The economic, political, strategic and cultural dynamism in Southeast Asia has gained added relevance in recent years with the spectacular rise of giant economies in East and South Asia. This has drawn greater attention to the region and to the enhanced role it now plays in international relations and global economics.

The sustained effort made by Southeast Asian nations since 1967 towards a peaceful and gradual integration of their economies has had indubitable success, and perhaps as a consequence of this, most of these countries are undergoing deep political and social changes domestically and are constructing innovative solutions to meet new international challenges. Big Power tensions continue to be played out in the neighbourhood despite the tradition of neutrality exercised by the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN).

The Trends in Southeast Asia series acts as a platform for serious analyses by selected authors who are experts in their fields. It is aimed at encouraging policymakers and scholars to contemplate the diversity and dynamism of this exciting region.

THE EDITORS

Series Chairman:

Choi Shing Kwok

Series Editor:

Ooi Kee Beng

Editorial Committee:

Daljit Singh

Francis E. Hutchinson

Norshahril Saat

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

• While much research has explored how perceptions of income inequality influence political outcomes—such as political participation, behaviour, and support for democracy—less attention has been given to how a country’s economic and political conditions shape these perceptions. This article argues that economic outlook and political stability play a crucial role in shaping how youths perceive income inequality.

• A youth and civic engagement survey conducted by the ISEAS – Yusof Ishak Institute between August and October 2024 found that Indonesian, Filipino and Thai youths are the most pessimistic about the economic prospects and political conditions of their countries. This bleak outlook aligns closely with their negative perceptions of income inequality.

• In contrast, youths in Singapore and Vietnam exhibit higher levels of optimism, underpinned by the strong economic growth and political stability of their countries. These favourable conditions, in turn, contribute to more positive perceptions of fairness in wealth distribution in their respective countries.

• Malaysia, however, presents a more nuanced picture. Despite relatively high levels of income inequality, Malaysian youths remain optimistic about the economic future of the country, revealing a disconnect between economic optimism and perceptions of income inequality.

• Overall, this article urges policymakers to address objective measures as well as subjective perceptions of inequality by fostering economic environments and political systems that bolster youth optimism and confidence in equitable development. As these perceptions will shape future political landscapes significantly, ensuring a balanced narrative regarding economic growth and fair wealth distribution is essential for sociopolitical stability in Southeast Asia in the future.

INTRODUCTION

Southeast Asian countries exhibit remarkable economic diversity. While some have experienced rapid economic growth alongside declining income inequality, others continue to grapple with persistent and substantial income disparities. Yet public discontent and anxiety about the economy remain widespread across the region, even where objective indicators like the Gini index paint a more optimistic picture. This suggests that perceptions of inequality, grounded in day-to-day economic and political realities rather than statistical measures, play a critical role in driving public concern, political engagement and demands for policy change. Research shows, however, that these perceptions are often inaccurate and biased.

Studies have shown that social and economic inequalities often serve as underlying causes of social unrest and political demands for change. In particular, these inequalities have played a significant role in fuelling separatist movements in Aceh (Indonesia), Pattani (Thailand) and Mindanao (the Philippines), as well as the non-separatist movement in Sabah, Malaysia. Income inequality has also been identified as an important factor in various violent conflicts that emerged during the post-Suharto era. A recent example is the Indonesia Gelap (Dark Indonesia) movement, which was behind multiple protests. Although various factors triggered the movement—such as unfavourable government policies, including education budget cuts affecting national strategic projects and military involvement in the civilian sector—the movement also reflects the growing social and economic inequality within the country. Similarly, in Thailand, economic inequality and urban-rural divides have contributed to various public protests in recent years. In short, these examples demonstrate how perceived social and economic inequalities are key drivers of political participation and demands for policy change.

PREAMBLE

Tropical peatland ecosystems in Southeast Asia are globally important as carbon sinks. They are also diversely rich in terrestrial and aquatic fauna and flora, and are significant sources of livelihood for local communities. However, agribusiness-driven land-use change and drainage cause a great amount of peatland degradation and ignite underground peat fires; these in turn generate air pollution known as “haze” and lead to significant economic losses and affected public health. Haze and climate change are connected, with peat burning emitting substantial amounts of greenhouse gases (GHG) and pollutants—which are projected to increase with climate change due to rising intensity and frequency of droughts. However, these issues are largely treated separately in policy and governance, which offers a big challenge for management and a lost opportunity for sustainability.

This article provides an overview of state-of-the-art research on peatlands and their governance in Southeast Asia, mainly focusing on Indonesia and Malaysia, home to the largest tropical peat deposits in the region. It first outlines and maps key developments over recent, along with associated environmental issues. Next, it details the connection between haze and carbon emissions in the region's peatlands and how peatlands represent a large proportion of national GHG emissions in both countries. It then traces the evolution of peatland policies at the national and regional levels, from conservation to addressing fire and haze issues, reflecting their complex relationship with national development and the corporate sector. The following section focuses on opportunities to integrate and improve peatland governance; while regulatory approaches are already largely in place, there are untapped opportunities related to financial and market instruments, as well as the ability to create enabling governance environments through community participation. The authors then highlight the remaining challenges in this endeavour, namely data uncertainties and the complexity of integrating policies across multiple scales and issues.

PEATLANDS IN SOUTHEAST ASIA

Pristine peatlands are usually waterlogged all year round. The carbon-rich material from aboveground biomass and roots that fill them decompose very slowly, making these areas globally important stocks of carbon. They also provide many other essential ecosystem services beyond carbon sequestration, such as regulating the water cycle and maintaining water quality in catchment areas, acting as coastal buffers and sources of timber and non-timber forest products for adjacent communities. The UNEP's Global Peatland Assessment estimates that peatlands cover 3–4 per cent of the planet's land surface, with tropical peatlands making up ∼11 per cent of the global peatland area.

The economic, political, strategic and cultural dynamism in Southeast Asia has gained added relevance in recent years with the spectacular rise of giant economies in East and South Asia. This has drawn greater attention to the region and to the enhanced role it now plays in international relations and global economics.

The sustained effort made by Southeast Asian nations since 1967 towards a peaceful and gradual integration of their economies has had indubitable success, and perhaps as a consequence of this, most of these countries are undergoing deep political and social changes domestically and are constructing innovative solutions to meet new international challenges. Big Power tensions continue to be played out in the neighbourhood despite the tradition of neutrality exercised by the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN).

The Trends in Southeast Asia series acts as a platform for serious analyses by selected authors who are experts in their fields. It is aimed at encouraging policymakers and scholars to contemplate the diversity and dynamism of this exciting region.

Indonesia is one of the most disaster-prone countries globally, being frequently exposed to various geophysical and climate-related hazards (Lin 2015). Increasing sea-surface temperatures contribute to growing risks of hydrometeorological hazards such as storms, tropical cyclones, floods and landslides. In 2022, flooding was the most frequent type of natural disaster in Indonesia, with floods also having increased in intensity over the preceding decade (Annur 2022). While geophysical disasters like earthquakes and volcanoes have caused more deaths than floods in Indonesia, flooding occurs more often, affects more people, and causes more damage (Djalante et. al. 2017). Flooding is a particular problem in urban areas, both for those along coasts and those located inland in or near water catchments. Rising sea levels are a particular problem for the first group: the newspaper Kompas reported that almost 200 cities in Indonesia's coastal areas will be more frequently exposed to destructive tidal flooding in coming years (Rosalina et al. 2021). Meanwhile, inland urban centres are endangered by a trend of increasingly frequent and intense floods and landslides that have occurred in the 893 inland watershed areas in Indonesia over the past ten years (Wisanggeni et al. 2023).

City governments in Indonesia deal with disasters and disaster risks—particularly flooding—differently. As I show in this chapter, some cities succeed relatively well at managing or even averting floods while others fail. How is it possible that cities operating within the same national context, and often dealing with similar risk factors (such as topography and rainfall patterns), perform very differently in terms of outcomes of flood management? This question becomes even more puzzling when we observe that cities that do not invest heavily in massive technical interventions sometimes do equally well or even better than cities that depend on such interventions.

In this chapter, I draw on my research in three urban regions of Indonesia to propose that the best explanation for how and why cities cope so differently at dealing with floods lies in the local politics of flood risk management. Floods are physical occurrences, but their form, magnitude and location, and the number of people affected by them, are all shaped by political processes (Pelling 1999). Previous studies in Indonesia and beyond have contributed to identifying how flooding intertwines with politics (Coates and Nygren 2020; Padawangi and Douglass 2015).

The management of solid waste, or garbage, is a major problem confronting big cities in Indonesia. As the urban population expands, and as people living in cities consume more, cities produce more rubbish. Managing this garbage is fundamentally a responsibility of district-level governments, and there has been little in the way of nationwide initiatives or systematic strategies to deal with the problem. In towns and cities around the country, many residents continue to dump their garbage on the street, burn it or throw it into waterways, contributing to other problems such as air pollution and urban flooding. Community and city-organised garbage collection, meanwhile, ends up in ever-growing mountainous and insanitary landfills that dot the countryside around urban centres.

For these reasons, it is important to look at success stories of cities that are managing to get on top of their garbage problems. One such case is Surabaya, the capital of East Java province. Surabaya is currently more advanced than most other cities in Indonesia in terms of waste collection, transport and landfill management. In 2019 and 2022, the city received the Adipura Kencana award, the highest rank in the Adipura award, which is given to cities that can maintain city cleanliness and urban environmental management (including sanitation and green open spaces) consistently and sustainably for multiple years (Maulidiya 2019; Pemerintah Kota Surabaya 2023). In 2021, President Joko Widodo visited the Benowo landfill (Surabaya's dumping site) to inaugurate the first waste-to-electricity facility (pengolahan sampah menjadi energi listrik, PSEL) in Indonesia. In addition, waste management in Surabaya has involved a large degree of community participation, through waste banks and community-based recycling centres.

How has this success been achieved? In this chapter, I argue there were three key ingredients. First, waste management reform in Surabaya required a long period of effort by the city government. A major turning point came in the early 2000s, but success was built on a long history of efforts to develop a waste management system that can be traced as far back as the Dutch colonial era in the 1920s. The Surabaya experience thus suggests that successfully governing waste requires long-term commitment.

This comment was made by Pak Suro, a resident of a rental social housing (rumah susun sederhana sewa, rusunawa) unit in Jakarta. The government evicted him, his wife, two small children and an ailing parent from their kampung (low-income self-built urban neighbourhood) in 2016. After a few months of living in a makeshift tent among the rubble of his and his neighbours’ homes, he reluctantly agreed to relocate to a unit in a rusunawa some 20 kilometres away. Witnessing his parent's deteriorating health and his daughter's frequent bouts of pneumonia caused by living amid the dust and debris near the ruins of their former home had become too much. Yet, instead of rebuilding a new life in the rusunawa, Pak Suro felt deprived. He felt he had become poorer, but what he lamented most was the precarity of his new life. For Pak Suro, as for many other residents after their kampung is demolished, a rusunawa is not, and cannot be, a home.

Rusunawa emerged into the public debate amid the intense period of kampung evictions that occurred in Jakarta during 2013–2017 under the combined leadership of Joko Widodo (governor of Jakarta in 2012–2014, president of Indonesia 2014–2024) and his deputy, Basuki Tjahaja Purnama or Ahok, who himself later became governor in 2014–2017, with Djarot Saiful Hidayat as his deputy. In total, Jakarta's Legal Aid Institute (Lembaga Bantuan Hukum, LBH) documented around 495 cases of kampung evictions, displacing 15,319 households, from 2015 to 2018 (LBH Jakarta 2016a, 2017, 2018a, 2018b). While this chapter focuses on rusunawa as a housing alternative provided to evicted residents, it should be noted that government policy intends rusunawa primarily to benefit lowerincome urban households more generally.

Urbanisation in Indonesia has accelerated since the country became independent. Currently, more than half of Indonesia's population live in cities. Consequently, urban planning, the discipline managing urban growth and responding to the service and infrastructure needs of the population so that they may have good quality lives, has a significant role to play in Indonesia. In this chapter, I discuss historic and current conditions of urban planning in Indonesia, and how ‘Indonesian Planning’ has contributed to the conceptual and empirical development of what is often called ‘Southern Planning’ (Watson 2016)—the theory and practice of urban planning as it has developed in the Global South.

I argue that three structural conditions have significantly affected the growth of Indonesian cities, namely, poverty, informality and the growth of the middle class. In addition, as I discuss later, the role of the private sector, whose actions have been targeted towards the demands of uppermiddle and middle groups, has shaped the character of the Indonesian planning system. Lately, a second group of challenges linked to the provision of infrastructure and environmental impacts has become critical in urban areas. These are a consequence of urbanisation and economic development, and include provision of housing, managing vulnerability to disasters and providing adequate solid waste disposal. They are not the only challenges faced in cities, but overcoming them is important for moving towards resilient, safe, inclusive and sustainable cities (as expressed in Sustainable Development Goal 11, adopted by the United Nations in 2015). I show that, despite all the problems, actors within the Indonesian planning system, especially particular communities as critical stakeholders within that system, have opportunities to address these challenges. In this chapter, I discuss these challenges and how the Indonesian planning system helps illustrate the conditions of Southern Planning.

The chapter is organised into seven sections. The next two sections look at the meaning of Southern Planning, and provide an in-depth discussion of the Indonesian planning system. In the fourth section, I elaborate on structural challenges experienced in Indonesian cities, focusing on poverty, informality and the growth of the middle class. The fifth section examines the most recent challenges in cities linked to infrastructure provision and environmental impacts. A sixth section looks at the opportunities that the current planning system can use to improve Indonesian cities. Finally, the conclusion reflects on the contribution of Indonesian planning to a broader analysis of Southern Planning.

One of the classic problems that arises as a country urbanises is traffic congestion. As more and more people pack into urban areas, and especially as urban sprawl generates large commuter zones around urban cores, road usage often outstrips capacity. While traffic jams are a familiar problem for people in all of Indonesia's rapidly growing urban areas, they are particularly a challenge for people in the Greater Jakarta metropolitan area, where urban sprawl is most extensive.

The Jakarta metropolitan area is the largest metropolitan area in Indonesia, both in terms of land size and economic magnitude. It consists of an urban agglomeration that stretches over all of one province (Jakarta) and parts of two others (Banten and West Java), and includes Tangerang city, South Tangerang city, Tangerang district, Depok, Bogor city, Bekasi city, Bogor district and Bekasi district, with a total area of about 6,700 km2 (BPS 2023). It also accounts for approximately 22.6 per cent of the national urban population, around 10 per cent of the national population and 23.6 per cent of national gross domestic product (GDP) (Roberts et al. 2019: 57; Yudhistira, Indriyani et al. 2019). The metropolitan area's per capita regional GDP is almost twice that of Indonesia's per capita GDP (BPS 2023). Over recent years, the demographic and economic weight of the Jakarta metropolitan area has been driven especially by the areas located outside its core. This urban periphery around Jakarta experienced the highest growth in urban population of any type of urban area in Indonesia between 2004 and 2016, with an annual population growth rate of 4.8 per cent per year; in contrast, the Jakarta core grew at only 1.4 per cent per year (Roberts et al. 2019: 63). While Jakarta's core has been relatively stable, urban settlements in Jakarta's periphery grew at 9.1 per cent per year between 2000 and 2014 (ibid.: 64), indicating considerable conversion of agricultural and vacant land into built-up areas.

Growth of this massive urban agglomeration has generated a major problem with road traffic congestion. According to the 2023 edition of the TomTom Traffic Index, Jakarta is the ninth most congested city in Asia.

More than half of the world's population currently lives in urban areas. As reported by the World Bank (2023), the global urban population share has increased markedly from only about one-third in 1960 to 57 per cent in 2022, pointing to the occurrence of urbanisation—the process by which a growing proportion of a country's population lives in urban areas—in many parts of the world (Firman 2018; Jones and Mulyana 2015). However, an absolute increase in the size of the urban population does not necessarily indicate urbanisation. As pointed out by Crankshaw and Borel-Saladin (2019), an increasing number of urban inhabitants over a particular period is not always accompanied by a significant growth in the urban population share. The growth of the urban population can only be considered urbanisation when its rate exceeds that of national and/or rural population growth.

Observers often consider migration from rural to urban areas to be the main cause of urbanisation (examples in the Indonesian mass media include Nugraheni 2022 and Utami 2023). However, urbanisation can also result from other reasons, such as natural population increase and reclassification of rural areas as urban areas (Dyson 2011; Zelinsky 1971). Natural population increase can be the major contributor to urbanisation when urban areas experience lower mortality rates and higher fertility rates than rural areas (Crankshaw and Borel-Saladin 2019). Further, in several countries, such as the United States and India—and, as we shall see, Indonesia—the reclassification of a rural locality as urban can also play an important role in increasing urbanisation rates (Firman 2018; Jain and Korzhenevych 2020; Jiang et al. 2022). Indeed, compared to other causes of urbanisation, reclassification can have a more direct effect on changing the size and structure of urban populations (Jiang et al. 2022).

Scholars generally agree that urbanisation is a crucial factor in accelerating economic development (Zhang 2016). Higher urban population shares can lead to higher national incomes and productivity rates. Certainly, high-income countries have higher urban population shares, at around 81 per cent, than middle- and low-income countries, respectively at 53 per cent and 34 per cent (World Bank 2023).