Bringing the Young and the Tech into Indonesia’s Digital Education Politics and the Geopolitical Impact

Indonesia’s appointment of an ex-CEO of a home-grown tech company in reforming the bureaucracy raises the question of how the government is reshaping its role in education politics in an era of digital transformation. This is a question important not only in understanding domestic politics but also in understanding foreign relations of human capital development. This article analyzes the case of the Indonesian government’s decision in 2019 to bring in the tech and the young to the Ministry of Education and Culture. The author argues that this decision was made both for the country and for the bureaucracy’s survival and for seeking competitiveness in a leapfrogging manner. This decision goes against the conventional understanding that in the state-society relationship, digital transformation in the bureaucracy is lagging behind and corporations are moving ahead. For Indonesia, with its strong motivation to accelerate national development and counter digital colonialism, a unique political-economic alliance and partnership was made for dramatic bureaucratic reform. This leapfrogging reform also implies that diplomatic mismatch is likely to happen in an international human capital development agenda where bureaucratic cooperation is increasingly necessary but the difference in bureaucratic reforms widens.