Indonesian Journal of Law, Governance, and Regulation

Property law, customary tenure, and tourism-driven land conversion in Bali, Indonesia: An empirical socio-legal study

Devi Afrianty — Mon, 02 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0700

This article examines property law in Bali as a plural socio-legal system in which national land statutes, provincial regulation, desa adat authority, subak irrigation institutions, and tourism-driven markets interact. The study uses a doctrinal and empirical socio-legal design. Open data from Statistics Indonesia for Bali, Bali legal-information systems, reports attributed to the Bali regional office of the Ministry of Agrarian Affairs and Spatial Planning/National Land Agency, and published government statistics are combined with peer-reviewed scholarship on Indonesian land law, legal pluralism, property rights, and Bali's subak landscape. The empirical results show a central governance tension. Bali has very high formal land-registration coverage, reported at 2,035,418 registered parcels or 95.4% of estimated parcels in 2023, yet registration has not prevented rapid changes in land use and market access. Reported rice-field area declined from about 70,995.82 ha in 2019 to 64,474 ha in 2024, with Denpasar and Gianyar experiencing particularly steep proportional losses. Only 39,973 ha of the 2024 rice-field area was classified as protected sustainable food agricultural land, leaving an estimated gap of more than 16,000 ha if the 87% national protection benchmark is applied. Tourism recovery after the COVID-19 shock intensified demand: direct foreign arrivals returned to 6.33 million in 2024, while accommodation and food services dominated Bali's fourth-quarter 2024 GRDP structure. The paper argues that Bali's property law problem is not merely weak titling; it is the misalignment between title security, spatial control, customary obligations, and market incentives. Policy reforms should integrate cadastral, spatial, and beneficial-ownership data, strengthen LP2B enforcement, and protect adat and subak land as social-ecological property rather than as ordinary alienable commodities.

Investment law and realized investment in Indonesia: An empirical legal analysis of regulatory reform, institutional quality, and capital formation in 2019-2025

Radha Aulia Putri — Mon, 02 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0700

Indonesia has repeatedly redesigned its investment laws to convert regulatory reforms into capital formation, industrial upgrading, and employment creation. This study examines whether the contemporary regime of capital investment law is consistent with observed empirical outcomes in 2019-2025. Using an empirical legal method, it triangulates public legal instruments, Badan Koordinasi Penanaman Modal (BKPM) realized investment statistics, United Nations Conference on Trade and Development Foreign Direct Investment (UNCTAD FDI) data, and institutional indicators from the World Bank and World Justice Project. The legal framework is anchored in Law No. 25 of 2007 on Capital Investment, the Job Creation Framework, Government Regulation No. 5 of 2021 on risk-based business licensing, and Presidential Regulation No. 10 of 2021 on investment business fields. The data show a record realized direct investment of Rp1,714.2 trillion in 2024 and Rp1,931.2 trillion in 2025. Foreign investment remained important, but domestic investment became a larger contributor in 2025. UNCTAD data show FDI inflows of US$24.212 billion in 2024, recovering from 2023 but remaining below the 2022 peak value. The study concludes that Indonesian investment law is more facilitative; however, high-quality investment still depends on implementation certainty, regional coordination, environmental due process, dispute prevention, and credible enforcement.

Rule of law and legal pluralism in Indonesia: Constitutional transformation, regulatory governance, and rights protection in a decentralized state

Maya Shaffina Putri — Mon, 02 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0700

Indonesia’s legal system is often described through apparently contradictory images: a civil-law jurisdiction that relies heavily on statutes, a constitutional democracy with an assertive Constitutional Court, a decentralized state with thousands of local regulations, and a plural society in which adat, Islamic norms, administrative practice, and national legislation operate simultaneously. This paper examines Indonesian law as a site of constitutional transformation, regulatory governance, and rights contestation after Reformasi. Using a qualitative doctrinal and socio-legal literature review, it synthesizes peer-reviewed research and key legal materials on constitutional review, decentralization, anti-corruption, legal pluralism, the Job Creation regime, the 2023 Criminal Code, and digital defamation law. The central argument is that Indonesia’s rule-of-law challenge is not primarily the absence of law, but the interaction of institutional fragmentation, uneven legal reasoning, politicized rulemaking, and unresolved tensions between legal pluralism and constitutional rights. The paper finds that Indonesia has built important legal institutions since 1998, particularly constitutional review and specialized courts, but these institutions operate within a regulatory environment marked by overlapping jurisdictions, weak harmonization, and contested public participation. Legal reform should therefore shift from episodic statutory change to a systemic agenda: integrated judicial review of subordinate regulations, rights-sensitive recognition of living law and adat, more transparent judicial reasoning, strengthened anti-corruption safeguards, participatory regulatory impact assessment, and narrow interpretation of speech and morality offenses. These reforms would improve legal certainty for citizens and businesses while preserving Indonesia’s plural constitutional identity.