Establishing Sustainable Marine and Coastal Ecosystems in Indonesia: Policymaking Dynamics in Countering Illegal Fishing Practices

Background As the world’s largest archipelagic nation, ensuring the sustainable use of oceans and seas is a significant challenge for Indonesian policymakers. Fortunately, Indonesia shows positive trends in the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) 14 ‘life below water,’ partially due to its decisiveness in countering Illegal, Unreported, and Unregulated Fishing (IUUF) through a vast number of measures. Methods To decipher this trend, this study argues for the relevance of the international relations’ analytical framework of ‘environmental foreign policy’ and bridges the ideas of the state-level analysis, which utilizes three basic causal variables: checks and balances, bureaucratic politics, and policymakers’ roadmaps. In doing so, this qualitative study assesses official documents published between 2015 and 2024. Results 1) The relevance of domestic checks and balances as leading to a limited level of disagreements between the legislative and executive agencies; 2) Bureaucratic politics as leading to divergent IUUF-countering policies, including the effective occupancy over Indonesian seas, fisheries-based management areas, and the public bombing and sinking of illegally intruding ships; and 3) The conception of Indonesia’s ‘blue economy’ as the basis of the nation’s long-term development plan, which leads to divergent policies working towards the same goal of countering unsustainable fisheries. Conclusions The causal variables of checks and balances, bureaucratic politics, and policymakers’ roadmaps allow for a nuanced understanding of Indonesia’s positive trends in responding to the demands of establishing more sustainable oceans.