The foreign policy fiasco of countering illegal fishing: Reflections from Indonesia's approach to publicly explode and sink illegally intruding boats

Abstract

The policy of publicly exploding and sinking intruding foreign-flagged fishing boats was the signature Indonesian response to Illegal, Unregulated, and Unreported Fishing (IUUF) between 2015 and 2017. Unfortunately, due to the state's political dynamics, Indonesia decided to abandon its assertive policies and adopt more legal and educational approaches, with the hope of reducing maritime incursions. This study argues that existing scholarship has largely overlooked the phenomenon of Indonesian policymakers abandoning the past approach of exploding ships, primarily due to the dominance of securitization discourses used to make sense of the extraordinary measures undertaken. To provide an alternative interpretation, this study frames the abandonment of Indonesia's assertiveness in countering IUUF as ‘foreign policy fiascos,’ through a cross-fertilization of the foreign policy analysis and public policy literatures. Examining Indonesia's IUUF-countering policies between 2014 and 2023 reveals that the framing of these policies as a foreign policy fiasco is made possible through the convergence of the following frameworks. First, the nexus between group interactions and poor decision-making, exemplified through the concepts of ‘Bureaucratic Politics’ and ‘Newgroup Syndrome,’ to reveal competitions among maritime-securing agencies, conformity pressures and temporal aspects of groups. Second, bridging the public polices' assertion of ‘Programmatic,’ ‘Political’ and ‘Process’ dimensions to assess the extent of policy fiascos, which shows the lack of deterrence effects and opposition voices in the assertive approaches of bombing and sinking ships.

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