Maritime Safety in Indonesia: Mapping the Challenges and Opportunities

This is a report of a study conducted by Centre for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) Indonesia to map the various aspects surrounding the conduct of maritime safety in Indonesia, including its key stakeholders, institutional and regulatory frameworks, and the main challenges regularly faced in providing and managing maritime safety. There are several significant findings.

Firstly, there are overlapping responsibilities and similarity of tasks in practical operations among agencies/authorities that oversee maritime safety. This has made it difficult to distribute functions between them and coordinate efficiently. Agencies tend to stick rigidly and refer only to the national law/constitution sanctioning their own establishment, authority, and legitimacy to operate. Secondly, and accordingly, this study found that the relationship between stakeholders of maritime safety is, in fact, a critical factor to ensure maritime safety. Thirdly, although Indonesia has a comprehensive set of national regulatory frameworks to converge maritime safety practices in Indonesia with global standards, in practice the geographic nature of Indonesia as an archipelagic country engenders complexity in standardizing the nationwide of maritime safety practices. Fourthly, the human factor is still the main factor causing maritime accidents in Indonesia.

This study identified and categorized these challenges to three interconnected levels—political level, strategic level, and societal level. It is only through a complete overhaul of all the challenges faced within these three levels could a rigorous implementation of maritime safety be carried out in Indonesia.