Meikarta: A New World in Trouble

This talk provides an “update” on what has been going on in Meikarta, the LIPPO group’s biggest and most ambitious development project to date, and one that was recently hit by a bribery scandal involving local officials and legislators. LIPPO started construction before they finalized negotiations on land use or the West Java provincial government issued the necessary permits. Unlike in the past, land grab is not an issue today, but Meikarta is an interesting case as it concerns issues of land bank and land ownership, which are in the hands of a few Chinese-Indonesian developers with a close internal network. The case of Meikarta, which the developer claims is the “future that is here today,” illustrates a new type of land issue that Indonesia will increasingly face in the future as President Jokowi intensifies his nationwide land-certificate distribution policy to land owners, possibly encouraging more systematic land-banking practices by developers.
Manneke Budiman is a YCAR Research Collaboration Fellow. He currently teaches at the Faculty of Humanities, Universitas Indonesia and is its Associate-Dean for Academic, Research and Student Affairs. At the moment, he is engaged in multi-year research on water, waste, and health management in the context of rural-urban dynamics in Indonesia.
All are welcome.