Indonesia’s Policy Proliferation: Why More Isn’t Always Better OR Too Many Rules: Indonesia’s Governance Challenges & Policy Overload OR Indonesia’s Governance Trap: The Cost of Constant Policy Expansion

Indonesia’s approach to governance often feels like a relentless cycle of adding new layers. Each year brings a fresh wave of regulations, the creation of new task forces and the launch of various digital applications. While seemingly responsive to political pressure and public expectations, this proliferation of rules, bureaucratic units, and fragmented digital systems begs a critical question: does simply adding more instruments actually improve government performance, or does it slowly erode the state’s core ability to solve problems?

This isn’t just about an accumulation of regulations; it’s a pattern visible in the expansion of bureaucratic layers and increasingly complex data ecosystems. Repairing, simplifying, or integrating existing systems often proves more challenging than creating something new. Solutions intended to improve governance often contribute to a more convoluted administrative landscape.

The consequences are readily apparent. Civil servants are burdened with an ever-growing volume of instructions, applications, reports, and regulations. According to Indonesia’s Legal Documentation and Information Network, there are over 251,000 applicable laws and regulations currently in effect. Despite this vast quantity, overlapping rules persist, hindering effective implementation. Rather than streamlining public service delivery, these new instruments often create additional administrative burdens, reducing the time available for substantive perform.

Even digitalization, intended to accelerate public service delivery, has become a new source of complexity. The Ministry of Administrative and Bureaucratic Reform (Kemenpan RB) reports more than 27,000 digital platforms built by ministries, agencies, and local governments. This illustrates a tendency to create new, siloed systems rather than designing interoperable solutions within a broader national data architecture. The recurring issue highlights a fundamental constraint: the absence of an integrated national data architecture.

Indonesia’s regulatory quality, as measured by the World Bank, has seen modest improvement over the past 14 years, but remains significantly lower than that of Malaysia and Singapore. This indicator reflects the government’s capacity to create and implement sound policies, demonstrating that simply increasing the quantity of regulations doesn’t necessarily translate to improved quality. This underlying problem often receives less attention than issues like corruption, despite being fundamental to decent governance.

This pattern is driven by a combination of political incentives and bureaucratic culture. When crises emerge, the government feels compelled to respond swiftly. Launching new regulations, task forces, or applications is often perceived as more straightforward than improving existing instruments. In an increasingly competitive political environment, novelty is often valued more than thorough structural evaluation. This leads to policy becoming performative – designed to be seen, immediate, and accompanied by grand rhetoric.

Bureaucratic fragmentation exacerbates this tendency. As long as ministries and agencies operate with their own data systems, performance indicators, and policy architectures, they will maintain strong institutional identities. A few years ago, local governments were caught between two distinct financial management applications – the Ministry of Home Affairs’ Regional Government Information System (SIPD) and the Financial and Development Supervisory Agency’s Regional Management Information System (SIMDA) – leading to inconsistent implementation and delayed budget disbursement. When incentives for consolidation are weak, creating new instruments becomes easier than integrating or streamlining existing, overlapping ones.

The result is policies that should be mutually reinforcing instead piling up on or canceling each other out, creating confusion at the implementation level. A recent example illustrates this dynamic. A member of Commission IV of Indonesia’s House of Representatives (DPR), which focuses on agriculture, forestry, and marine affairs, has proposed the establishment of a new ministry dedicated to food security, citing the lack of a centralized institution for food policy. If implemented, this Ministry of Food would function as the primary regulator, while Indonesia’s state-owned food logistic agency (BULOG) would remain the executor and distributor. Such an institution could be effective if formed through the consolidation of existing agencies, but otherwise risks adding another layer of bureaucracy and hindering progress towards food security.

The creation of new instruments and institutions doesn’t necessarily address structural problems; it often simply reinvents the wheel and risks reinforcing the same patterns of institutional expansion serving as a vehicle for power distribution, potentially at the expense of technical competence and professional merit.

Overregulation also has a more subtle, yet significant, effect: it erodes public trust. Citizens witness intense policy activity, but often witness limited tangible results. When new policies emerge but the same problems persist, the public is likely to perceive the government as reactive rather than proactive. The more instruments and institutions are created, the less clear the overall policy direction becomes. Without a demonstrated ability to refine existing instruments and discontinue unnecessary ones, it becomes difficult for the government to regain or maintain public confidence.

The challenge facing Indonesia today isn’t simply the quantity of rules, bureaucracies, or systems, but how to integrate and sustain them to improve policy outcomes. The state’s prolific production of new instruments and institutions may create the illusion of activity, but it doesn’t address underlying structural issues. What’s needed is the political will to revisit existing instruments, processes, and structures, simplify complex ones, and phase out those that no longer serve a useful purpose.

the future of Indonesia’s governance will depend less on how many new structures and systems it produces, and more on its capacity to integrate and strengthen a smaller number of coherent and effective ones. Proliferation without integration weakens policy coherence and impedes program implementation. Simplification and consolidation – not accumulation – builds a more resilient governance system that better serves the public interest.