A relational approach to policy legitimization strategies: The case of Indonesia’s capital city relocation project

Abstract

Legitimacy is vital for policymakers to gather both internal and external support for new projects, especially for mega-infrastructure projects like new cities being built from scratch. However, urban and political geographers rarely address or explicitly theorize about legitimacy. This paper situates the concept of legitimacy within discussions of urban studies and organizational management and, using insight from critical policy studies, proposes a relational approach to studying how legitimacy is enacted in urban policymaking. This novel approach eschews positivistic typologies and instead focuses on the ways policymakers enact different legitimization strategies, thus accounting for the impacts of networked agency and the relational pathways through which policymakers construct operational logics. Through an empirical case study of Indonesia’s capital city of Nusantara, we find that internal and external legitimization strategies (vis-a-vis different audiences) dialectically influence one another and has led to a proliferation of discursive frames surrounding the project, thus resulting in a dominating yet fragile policy regime. This case study thus demonstrates that legitimacy serves as a valuable analytical lens for understanding the rationalization and socio-material embeddedness of urban development policies within the built environment.

Introduction

On August 26th, 2019, Indonesia’s President Joko “Jokowi” Widodo announced his intention to move the country’s national capital from Jakarta to an unspecified location in East Kalimantan province on the island of Borneo, some 1,250 km away from the current capital Jakarta. Although capital city relocations are by no means unprecedented among post-colonial states in the so-called Global South, this is perhaps the most ambitious one in modern history in terms of scale, cost, and also timeline (see section three). It also has become one of the most controversial among hundreds of large-scale infrastructure projects executed during Jokowi’s two presidential terms, and the rapid pace of the capital relocation project has come under scrutiny by a growing cadre of analysts and scholars (Amir, 2023; Hudalah, 2023).

The main justifications provided for undertaking this effort generally fell into one of two categories, namely (i) the unsuitability of Jakarta, a rapidly sinking city and congested mega-city, and (ii) the need for more equitable development outside the island of Java. However, as the implementation for the new capital city project began (later named Nusantara Capital City or Ibu Kota Nusantara), the plans – as well as their accompanying logics and justifications – began to morph. This paper explores those mutating policy justifications by analyzing the Indonesian government’s legitimization strategy for Nusantara (popularly referred to as IKN in Indonesia) in terms of how the underlying problem has been framed and how the proposed new capital city is discursively constructed as a solution thereof.

Central state structures have in the last two decades taken on a larger role in promoting mega-urban development projects in the so-called Global South, including Indonesia, through state rescaling and state entrepreneurialism (Anguelov, 2023; Datta and Shaban, 2017; Hudalah et al., 2022; Moser and Côté-Roy, 2021). These projects often use antecedent referencing (Bunnell et al., 2022) to “smart,” “green,” and “sustainable” planning models from (perceived) successful elsewheres in Asia such as Singapore, which has successfully exported its urban planning expertise to other cities in for example China (Chua, 2011; Pow, 2014; Pow, 2018; Pow and Neo, 2015; see also Bok, 2020) and India (Das, 2015: 237), as legitimizing discourse. However, given that national governments are not monolithic entities but constructs that are “constituted out of the representations and practices that are associated with [them]” (Kuus and Agnew, 2007: 98), legitimacy is also vital for policymakers to gather coalitions of internal backers to support new projects (Koch, 2018: 16). For megaprojects such as Nusantara, it is particularly important to get key stakeholders “on board” to support the project politically, provide the necessary resources to implement it, and forestall (potential) resistance. Legitimacy is moreover important for politicians to win and/or maintain public support for their individual policy agenda. For Jokowi in particular, infrastructure development has been a cornerstone of his personal brand, and his image as a “hard-hat” leader who gets things done (Bland, 2021) was key in elevating his image to the national stage (Bunnell et al., 2018: 1026; Bunnell et al., 2022: 12). As such, legitimizing Nusantara has become vital not only in cementing Jokowi’s personal legacy (Hudalah, 2023) but also to ensure the project’s continuity beyond his second (and last) term which ended in October 2024.

This paper locates the concept of legitimacy within discussions of policy mobilities (Schäfer, 2022; Temenos and McCann, 2013), organizational management (Johnson, 2004; Suchman, 1995), and related literature on urban geography and critical policy studies. In light of significant conceptual gaps on how urban scholars consider legitimacy, we propose a new relational approach (Glückler and Panitz, 2021; Jacobs, 2012) for how critical urban scholars study it in practice. Our approach demonstrates that legitimacy serves as a valuable analytical lens for understanding the rationalization and socio-material embeddedness of urban development policies, including new city-building projects, within the built environment. Through an empirical case study of Indonesia’s new capital city of Nusantara, we illustrate how internal and external legitimization strategies dialectically influence one another in response to evolving socio-economic conditions and audience perceptions, thereby continuously generating new rationalizing discursive frames. This has also resulted in a dominating but fragile “regime of truth” (Prince, 2012a).

The research presented here is grounded in two related research projects about Nusantara (a doctoral thesis project and a state-funded research project hosted by Bandung Institute of Technology) which included several rounds of fieldwork conducted between January 2022 and August 2024. The empirical basis for this study includes both semi-structured interviews and a curated database of hundreds of secondary data sources. During the fieldwork, the authors collectively conducted more than 70 semi-structured interviews with politicians, planners, public intellectuals and activists with first-hand knowledge of Nusantara’s development. This was complemented by the systematic collection of hundreds of policy documents, including 198 government press releases (PRs) and over 240 mass media articles published (predominantly in Bahasa Indonesia but also some in English), published between 2019 and the end of 2023, and dozens of government brochures, slide shows, and legal documents. Interview transcripts were analyzed using axiomatic coding, while the secondary data was studied using a combination of thematic categorical analysis and critical discourse analysis, which enabled us to systematically code government narratives based on dominant themes and concepts and categorize them into explicitly and implicitly similar frames. Most of the interviews cited in this paper were conducted in English, while all textual analysis was performed in Bahasa Indonesia by a native-speaking author.

The rest of this paper is organized as follows: in light of this introduction, the next section develops a relational approach to examining legitimization strategies of urban development policies. The following section gives a brief overview of Nusantara and situates it within Indonesia’s public sector organizational culture (and wider political economy), thus providing an empirical backdrop to the importance of generating legitimacy for the project. Following this, section four will apply our novel theoretical framework to Nusantara, focusing on internal and external audiences, respectively. This case study analysis will demonstrate how both formal and informal strategies were leveraged by the Jokowi government to garner internal support, and how those tactics later influenced public-facing legitimization tactics (and vice versa). The final section concludes by discussing the empirical and theoretical contributions of the paper.

Developing a relational approach to studying legitimacy

Most people have an intuitive understanding of legitimacy as an important aspect of (doing) politics. In broad terms, legitimacy can be defined as the general acceptance of someone – or some thing’s – authority, either by specific stakeholders or the general population as a whole. In more practical terms, legitimacy gives organizations easier access to the strategic resources that are critical for their growth and survival (Zimmerman and Zeitz, 2002, cited in Díez-Martín et al., 2013: 1954). The same goes for state institutions, who – despite having fixed annual budgets and human resources – often require access to new skills and additional resources to implement novel policies. However, most social scientists have hitherto defined legitimacy either from the source it is derived from (Weber, 2019), or some kind of typology of the form it takes (Archibald, 2004; Deephouse and Suchman, 2008: 52; Suchman, 1995). This not only risks creating a tautology, but also eschews the fact that legitimacy has an inherently subjective meaning depending on an actor’s relational positionality. For example, a trained lawyer is likely to understand legitimacy in terms of adherence to legal institutions, while a farmer might judge the legitimacy of a government in terms of whether or not they deliver on electoral promises on agricultural policy.

To properly account for (and operationalize) legitimization strategies in state-led urban policymaking, it is therefore necessary to develop a relational approach that focuses on the processes (see Montero and Baiocchi, 2022) by which state institutions attempt to build legitimacy for a given policy (rather than the form that legitimacy takes). “Relational” here is simply taken to mean that social phenomena, including public policy, exist in time and space as a product of networked socio-material relations (for a lengthier discussion, see Jones, 2009). The rest of this section will position legitimacy in urban geography through a review of relevant literature in organizational management, urban planning, and critical policy studies to identify lessons and gaps. It will then propose a new approach to studying legitimacy by focusing on the various formal and informal strategies being deployed by state institutions.

Several critical caveats have emerged from the organizational institutionalist tradition. First, that although many organizational management scholars employ “legitimacy,” definitions tend to be limited (Suchman, 1995: 572). As such, Suchman (1995) has long called for research to more clearly identify what type of legitimacy is being studied, to recognize its inherent heterogeneity, and to furthermore compare legitimacy management between different types of institutions – including public versus private organizations. Second, that although legitimacy is something that can be objectively possessed, it is a social construct that is created through the relational observation by an audience (Suchman, 1995: 574). Third, as Johnson (2004: 11–12) points out, legitimacy is an inherently social process, and there are almost innumerable subjects (“objects”) of legitimacy ranging from actors and institutions to practices, policies, symbols, and more. There are therefore also many different audiences of those objects’ legitimacy, which will be expanded further below. Fourth, while earlier literature distinguished between instrumental and intrinsic forms of legitimacy (Ashforth and Gibbs, 1990; Suchman, 1995; see also Scott, 2013) it is important to note that all forms (or types) of legitimacy can be pursued for a myriad of purposes. For example, cognitive legitimacy may be pursued both as a means to an end (i.e., informing people of how a policy is designed) and as an end in of itself (i.e., to make the policy appear rational and gain public acceptance). This implies that instrumental and normative legitimacy are actually meta-categories.

While legitimacy has featured prominently in contemporaneous urban and spatial planning literature, particularly in terms of local participation and good governance (see for example Getimis, 2010; Haus, 2014; Haveri et al., 2019), it is rarely tackled directly by urban geographers. A noteworthy exception is Swyngedouw (2005) who has shown that the shift towards localism in urban planning has shown mixed results, as “inclusive” governance mechanisms do not in and of themselves guarantee that outcomes are more democratic. ¹ However, critical policy studies – an interdisciplinary field which overlaps with urban and political geography – does periodically engage with legitimacy, often using ethnographic insights (see Mosse, 2006; Wedel et al., 2005). Of particular interest to this paper, scholars such as McCann (2011), Peck and Theodore (2010, 2012), and Rapoport and Hult (2017) have examined the different actors, events and processes that enable urban policy models to circulate (and mutate) through various local, national and transnational networks. This strand of research on policy mobilities has helped demonstrated that public policy and its trans-national movement is socially reproduced, and that different institutions and agents exert their influence relationally, across space and time (Wedel, 2017), although any single actor are in of themselves unable to directly influence or predict policy outcomes in complex social milieux (Prince, 2012b; see also Ferguson, 1990). Research on legitimacy should therefore pay attention to everyday bureaucratic and planning cultures (Kuus, 2008), including formal and informal relations that enable the development and justification of new policies.

At the intersection of urban geography and spatial planning, Terlouw (2020, 2023) has developed an innovative approach to conceptualizing (and studying) the legitimacy of spatial planning, broadly separating it into ideological strands that are either territorial or relational in nature. Taking an evolutionary approach, Terlouw explains that these two different-yet-intertwined perspectives (see also McCann and Ward, 2010) are grounded in different moral outlooks on the normative structure of human society, that is, while the territorial view is grounded in community and traditional values, the relational view emphasizes individual freedom and a globally level playing field. In practical terms, Terlouw (2023: 19) thus argues that “the legitimacy of the governance of cities and regions is based on balancing both moral systems.” However, broad historical and political trends mean that different types of spatial identity discourses will resonate to different extents (i.e., be considered more or less legitimate) at different places and at different points in time. Put in simple terms: political legitimacy is both time- and place-dependent, which must therefore be accounted for in any study of policy legitimization.

To justify an intervention, (urban) policymakers need to develop discursive frames that help structure information about a given “problem” in a way that begs specific “solutions” (Bok, 2024; Montero, 2020). Mosse (2006: 951) calls these “legitimizing representations,” and note that powerful actors need to put significant work into creating “knowledge systems” that “constantly organize attention away from the contradictions and contingencies of practice” to “mobilize and maintain political support” for a given policy or intervention (Mosse, 2006: 938–939; see also Ferguson, 1990). Solution-oriented discourse includes urban planning tropes, such as smart cities, green cities, creative cities, and sponge cities, as well as appeals to emulate success stories from elsewhere. Among the latter, global model cities like Singapore, Dubai, and Songdo are often appealed to as what Bunnell et al. (2022: 4) call “aspirational truth spots,” where new city projects are legitimized by narrating plans through “desirable or progressive developmental possibilities that are perceived to have been realized in an extant city.” However, and regardless of their scientific validity, technocratic policy design is a fundamentally subjective process that must continuously rationalize itself. It is therefore important to analyze legitimizing discourses to help illuminate the underlying logics and contradictions of urban policymaking.

To better account for how legitimacy forms part of (and impacts) urban policymaking, this paper proposes a relational approach that focuses on the process of how policymakers seek to create legitimacy, rather than the phenomenon of legitimacy per se. Legitimization processes here refers to the strategic steps taken by a government agency (or agencies) in an attempt to create material and/or immaterial support for a given urban policy. Inspired by Mosse (2006: 940) who points out that policy needs to be “sustained socially by enrolling supporters and building an interpretative community that made the project successful,” these strategies are split into two general “directions” based on the intended audience, namely internal and external legitimization. The former includes formal and informal methods for shoring up intra-organizational support, while the latter includes various government speech-acts intended for external audiences. ² Moreover, there is a dialectical relationship between these two agential directions as internal strategies influence external strategies (and vice versa).

Internal legitimacy within a project or policy’s own institutional setting is a necessary pre-condition for implementation. Different government agencies may have intra- or inter-organizational networks of actors that have contesting perspectives on what policies should be prioritized and why. Moreover, internal legitimization helps create knowledge frames which ensure international cohesion and propagate a raison d’etre for a given project or policy. These discursive frames are (re)produced through both formal and informal tools, ranging from informal office gossip and secretive political consultations to official policy documents and urban masterplans. Importantly, these operational logics can be rationalized before, during or even after implementation, and are likely to mutate during project implementation. Indeed, as demonstrated by Ferguson’s (1990) famous organizational ethnography of a development project in Lesotho, policy interventions often have to re-invent themselves several times throughout their lifespan to overcome the cognitive dissonance between their interpretative frames and observed outcomes. In other words, what constitutes “success” and “failure” of a policy is not only discursively constructed (Temenos and Lauermann, 2020; see also Colven, 2020), it is also liable to strategic modification throughout the policy cycle. According to Mosse (2005: 205–229; cited in Mosse, 2006), such discursive shifts can also be used to “conceal” the multi-scalar spatial outcomes of a policy intervention.

External legitimacy is equally (if not more) important. This refers to the perceived legitimacy by third-party stakeholders not directly involved in the creation and planning of a policy, such as private investors, affected local communities, and the general electorate. All state structures rely on some form of public support for continuity, and policymakers often require private investment to implement a project. Common strategies include various political speech acts (which are usually reproduced through digital and print media), press releases, masterplans, powerpoint presentations, conference presentations, as well as official legislation. Taking a cue from Bunnell and Das (2010), these “seductive” narratives are often co-produced by coalitions of public and private actors – including urban planning and management consultants – to promote the public acceptance of utopian urban development projects (Côté-Roy and Moser, 2019).

As earlier mentioned, internal and external legitimization strategies are likely to utilize similar and overlapping discursive tools. For example, the legitimizing role of technical experts may be geared towards both key government decision-makers (internal legitimacy) and the general public (external legitimacy) in justifying a given policy regime (see for example Mitchell, 2002). Similarly, jargon-laden visioning tools such as master plans and (digital) 3D models – what Bunnell (2004) calls “technologies of seduction” – are usually reproduced in both inwards and outwards facing policy presentations, often centered around narratives of smartness or greenness. These discursive representations are not only important for how central states continuously reproduce themselves (Kuus and Agnew, 2007: 98; see also Bok, 2020), but also shape how the public perceive the legitimacy of the central state and its actions. However, the way these discursive constructs are received (or perceived to be received) by the public may lead policymakers to strategically re-frame a project, change its underlying operational logics, and/or modify how it is being implemented. This means that there is a dialectical relationship between internal and external legitimization strategies, and the way different audiences perceive urban policy legitimization strategies has a direct impact on our built spaces.

In sum, this paper thus proposes a relational framework for studying legitimacy in urban policymaking that accounts for the socio-political context of a project, the networked agency of policymakers, and the relational ways in which discursive frames are propagated. This novel approach has several advantages: first, it enables us to inductively study observable phenomena – political acts and discursive practices – rather than debating abstract typologies. Second, by operationalizing legitimacy based on the target audience, we can better dissect the operational logics of different discursive strategies and, in turn, how those strategies impact project design and implementation. Third, this approach can better account for the complex social milieux that urban policy exists within, and how different networked actors inter-relationally impact visible policy outcomes (see for example Prince 2009, 2012a on epistemic communities). In the rest of this paper, this framework will be empirically applied to assess the strategies deployed by the Indonesian government to create support for the planned new capital city of Nusantara during the second term of President Jokowi (2019–2024), starting with an account of Indonesia’s political economy and bureaucratic culture to situate Nusantara’s socio-political milieux.

The socio-political context of Nusantara Capital City

President Jokowi first announced his ambitious capital relocation project to the public during his 2019 State of the Union address, on August 17th, 4 months after securing a decisive re-election. Although the idea of moving the capital city had ebbed and flowed since the 1950s (Wijanarka, 2006; see also Nugroho et al., 2023: 11–12), the announcement was nevertheless a surprise to the general public as most of the preparatory work had been done by government planners with very limited public participation. The ambitious proposal entailed moving the capital from Jakarta to a greenfield site 2000 km away and across an ocean, with an expected cost of $32 billion. With Indonesia’s historical precedents of so-called “Mangkrak” (stalled) mega-infrastructure projects, many critics doubted its political feasibility. Nevertheless, the second Jokowi government pressed ahead with the goal of inaugurating the administrative core on independence day in August 2024 and for Nusantara becoming a fully-fledged, vibrant city with a target population of 1.7–1.9 million by 2045. ³

The law outlining the name, location, planning, governance, and financing of the future capital (Law 3, 2022) was passed by the House of Representatives (DPR) with surprising speed on January 18, 2022. Some experts have referred to this as “fast-track legislation,” as it only took 42 days to be processed and passed by the lower house. ⁴ The massive 120-page law included stipulations for creating the new cabinet-level Nusantara Capital City Authority (Otorita Ibu Kota Nusantara, or O-IKN) to oversee the 256,000-ha New Capital City Area carved out of East Kalimantan province and established. ⁵ By passing it as a law (Undang-Undang), which requires a two-thirds parliamentary majority, the Jokowi government gave Nusantara a much stronger legal basis compared to passing a presidential decree or government act which can both be unilaterally annulled by any future administration.

Several political factors enabled Jokowi to get the 2022 law ratified so swiftly. First, the governing coalition behind Jokowi after his 2019 re-election controlled 525 seats in the 575-seat chamber with only a single party in opposition, which meant that Jokowi controlled an overwhelming majority. Second, Jokowi’s personal approval ratings, which had been favorable throughout most of his first 5-year term, soared in his second term (and reached an all-time high of 78% in April 2024; see Jakarta Post, 2024). This meant that Jokowi was at the pinnacle of his political power during his second term (see for example Setijadi, 2021) and magnified his ability to overcome political barriers and push through his policy agenda. However, Jokowi and his allies had already made other moves behind the scenes to ensure the bill’s swift passing, as elucidated in the next section below.

The executive’s weariness of political and bureaucratic red tape is not isolated to Nusantara. Since taking office in late 2014, Jokowi has gradually accelerated state’s interventionism and investment in infrastructure development, as part of an ideological shift that Warburton (2016) has termed New Developmentalism. In particular, the so-called National Strategic Projects, or Proyek Strategis Nasional (PSN), removed many forms of red tape (such as enabling faster land concessions and cutting down permit processing times) while creating new pathways for state and non-state infrastructure financing. The organizational culture of Indonesian bureaucracy also undoubtedly enabled Jokowi’s push to expedite the implementation of Nusantara. Despite Indonesia’s experiment with decentralization since the fall of President Suharto’s New Order regime in 1998 (see for example Charras, 2005; Talitha et al., 2020), central state institutions in Indonesia still hold significant influence over local administrative affairs, particularly in provinces and districts with relatively weak local governance capacity. Moreover, central state institutions in Indonesia are well-known for having a strongly hierarchical culture, with (in)formal modes of authority and strict deference to seniors. This means that policy directives from the upper echelons of government, especially if they emanate from (or are perceived to emanate from) the President, are almost always acted upon without any outward questioning of their direction or underlying logic.

The combination of bureaucratic state power of the presidency and Jokowi’s personal popularity made it relatively easy for him to bend state planning institutions to his will. However, key actors first had to create discursive frames that would help rationalize and internally legitimize Nusantara to get it passed into law by parliament. Moreover, to ensure its long-term future, Jokowi needed to win public support and attract private investors to bankroll the high cost of implementing Nusantara, thus making it vital that internal legitimacy also translated into external legitimacy.

Dissecting Nusantara’s legitimization strategies

Internal legitimization strategies leveraged by state planners

Before bringing the draft bill to parliament, the Jokowi government worked hard to create an internal knowledge system around the capital city relocation initiative to frame what, how and why it should be implemented. Particularly in the early stages, the Ministry of National Development Planning (locally known as Badan Perencanaan Pembangunan Nasional, or Bappenas) played a key role in producing internal policy papers and mobilize other state institutions. Several of these documents eventually became part of the government’s internal legitimization strategy and helped formulate the discursive frames used to articulate the underlying developmentalist logics of the project.

Three key internal documents were produced by Bappenas between 2016 and 2019. The first one was a preliminary feasibility study concerning the relocation of the capital city which was initiated during the tenure of Andrinof Chaniago (Bappenas Minister from October 2014 to August 2015), and was to a large extent based on a white paper from Chaniago’s own think tank, Tim Visi 2033. This was reportedly later expanded to a formal policy paper considering different options for what part of the country to relocate the capital city to. Later in 2017, during the tenure of Minister Bambang Brodjonegoro (July 2016 to October 2019), a separate white paper was created by a Bappenas-led inter-ministerial team which considered a shortlist of three different sites in Kalimantan for the new capital city. Although the final choice of the site of the new capital city in East Kalimantan province was at least partially driven by the symbolism of being in the geographic center of the Indonesian archipelago – a key idea since Tim Visi 2033 first started lobbying for the capital city relocation – the fact that the government supposedly undertook extensive “research” into the appropriate choice of location for the new capital city is often touted by policy makers as evidence that the policy itself is rational and well-designed.

Many other technologies of seduction were produced to frame, represent, and rationalize the capital city relocation project to internal audiences. This includes master planning documents, at least two different strategic environmental assessment reports (SEAs), and scores of policy slide decks. The preliminary master plan and full master plan, produced by a consortium of private consulting companies consisting of McKinsey, Arup, and PSUD in 2019 and 2020 respectively, have proven especially instrumental in achieving intra-governmental legitimacy for the project. When the draft 2022 law on the capital city relocation was introduced to parliament through Commission II (one of parliament’s nine standing committees that focuses on Home Affairs, Regional Autonomy, Administrative Reforms and Agrarian Affairs), the master plan ⁶ and background white papers were submitted with it. The supposed depth of preparatory work demonstrated by these documents clearly impressed committee members, who felt that it supported the developmentalist logic of the policy and strengthened its legitimacy. In the words of one parliamentarian with direct knowledge of the proceedings, “it is rare for there to be a law [in Indonesia] that has a fairly complete master plan on top of it,” which was a contributing factor to why this politician personally supported the draft bill (and assisted in its circulation through parliament). ⁷

The way the Nusantara masterplan was created served an important instrumental role. According to a consultant who was part of the consortium that won the tender to develop the plan, McKinsey – the world’s leading management consulting company in terms of both revenue and prestige – was deliberately chosen to lead the process because of its reputation and prestige: “[Indonesia] is BSG and McKinsey country… most major government management consulting projects are split halfway [between those two companies],” and “they [the president’s office] wanted to put a bulletproof brand” on the masterplan to ensure its legitimacy. ⁸ This was echoed by a high-ranking government official, who explained that McKinsey was chosen not only because of its international reputation but also due to its experience working with public and private agencies in Indonesia, so “they know how to create [a] proposal that will be accepted by the government.” ⁹ McKinsey was thus chosen primarily for strategic reasons, despite the company’s relative lack of experience in urban planning.

The instrumental benefit of choosing McKinsey, however, was not only performative. In the words of one of their own consultants, “McKinsey approaches masterplanning as an [instrumental] strategy document… it’s got all the necessary powerpoint slides – all the buzzwords like ‘green,’ ‘ten-minute [city],’ ‘advanced manufacturing,’ ‘liveability,’ UN SDGs, etc. – for the President to face [stakeholders].” It was then up to other consortium members (Arup and PSUD) to “translate what those strategy buzzwords mean, on land, in the hypothetical location [of the new capital city].” ¹⁰ The concept masterplan (and to a lesser extent the technical masterplan) is therefore an inherently political document, both in terms of its content as well as the process of how it was created, which served as a powerful legitimizing force for the government in shoring up internal support for the capital city relocation project.

Importantly, the masterplan established key conceptual frames that have guided the planning of Nusantara as well as how politicians conceptualize it. Although it is practically impossible to pinpoint an overarching urban planning modality for Nusantara (as will be elaborated further below), certain key ideas like “forest city” and “smart city” have been included since the preliminary master plan was developed. These urban design models were further operationalized into 24 Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) in the masterplan (with targets for elements such as green space, social inclusion, public transit, and carbon emissions) which act as high-level, long-term reference points for project implementation and were enshrined in the 2022 law. Several urban planning consultants involved in both the Nusantara master plan and affiliated projects have highlighted the intrinsic importance of those KPIs in ensuring that the government can meet some of its lofty goals for Nusantara, and creating a set of common reference points that “cross boundaries…. of the different planning regimes” of various government ministries ¹¹ (the KPIs have also served a more instrumental role by occasionally being cited as evidence of the objective rationality of Nusantara). The 24 KPIs were later distilled into five areas of “cultural transformation” and complemented by eight principles to guide the development of Nusantara. Together with various visual representations of the location, timeline, and building designs, the KPIs have helped cement a powerful catalog of discursive frames for politicians, planners and third-party consultants to draw upon.

Another key legitimization strategy deployed by the Jokowi government was the promise of private investment. According to a parliamentarian (who is a member of the then-ruling party, PDI-P), Jokowi’s promise that Nusantara would attract significant national and international investment was one of the main reasons why members of parliament (MPs) looked upon the draft 2022 bill so positively. Jokowi told MPs that “the project has already received significant positive feedback from potential [national and international] investors” which created a strong sense of confidence over the project. ¹² In other words, Nusantara was positioned as win-win that would generate significant windfall for the national economy without being a burden on the state budget, with the government promising that no more than 20% of the estimated $32 billion development costs will come from public coffers and the remaining 80% coming from a 50-50 split of public-private partnerships (PPP) endeavors and private investment. Moreover, this seems to have been a strategic choice since the early stages of the Nusantara, as the McKinsey-led concept masterplan design was in no small measure designed to attract private investors. ¹³ According to another high-ranking government official, “in order to create public [support], you need to emphasize that the government will stick to the 20% and will [work] very hard to attract the 40% from private and 40% in terms of PPP”. ¹⁴

In summary, the government has internally framed Nusantara as a vitally important project that would promote investment and economic growth using a wide variety of urban planning models and buzzwords. These discursive frames were embedded in various formal and informal policy tools to propagate the internal legitimacy of the capital city project, and helped inoculate a morally desirable developmentalist logic that deterred internal opposition. Later, many of the discursive frames initially created for internal legitimization purposes were reproduced and used for external legitimization, such as the forest city concept (which has become one of the leading design concepts for the project), although others were later downplayed. This will be expanded further in the next two subsections below.

External legitimization strategies leveraged by state planners

The Jokowi government used a wide variety of strategies to secure public support for the capital city relocation. These strategies revolved primarily around framing it as a vitally important modernization project that would solve a multiplicity of social and economic problems in Indonesia, but also presenting the project itself as legally and politically valid. The following section delves into these efforts, utilizing a mixed-methods approach to explore the narratives and discursive frames promoted by the government to justify and garner support for the initiative. As noted above, our analysis consisted of both semi-structured interviews with key informants and the analysis of hundreds of government and mass media articles. This sub-section is primarily derived from our secondary data analysis, which provides a nuanced understanding of the rhetorical strategies and narratives used by the government to garner support for the project and illustrates the complex interplay of different underlying conceptual frame (re)produced in the government’s external legitimization efforts.

It is difficult to narrow down exactly how the government defines Nusantara. In public press releases from various government ministries, the project has been represented by a bewilderingly wide variety of descriptors and urban planning models. In the initial analysis of 198 government press releases, 30 general themes such as smart city, green urbanism, social inclusion, and the promotion of private investment, which were further divided into sub-themes for a total of 64 discursive frames (note: fourteen of the general themes were divided into 48 sub-themes, each of which correspond to a discreet frame). For example, the theme “social inclusion” was used in three different ways focusing on the national scale (10 PRs), regional scale (10 PRs), and local ethnic communities (5 PRs), respectively. Similarly, there were seven different explanations (in 21 different PRs) for how Nusantara will supposedly promote economic development. Overall, these themes reflect an extremely diverse range of policy ideals deployed to define and also justify the project; however, as explored further below, this heterogeneity has also made difficult for various audiences to understand what Nusantara, both as a city and as a policy, actually is.

The discursive frames used in press releases have been largely reproduced in public media reporting. It is worth noting that Indonesia has only modest levels of press freedom (ranked 111 out of 180 countries by Reporters Without Borders in 2024), marred in part by vested oligarchic interests (see Hadiz and Robison, 2014; Nugroho et al., 2012) and controlled access to the Presidential Palace for journalists. Media coverage has thus largely reproduces the ideas of creating a smart city with a global image and a transformative potential. However, while government press releases have leant more into environmental frames such as green urbanism and sustainability (both 35 PRs), mass media coverage tends to place greater emphasis on the project’s legal validity (92 articles) and the importance of private investment (39 times). Overall, both media forms emphasize the idealistic potential of the new capital city and how private capital will help realize them.

Our analysis demonstrates that the government’s discursive frames around Nusantara have evolved and been reprioritized over time. However, rather than replacing older discursive frames, they were usually deprioritized as new ones were added and/or re-emphasized. For example, while the unsuitability of Jakarta as a capital city was one of the most prevalent discursive frames in the early pre-pandemic stages, it was deprioritized during and after the pandemic while new discursive frames were added. This has resulted in a bewildering mass of supposed justifications for the project, which in effect dilutes the government’s various external legitimization strategies. However, several key strategies stick out (although for the sake of brevity, we will only highlight three). The first is the emphasis on environmental sustainability. This includes frames of green urbanism, forest city, environmental conservation, and climate change mitigation. Since its inception, the Indonesian government has steadfastly worked to position Nusantara as some form of environmental solutionism (see Montero, 2020) to problems both old (i.e., Jakarta’s ecological crisis) and new (sustainable urban living). Collectively, environmental sustainability has been the focus of a total of at least 123 PRs out of 198 analyzed; in other words, environmental sustainability frames appear in over 60% of all government press releases. It is also noteworthy that Nusantara is positioned as both a green solution in of itself, but also as a means to an end by promising to reforest Bukit Soeharto national park (mentioned in 7 different PRs), help reduce carbon emissions (9 different PRs, of which three mention the goal of becoming carbon neutral).

Second, Nusantara has been envisioned as a site of capital accumulation, akin to most other new city development projects around the world (Harvey, 2001; Moser and Côté-Roy, 2021; Zou, 2021). This has been built into Nusantara’s planning ethos from the very beginning as the promise of private investment has been a key legitimizing strategy, both internally and externally. In addition to being a potential magnet for international investment, Nusantara has been consistently positioned in public discourse as an enabler of economic growth and development. As stated for example in a press release by the Ministry of National Planning, Nusantara is imagined as “the engine of the economy for Kalimantan and become a trigger for strengthening the domestic value chain throughout Eastern Indonesia… [promoting] world trade routes, investment flows, and technological innovation.” ¹⁵ Government press releases have also emphasized more abstract development frames, such as accelerated development,” “economic development,” and “economic diversification” which were mentioned in 11 different PRs (in the first years of the pandemic, this was also linked to “economic recovery”). ¹⁶

Third, Nusantara is often presented in high-modernist frames as a technology-enabled smart city. Smart city (and associated frames such as digitalization, smart urban systems, IoT and smart transportation) are the focus of at least 42 different PRs. Some of these technological frames are often described in broad, superlative terms; for example, speaking at the groundbreaking ceremony for the capital city region’s new police office in 2023, the Head of the Capital City Authority said that Nusantara will have “technology-based city management standards, the use of CCTV, drones, the Internet of Things (IoT), big data and AI [to detect crime].” ¹⁷ In addition, Nusantara is also imagined as “an example for sustainable city development driven by the application of the latest technology.” ¹⁸ Technology, in the broad sense, has thus been a persistent and strategic theme in government discourse about Nusantara since 2019 in various ways, shapes and forms. However, smart technologies are also frequently positioned in government discourse as inherently desirable in and of themselves, focusing on immaterial technological progress, which indicates that state planners assume a form of technological determinism.

It should be noted that these external discursive frames often commingle. To take but one example, themes of environmental sustainability often go hand in hand with promises of economic growth as well as technological innovation, which suggests the presence of an urban smart-sustainability fix (Martin et al., 2019). Furthermore, the way that smart city discourses have been positioned as a broader enabler of advanced urban infrastructure and environmentally friendly technologies in Indonesia (and thus supposedly promote more sustainable economic growth) has, over time, lent itself to increasingly abstract idealism. This, in the post-pandemic years, Nusantara has been increasingly characterized as a civilizational transformation (11 different PRs, the first published in 2019 and the rest in 2022 and 2023). A press release from November 2023, for example, stated that the development of Nusantara is a “[national] transformation. Not just building a city, but a transformation of a new civilization so that Indonesia in 2045 will be a stronger and more prosperous nation.” ¹⁹ Nusantara has thus, over time, increasingly combined utopian thinking with aspirational frames (see also Bunnell et al., 2022) that promises to create a legacy for future generations (9 PRs) and make Indonesia “future ready” (7 PRs).

The relational interplay between internal and external legitimization strategies

As demonstrated in the analysis above, the Jokowi government used a myriad of inwards and outwards-looking discursive frames to legitimize Nusantara. The work done to develop and circulate a collective vocabulary framed around design principles in the early masterplanning stage was significant in cementing the “knowledge systems” (Mosse, 2006: 938) that provided the projects raison d’etre, and moreover created a pervasive sense of internal coherence (even if that coherence was subtly authoritarian in nature). In turn, many of these discursive frames were reproduced and repurposed for public-facing legitimization strategies, particularly through government press releases and media statements. However, not all discursive frames retained the same weight, as some were either downplayed over time (such as the Nusantara -Balikpapan-Samarinda tri-city spatial planning approach, which still features prominently in investor-facing promotional documents; see O-IKN, 2023) or phased out (for example, the sponge city model) from external policy discourse. The rest of this section will briefly highlight three lessons about the interplay between internal and external legitimacy vis-a-vis Nusantara.

First, there is a dialectical relationship between internal and external legitimization strategies. In particular, public responses to external strategies – whether positive or negative – send valuable political signals to the government about whether or not a given strategy is receiving widespread acceptance. If a message or strategy is eroded by critics, government actors are likely to modify or even replace it. In the case of Nusantara, one visible example is how lines of argumentation over Jakarta’s congestion and unsuitability as a capital city were gradually overshadowed by arguments about Nusantara’s neigh-existential importance in “transforming” development in Indonesia and achieving civilizational progress for the entire country. These discursive frames have, in turn, been internalized by policymakers and planners in the government who adopt the same vocabulary, even in private interviews, to explain the vision of Nusantara. These shifts in internal frames of reference may, in turn, lead to new or revised external legitimization strategies further down the road. Internal and external legitimization strategies (and their enabling discursive frames) are therefore constantly mutating from and into each other in a dialectical manner.

Second, some legitimization strategies are inherently cross-sectional by being designed for both internal and external audiences. One example that stands out is the emphasis on the legal foundation for the project. In both private conversations and in public-facing discourse, many policymakers emphasize the legal basis of Nusantara and how the law in of itself will guarantee the project’s success. A press release from 20th October 2023, about a meeting with a diplomatic delegation, for example, explicitly states that “the development IKN [Nusantara] is based on a binding law, in accordance with Law 3 (2022) on the National Capital, which means that [future] leadership successions cannot stop the development of IKN.” Another example is the creation of new public institutions to oversee the project (i.e., the new capital city authority), which was set up to internally steer planning and political resources for Nusantara. Public discourse has heavily emphasized the centrality of the new authority (commonly referred to as O-IKN) as a facilitator of growth and success for the capital city relocation projects; President Jokowi, for example, stated in 2022 that O-IKN will be “flexible and agile” so as to attract “funding … from various existing schemes.”

Third, the proliferation of discursive frames surrounding Nusantara has created a fragile policy regime. The Indonesian government has embedded a veritable deluge of labels, buzzwords, indicators, and policy models in various forms of textual and verbal discourse, which makes it near-impossible to pin down what the actual project is. On the one hand, this shows that Jokowi and his key advisers have been keenly aware of the need to invest in developing legitimacy for the Nusantara megaproject. On the one hand, this shows that the government has been mindful of public perceptions and the need to adjust discursive frames to political realities. On the other, it has also contributed to a bewilderingly wide set of concepts, metrics, and policy ideals, which are difficult for external stakeholders to comprehend (and even harder to implement!). In some sense, therefore, Nusantara has become a “carousel of labels” which reveal very little about the nature of the project itself, but more about “the nature of discourses surrounding it” (Cugurullo and Ponzini, 2018: 150) and how the central state is increasingly struggling to justify the city’s very existence.

This begs the question of how firm – or perhaps fragile – the legitimacy for Nusantara really is. It is already public knowledge that, despite outward appearances, many government bureaucrats are privately skeptical (if not outright critical) of the capital city relocation project, and polling data has indicated that public support for it is based on Jokowi’s own support base (Muhtadi, 2022). In other words, support for Nusantara relies on the power and personal popularity of President Jokowi (Hudalah, 2025), whose final term came to an end in October 2024, which is a shallow form of public legitimacy. The central state’s legitimization strategies have thus resulted in a superficially dominating but inherently fragile policy regime, as evidenced by how many policymakers and urban planners affiliated with the project will privately express reservations about the project’s implementation. In other words, the government has created a “regime of truth” (Prince 2012a) around Nusantara that is based on a false consensus about its necessity, both internally and externally, which means that it will be relatively easy to challenge the project’s legitimacy in the future.

As demonstrated in this section, urban scholars stand much to gain from explicitly analyzing policy legitimacy. Our proposed relational approach to theorizing legitimization processes highlights the dialectical relationship between internal and external legitimacy, and illuminates how legitimizing discourses shape the idiosyncratic logics of urban policymaking (Mosse, 2006). More broadly, this also contributes to understanding everyday state planning processes (Kuus, 2008), and how power is topologically mediated to reshape built landscape at-a-distance, including brand new cities built from scratch (Moeller, 2025).

Conclusion

This paper presents a novel approach to studying legitimacy in urban policymaking. Disaggregating the state (Kuus and Agnew, 2007: 98), it draws insights from organizational management theory, urban geography, and critical policy studies to analyze the relational legitimization strategies used by government officials embarking on new urban planning projects. Building on older institutionalist scholarship which acknowledges that legitimacy is responsive to the needs of external audiences (Suchman, 1995), we find that legitimization strategies to be socially and geographically relational as they are fundamentally shaped by how policymakers perceive how their discursive frames are received. Through an empirical case study of Indonesia’s new capital city of Nusantara, we demonstrate that internal and external legitimization strategies mutually influence one another dialectically. These strategies rely on a myriad of discursive frames that are modified and re-prioritized in response to evolving political and socio-economic conditions (Terlouw, 2023). However, the ongoing process of discursive adjustments, both big and small, has resulted in a fragile form of legitimacy devoid of any genuine consensus on the core values or overarching goals of Nusantara. Our results thus also contribute to discussions in critical policy studies about how policymakers continuously (re)rationalize projects (Mosse, 2006).

The fact that so much of Nusantara’s legitimacy is both directly and indirectly connected to President Jokowi (Hudalah, 2023) indicates that there may have been a qualitative shift in the nature of power in contemporary Indonesia. Jokowi has not only accelerated the developmentalist infrastructure initiative of his immediate predecessor, Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono (Warburton, 2016), he has turbo-charged the Indonesian state’s fixation with mega-infrastructure by positioning Nusantara as a catch-all silver bullet to Indonesia’s complex national and regional development problems (Addie et al., 2020). Furthermore, Jokowi has shown an almost uncanny ability to bend state structures (and the wider oligarchy) to his will (Fukuoka and Djani, 2016) by using both informal political pressure and tying the legitimacy of key projects like Nusantara to his own individual power and political legacy (Hudalah, 2023). As such, this demonstrates new ways in which state power in Indonesia is being subtly re-centralized (Al Farouq, 2025; Hudalah et al., 2022), and that the Indonesian presidency is today able to reshape the built landscape of Indonesia through subtle domination at a scale that has hitherto been unheard of.

Studying legitimization strategies thus helps uncover how central-state policymakers enact their authority to implement urban policy and restructure built space, sometimes on a massive scale. One significant blind spot in our policy legitimation model is the role of social media, despite the well-known fact that it influences public opinion (and Jokowi has many times shown that he cares a lot about actively managing his social media image). Further research is also needed on how Nusantara’s legitimization strategies will evolve under Indonesia’s new post-2024 presidency, and comparative studies can for example look at whether state apparatuses in different socio-political milieux leverage similar legitimization strategies and whether their chosen discursive frames mutate as rapidly as in Indonesia.