Transmigration in Indonesia: Lessons from its environmental and social impacts

Abstract

Indonesia's transmigration program to transport people from Java and other densely populated islands to largely forested outer islands has high environmental, social, and financial costs, while doing little towards relieving population pressure on Java. Transmigration has been an important cause of forest loss in Indonesia World Bank financing promoted the program directly over the 1976-1989 period and continues to underwrite other settlement models that have supplanted earlier programs. The bank projects included creating and strengthening a Ministry of Transmigration, which also carried out settlements of types other than those financed as discrete components of bank loans. Some of these indirectly supported activities have had particularly serious human rights consequences. The case of transmigration provides valuable lessons for tropical countries and international development agencies such as the World Bank, and many of these lessons have yet to be learned.