Metropolitan Governance and Institutional Design: Transportation in the Jakarta Metropolitan Region

In the Jakarta Metropolitan Region (JMR), the lack of co-ordination and appropriate governance has resulted in paralyzing traffic jams at the metropolitan scale that cannot be resolved by a single government entity. The issue of metropolitan governance is especially crucial here as the JMR lacks an established and formally pre-designed system of governance (e.g., in a constitution or other legal regulations). Instead, it relies on the interaction, coordination and cooperation of a multitude of different stakeholders, ranging from local and regional authorities to private entities and citizens. This chapter offers a discussion on the various governance approaches relating to an appropriate institutional design required for transportation issues at the metropolitan scale. The case used is a regional Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) system as an extension to the metropolitan transport system. Institutional design analysis is applied to the case and three possible improvements - i) a ‘Megapolitan’ concept, ii) a regional spatial plan and iii) inter-local government cooperation; were identified that correspond to current debates on metropolitan governance approaches of regionalism, localism and new regionalism. The findings, which are relevant to similar metropolitan regions, suggest that i) improvements at the meso-level of institutional design are more readily accepted and effective than improvements at the macro-level and ii) that the appropriate institutional design for governing metropolitan transportation in the JMR requires enhanced coordination and cooperation amongst four important actors - local governments, the regional agency, the central government, and private companies.