have a huge, huge funding and then at the same time it is complicated. (August 2016, personal communication)

Yet in interviews and documents, consultants explained that successful implementation of this ambitious project would hinge on the development of institutional capacity. The gap between required and actual capacity casts doubt on its feasibility from the perspective of both consultants and bureaucrats, raising the question of why this particular project was deemed appropriate for the Indonesian context. These concerns were not illegitimate: this would be Indonesia’s most ambitious infrastructure project to date; successful implementation would require a level of institutional capacity that was considered not to exist. Its feasibility, however, was rarely explicitly considered by consultants, though a number of consultants did acknowledge the possibility of pursuing a less complex version of the master plan, such as a “dyke only alternative” (without land reclamation). Instead of re-evaluating the relevance of the DDA to Jakarta, deploying a discourse of institutional capacity shifts responsibility for the project’s potential success (or failure) onto the Indonesian ministries. This echoes observations by Dean et al. (2017) that the World Bank mobilized discourses of institutional capacity to explain the failure of their projects in the Pacific Islands. Thus,

Instead of the World Bank being compelled to reflect on whether its procedures and requirements were reasonable and feasible within the Kiribati context, their necessity and legitimacy was taken as given: benchmarks by which to judge who, and how others, lacked capacity. (68)

Consultants acknowledged during interviews that the institutional context of Indonesia bears little resemblance to that of the Netherlands, posing challenges for implementation. This was reflected in the comparisons they implicitly and explicitly drew:

… in the Netherlands, everything is open. But decision-making processes in Indonesia are still hidden in some way. (Advisor, Dutch Ministry of Infrastructure and The Environment, December 2015, personal communication)

… mostly the technical design aspects are quite similar to the Netherlands, you can apply the same methodology, the same kind of analysis, the same kind of design principles but there are many differences in terms of institutional capabilities of government … . (Dutch consultant, December 2015, personal communication)

The challenges of implementation illustrate the “the awkwardness of translation” (Tsing, 2005: 211) as consultants struggled to render the different institutional contexts of the Netherlands and Indonesia commensurable.

A third reason contributing to the lack of commitment and progress were the concerns of some individuals and ministries that the project would have negative social and environmental impacts, as described by a member of staff (quoted previously) in the Water Resources Department in BAPPENAS:

… [we] need to decide (…) whether we need the NCICD Phase B, C [outer sea wall and land reclamation] or whether we just finish with NCICD Phase A [strengthening the inner sea wall] (…) it’s not only about technical but also social, environment. We have the mangrove there. We have the fishermen there. (…) what will happen if we have the reclamation and the dike, what will happen with sediment, what will happen with water quality? (…) it’s quite massive construction work, it’s very expensive (…) it will be good to have a sophisticated, well planned [project] but is that really something that we need, at the moment? (August 2016, personal communication)

For example, the Indonesian Ministry of Maritime Affairs and Fisheries explicitly raised concerns about the environmental impacts of closing Jakarta Bay. In October 2015, while I sat in the reception of a Dutch engineering firm in Jakarta waiting to meet with a consultant, I browsed a copy of the newspaper The Jakarta Post. An article, titled “Sea wall an environmental disaster: study,” reported on the findings of a recent study published by staff in the Research and Development Center for Marine and Coastal Resources within the Indonesian Ministry of Maritime Affairs and Fisheries. The consultant I met that day was not aware of the study and expressed their regrets that the ministry had not raised their concerns directly. These instances of disruptive friction—evident in the resistance of different state ministries—illustrate the agency of state actors to interrupt efforts to globalize Dutch expertise. Rather than being characterized by unimpeded motion, Dutch expertise encounters frictions that produce unexpected divergences between aspirations and reality such that Dutch expertise “runs up against the landscape” of Jakarta, “but not quite as in its dreams” (Tsing, 2005: 65).

By 2015, the reservations of DKI Jakarta and the Indonesian government had brought the project to a standstill. Yet these frictions again proved productive: a decision was subsequently made to conduct a 2-year review of the project to undertake further studies with the aim of acquiring high-quality data and engineering analyses of Jakarta Bay. The Dutch government financed a second round of funding, an outcome influenced by the introduction of South Korean involvement via the Korea International Cooperation Agency, which resulted in a trilateral Memorandum of Understanding in 2015. By raising their concerns about the GGSW project and leveraging South Korean interests in the project, the Indonesian ministries (unintentionally or not) secured additional funding and technical support from the Dutch for a second phase of the project (NCICD 2). While some actors involved might have considered this a “failure,” setback or concession, for others this constituted a success. This illustrates how friction can be disruptive and productive to realizing a project.

Consultancy firms also reaped benefits: at the same time as experiencing difficulties in Jakarta, consultants sought to profit from the unrealized master plan. Though still only existing on paper, consultants presented the GGSW project at conferences to showcase their expertise in delta management, and pursue consultancy contracts:

… I often also present the project as an example of how you can make an integrated master plan for a city, but it is also maybe to show the Dutch expertise, but it is also maybe a bit of a test case, especially coming here [to Jakarta], how to implement it. Because of its complexity but also because of its ambitions. (Dutch consultant, December 2015, personal communication)

Thus, despite not actually realizing the project and failing to “transform the world in their own image” (Ferguson, 1994: 276), consultants used the master plan as a model for implementation. Whether these consultants ultimately succeed or fail in realizing the GGSW project as envisioned, the master plan has helped to keep in motion the project of globalizing Dutch expertise which, from the perspective of the Dutch water sector and government, is most likely considered a successful outcome.

Translation to the sphere of real estate development

Faced with the Indonesian government’s apparent unwillingness to commit funding, consultants integrated the use of private–public partnerships into the master plan during the design process, while continuing to encourage the government to commit financially. The reliance on private investment as a “financial fix” (Wade, 2019: 165) had a significant bearing on the master plan; land reclamation became the primary financing mechanism and the centerpiece of the master plan in the form of 1250 ha of reclaimed land in the shape of the Garuda. The design has been credited to Dutch architect Gijs van den Boomen, KuiperCampagnons who, while playing on an iPad in a taxi, noticed that the shape of Jakarta Bay resembled a bird (personal communication, 2015). The introduction of this design invoked nationalist sentiments (somewhat ironically) as a symbol of Indonesian independence, capturing the imagination of political elites:

… when the Garuda was introduced (…) it was really a moment that more energy flowed into the master plan (…) it triggered (…) more interest because the project also shifted a bit from only being a sea wall to providing perspective for the city, which is also one of the goals for the master plan. (Dutch consultant, December 2015, personal communication)

Reflecting how infrastructure projects, particularly in postcolonial contexts, are associated with ideas of desire, fantasy, modernity, and state-building (Larkin, 2013), the Indonesian government regarded GGSW project as a project of national importance, enrolled in the work of re-envisioning Jakarta’s place on the international stage. This contributed significantly to driving the project forward.

At the same time, however, the emphasis on land reclamation dramatically altered the master plan, transforming what was initially a coastal defense plan into what many critics perceived as an urban development project. As one financial consultant reflected, “it started as a water project. During the process, it looked like it became a real estate program (…) But we concluded it is an integrated project” (December 2015, personal communication). While the Indonesian Ministry of Public Works, Ministry of Coordinating Economic Affairs, and BAPPENAS remained relatively steadfast in their support of the project, the emphasis on urban development led individuals within the ministries to question its purpose. As one Dutch consultant working closely on the project elaborated:

… concerns were raised throughout the ministries and so this new cabinet was like “what is this project?” You know, “is this over the top?” And also, they lost the original intention of the project: flood safety. It was only about the great Garuda. And so, this new cabinet was quite hesitant to proceed and only the ministries (…) [and] President Jokowi who are familiar with the project … they were still endorsing the project. (September 2015, personal communication)

Demonstrating that policies never arrive in vacuum but are instead confronted with “pre-existing socioeconomic institutions and cultural contexts” (Chang and Sheppard, 2013: 61), the GGSW project soon became entangled in longstanding plans to redevelop North Jakarta via a series of hotly contested reclamation projects, commonly referred to as the 17 islands. Plans to redevelop North Jakarta date back to then-President Suharto’s “Rebirth of Jayakarta” plan in the mid-1990s (Silver, 2008) via the creation of a waterfront city, revitalization efforts, transportation infrastructure, and extensive land reclamation (Sidarta, 1996). Though a Presidential Decree was signed (Keppres No. 52/1995) and the Jakarta Waterfront Implementation Board established, the 1997 Asian financial crisis stalled the project. Plans for reclamation were subsequently revived in the 2000s when DKI Jakarta issued reclamation permits to developers for 17 islands. By resonating with these longstanding desires of developers and political elites to redevelop North Jakarta via land reclamation, the GGSW project garnered the interest of key actors within the Indonesian bureaucracy while also translating into the sphere of real estate development. For the national government, the master plan offered a win–win: it presented an opportunity to provide a long-term solution to flooding and redevelop North Jakarta, without financially burdening the ministries.

However, consultants expressed concerns about the faith being placed in land reclamation as a limitless source of revenue. As one consultant explained:

We had to temper [BAPPENAS’] enthusiasm because on paper, yes, the excel sheet does look very good with so much land reclamation. But where do you get the sand? The development time is going to be very long … the project will become very complicated … But still BAPPENAS was still the big driver behind this bigger, bigger, biggest development. (September 2015, personal communication)

Another challenge was posed by the conflation of the 17 islands and GGSW project by the public and the media. Though consultants explained to me that these were separate (at the time), the failure to effectively disseminate information about the project resulted in widespread confusion. Many media outlets, which in the absence of sufficient socialization became a primary source of information about the GGSW project, implicitly and explicitly conflated the two. Subsequently, property developers were able to use the project to advance their agendas (see Wade, 2019). For example, Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill LLP (SOM), a firm hired by Indonesian property developer Agung Podomoro Land to develop the master plan for Pluit City claims on its website:

SOM’s master plan for two new islands on 450 hectares of reclaimed land off the north coast of Jakarta, Indonesia, creates the first phase of a unique “archipelago” city district to be built in the historic Jakarta Bay. They offer an affordable solution to providing for Jakarta’s swiftly swelling population, while helping to deliver a sea defense to protect the city from sea level rise and severe storm surges that threaten millions of its residents. (SOM, n.d.)

By drawing associations between land reclamation and flood protection, developers capitalized on adaptation discourses in an effort to legitimize the 17 islands.

At the same time, the reputation of the GGSW project grew somewhat tarnished by its association with the 17 islands. It is important to note this was not only a matter of public perception: several consultancy firms were involved in both projects. In 2015, while reclamation of some of the 17 islands was already underway, individuals within the national ministries began to question the legitimacy of the permits given to developers. Indonesian Minister for Maritime Affairs and Fisheries, Susi Pudjiastuti publicly stated that the ministry never gave their approval for the projects, maintaining this was a legal requirement.

Already on shaky legal ground, the 17 islands became more contentious when a corruption scandal erupted; the director of Agung Podomoro Land was accused of bribing a city official to change a bylaw governing land reclamation. Rizal Ramli, Coordinating Minister for Maritime Affairs issued a temporary moratorium on reclamation in April 2016. (Ramli was later replaced by Luhut Binsar Pandjaitan in a Cabinet reshuffle in July 2016, who then lifted the moratorium in October 2017.) These events initially posed a relatively serious threat to the GGSW project. Since the financing strategy for the project depended on private sector investment, any perceived hostility to developers could increase the perceived risk of investment, thereby undermining its financial feasibility. As one Dutch consultant summarized, “one risk … is that we make the lives of the current investors so difficult, that they’re reluctant [to invest] – that’s a very big risk” (August 2016, personal communication).

However, the very entanglement of the GGSW project with the 17 islands also ensured its momentum. While highly political, construction of the 17 islands and sales of yet-to-be-built apartments were already underway. In 2016, President Jokowi requested BAPPENAS oversee the integrated planning of the 17 islands and GGSW project. Despite the risks of the project becoming associated with private sector corruption, this move was ultimately considered beneficial by consultants since it would contribute to moving the GGSW project forward and signaled Jokowi’s support. Thus, ultimately, the frictions Dutch consultants experienced relating to the 17 islands were also productive.

Conclusion: Productive or disruptive for whom?

Since the master plan for the GGSW project was completed in 2014, little material progress has been made. Given the uncertainty of the project’s future, and evidence of both disruptive and productive frictions between bureaucrats and consultants, the project fits neatly into neither category of success nor failure. By examining frictions between the aspirations of Dutch consultants and Indonesian bureaucrats and the realities on the ground, I draw three empirical observations. First, the uneven support this ambitious project received from DKI Jakarta and the Indonesian government illustrates how the state is not a single, monolithic actor. Different state actors expressed their hesitancies regarding the project’s feasibility and necessity, and the potentially negative social and environmental impacts on Jakarta Bay and the surrounding communities. However, these hesitancies resulted in the Dutch government funding further studies to strengthen the master plan, therefore nonetheless driving it forward.

Second, the entanglement of the GGSW project with long-term plans to reclaim 17 islands within Jakarta bay simultaneously threatened and ensured its survival. Moving well beyond flood management, the master planning process was shaped by government officials who imagined the project would serve their world-class city aspirations, as well as the broader political goal of positioning Indonesia on the international stage. While this was regarded as problematic by critics who viewed the GGSW project as an urban development project masquerading as a flood management plan, this also garnered enthusiasm within the government ministries by tapping into desires to transform North Jakarta via coastal development. Third, regardless of the lack of material progress, plans for the GGSW project did work for both the private and public sectors in Indonesia and the Netherlands: unintentionally lending legitimacy to the reclamation projects of property developers, providing momentum for plans to revitalize North Jakarta, and offering the potential to serve the Indonesian government’s interest in attracting private capital. Further, Dutch consultants used the project as a model of the DDA to demonstrate the broad relevance of their expertise to clients elsewhere. Collectively, these observations illustrate the difficulty of labeling the project as either a success or a failure, and the existence of the multiple, subjective definitions of these categories, raising the question: for whom can the project have succeeded or failed?

Responding to calls for further interrogation of policy disruptions (which I argue are fundamentally different from “failure”), this article has examined processes of policy mobilization that fall between categories of success and failure. Using the lens of friction, I have revealed the contradictory, messy ways in which policies are localized, illuminating the important role of Indonesian state actors in this process. In addition to building on existing scholarship critically examining the mobilization of Dutch expertise to places elsewhere (Hasan et al., 2019; Minkman et al., 2019), this article contributes to widening the analytical frame of policy mobilities scholarship by interrogating the social practices associated with policymaking that constitute neither success nor failure. This approach is particularly useful for researching urban development and infrastructure projects in the global South, which often are delayed, fail to live up to the aspirations of political elites, or never come to fruition. In such contexts, labeling projects simply as “failed” would not do analytical justice to the realities on the ground. By comparison, friction illuminates how success and failure can exist alongside one another. It allows us to see more clearly that what constitutes “failure” or “success” looks different depending on where one is standing. This can also be extended to the task of representing and researching cities of the global South, which are perpetually portrayed as failing by Eurocentric notions of development and modernity.³ Further, by illustrating how multiple interests and actors influenced the GGSW project, this case study complicates understandings within policy mobilities scholarship of how power-laden policy regimes operate. While they undoubtedly shape the making and moving of policies, relations of power do not always have the effects that we might anticipate nor do they unchallenged. My findings therefore echo Lauermann and Vogelpohl’s (2019) call for more attention within policy mobilities scholarship to opposition, contestation, and resistance to policy models.

The project re-emerged in 2019 after a hiatus as a newly designed “Integrated Flood Safety Plan.” The plan still relies on sea defenses, but the proposed dyke will remain open. The plan no longer includes the iconic, yet controversial Garuda-shaped land reclamation, instead integrating the few islands that have been reclaimed. The Indonesian Ministry of Public Works and Housing has given its approval for the most recent iteration and the plan will now be subject to discussion between the ministries (Dutch consultant, personal communication, 2019). Given how many years of debate followed the original master plan, the approval of the project by no means guarantees its implementation. In January 2020, Jakarta experienced its worst flooding in over a decade. Attention subsequently turned once more to flood management. Meanwhile, government plans announced in 2019 to relocate the capital city to East Kalimantan, Borneo, are moving ahead, raising questions about the future of Jakarta. Though time will tell whether the project will be implemented or abandoned, important insights can nonetheless be gleaned by examining processes that occupy the space in between success and failure. This is especially important to consider for understanding policymaking in the context of the “global South,” where projects often remain unrealized for years, if not decades. Though categories of success/failure will no doubt remain meaningful to actors involved in policymaking, abandoning such limiting categories might enrich policy mobilities scholarship by examining processes and practices that cannot be so easily classified.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to all those who gave me their time and shared their insights. Thank you to Eugene McCann and Jamie Peck for inviting me to present an earlier version of this paper in their session at the 2019 AAG meeting. I am grateful to Helga Leitner, Rhys Machold, Sam Nowak, Eric Sheppard and Matt Wade for providing thoughtful, detailed comments on earlier drafts. Rachel Bok provided her insights and support in developing the ideas presented here. Thank you also to the three anonymous reviewers for their extremely constructive comments and suggestions. Any errors and omissions are of course my own. Fieldwork for this article was supported by the UCLA International Institute, UCLA Department of Geography, and UCLA Urban Humanities Initiative.

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Emma Colven

Notes

Emma Colven is assistant professor in the Department of International and Area Studies at the University of Oklahoma. She holds a PhD in geography from UCLA. As an urban geographer and political ecologist, her research explores themes of water politics, real estate and urban development, adaptation to environmental threats, and environmental justice in cities of the global South. Her current research project explores the relationship between water crises and speculative urban development in Asian cities.

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