The Missing Chair in Indonesia's Policymaking

By Nita Safira, Government Public Relations Officer at the Ministry of Finance

In the first week of July 2026, a senior aide at the Presidential Staff Office appeared on a podcast to discuss the Red-and-White Village Cooperatives—or Koperasi Desa Merah Putih—the government’s village cooperative program for farmers and fishermen. Within hours, a clip explaining why aspiring cooperative managers would undergo military-style training went viral. The policy itself disappeared from the conversation. A program meant to reach millions of rural households lost the news cycle to the way it was explained.

This was not an isolated communications failure. In its October 2025 review of the Prabowo-Gibran administration’s first year, think tank Lab 45 recorded 81 policy-related communication missteps and 70 personal ones, 151 in total, or roughly one every two and a half days. Meanwhile, Sintesa Strategi Indonesia’s monitoring of digital conversations from June 5 to July 2, 2026, found more than 231 million impressions mentioning President Prabowo, while fewer than one in five mentioned cabinet ministers by name.

Together, these figures suggest a deeper problem: public attention keeps gravitating toward individual political figures, while communication professionals are often brought in only after decisions have been made.

The problem is not simply that communicators fail to deliver the message. Too often, they are asked to explain a policy they did not help shape, test, or anticipate.

The diagnosis is hardly new. At this year’s Bakohumas forum, the Ministry of Communication and Digital Affairs called for government PR to move “from press release producers to data-driven reputation managers.” The government already knows that communication needs to change. What has not changed enough is where communication sits in the policymaking process.

Why the Paradigm Has Remained Stuck

Part of the answer is structural. Government communication is still often organized around outputs: press releases issued, posts published, media coverage generated, and impressions counted. These measures show what institutions produce, not what citizens understand, trust, or ultimately do.

That distinction matters. Reach measures exposure. Effective public communication should ultimately be judged by whether people understand a policy, trust its rationale, and know what it means for them.

Yet communicators are frequently brought in after a policy has been finalized, when their role is to explain or defend a decision rather than identify communication risks while it is still being designed. Strategic communication should begin earlier, with formative research: understanding the policy environment, affected publics, their concerns, and the questions likely to emerge before objectives, messages, and channels are determined.

Indonesia already has the formal tools for this. Communication strategies define audiences, key messages, timing, and channels. But when such strategies are completed only after a policy is locked in, they become compliance documents rather than instruments for policymaking.

A strategy nobody consults before an announcement is not really a strategy. It is paperwork.

This missing seat matters most before a problem becomes a crisis. In today’s attention economy, an awkward explanation can become a national talking point within hours, amplified by influencers and algorithms that reward emotion over nuance. Crisis communication therefore cannot begin when a hashtag is already trending. It must start upstream, through risk mapping, monitoring, audience analysis, and spokesperson preparation.

A communicator involved early can ask questions policymakers may not naturally ask: Which part of this proposal will be misunderstood? Which words could trigger resistance? What will people ask first? Which groups may feel excluded? What competing narratives could emerge?

The viral podcast clip therefore raises a more important question than why the explanation went wrong: why was the communication risk not identified beforehand?

This Is Not Merely an Issue of Optics

How government explains its decisions affects public trust, support for fiscal measures, compliance, and ultimately the durability of policy. Communication is not packaging applied after policy is made. It is part of the relationship between the state and the people it governs.

Robert Shiller’s work on narrative economics offers a useful parallel. The stories people believe about economic conditions can influence how they behave, alongside the underlying fundamentals. In government, the same principle applies: when people cannot easily grasp the substance of a policy, the narrative that fills the gap may come from a viral clip, a misleading interpretation, or a single spectacle.

Indonesia saw this again on August 6, 2026, when President Prabowo met with 150 Indonesian researchers at the Presidential Palace and the National Research and Innovation Agency (BRIN) showcased innovations in food, energy, health care, and advanced materials. Public attention, however, was quickly captured by a viral demonstration of a coconut-fiber roof tile being stepped on.

An event intended to showcase Indonesia’s research capacity became a conversation about one spectacle. The problem was not a lack of substance. It was that the substance failed to become the story.

What Needs to Change

Communication professionals need a formal seat in policy development, not to determine what policy should be, but to bring expertise on how it will be heard, interpreted, and received once it leaves the government building.

That role should begin with listening, not messaging. Public participation, clarity, fairness, and transparency are central to effective fiscal communication. A communicator’s contribution should include the public’s likely questions, points of resistance, potential misunderstandings, and evidence from audience and media monitoring.

This also requires changing how communication performance is evaluated. The question should not simply be, “How many people saw our message?” It should be, “Did people understand what the policy does, why it matters, and what it asks of them?”

Visibility is not the final objective. Trust, legitimacy, understanding, and whether a policy can work once it meets reality are what ultimately matter.

Government does not need another forum to conclude that communication must be modernized. That conclusion has already been reached. What it needs is to embed communication expertise while policies are still being designed, tested, and debated, rather than after the decision has been made.

A communicator who arrives only when a policy needs a press release has already arrived too late.

The missing chair is not a seat at the press conference. It is a seat at the policy table.

Indonesia lacks a policymaking culture that treats communication not as the final coat of paint on a decision, but as part of how that decision earns understanding, trust, and legitimacy in the first place.

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