Key Takeaways:
- The author says Indonesia’s 2025–2029 RPJMN treats food, energy, and water self-sufficiency plus commodity downstreaming as ways to keep policy room in a multipolar, shock-prone economy—not as a retreat from trade.
- Bappenas’s risk-planning framework (MRPN) under Rachmat Pambudy is framed as converting global supply and energy risks into domestic capacity; “strategic autonomy” here means managing interdependence, not autarky.
- Belarus is the example: a 2026–2030 roadmap after Lukashenko’s July 2026 visit and September talks with Ambassador Ramanouski on agri-tech and industry, so partners add factories and skills at home rather than only imported inputs.
For Indonesia, geopolitical fragmentation is changing not only relations between states, but also the external conditions that shape the success of national development. The shift from a unipolar toward a multipolar order is accompanied by trade tensions, supply-chain disruptions, competition over resources and technology, and growing uncertainty over food and energy security. These developments are making economic resilience increasingly difficult to separate from how a state responds to changes in the international environment.
In this context, Indonesia’s strategic question is no longer simply how to remain engaged with the global economy, but how to ensure that such engagement strengthens the country’s ability to withstand external pressures. This requires building the capacity to manage dependencies, diversify suppliers and expand domestic productive capacity.
This direction is reflected in the 2025–2029 National Medium-Term Development Plan, or RPJMN. Its focus on food, energy and water self-sufficiency runs alongside downstreaming and industrialization aimed at increasing domestic value added. Viewed through the lens of today’s geopolitical environment, these are not only economic development objectives but also efforts to expand Indonesia’s strategic room for maneuver.
Planning as Strategic Capacity
This is where national development planning takes on a broader significance. As external risks increasingly affect domestic development, states need mechanisms to translate changes in the international environment into long-term priorities, investment decisions, risk management and capacity-building.
The National Development Risk Management framework, or MRPN, developed by Indonesia’s Ministry of National Development Planning, or Bappenas, reflects this need. Risk-based planning is intended to integrate development risks into cross-sectoral planning, control and evaluation, with food security and the energy transition among the areas of focus. Industrial downstreaming is also incorporated into the broader framework of development risk management.
The framework points to something more fundamental: how global risks can be translated into questions of national capacity rather than treated simply as geopolitical pressures. Disruptions in food, energy or industrial raw-material supplies may originate in international markets, but their domestic consequences ultimately depend on how strong a country’s capacity is to absorb and respond to such shocks.
National planning therefore becomes one of the foundations of strategic resilience. Rather than merely responding to crises after they emerge, the state seeks to build capacities that make its policy choices less vulnerable to external changes.
The RPJMN and a New Direction for Development
The 2025–2029 RPJMN provides a more concrete framework for understanding this direction. Its priorities on food, energy and water self-sufficiency reflect a concern with the domestic capacity to meet strategic needs, while downstreaming and industrialization are directed toward increasing value added within Indonesia.
The two agendas are closely connected. Food security requires adequate productive capacity, technology, infrastructure and inputs. Industrialization requires investment, energy, raw materials, technology and skilled labor. In both cases, possessing resources is not enough; what matters is the ability to turn those resources into productive capacity.
Downstreaming, therefore, means more than processing commodities before they are exported. It is also about retaining a greater share of value creation within Indonesia, building industrial ecosystems and expanding the productive base that can support development over the long term.
With Rachmat Pambudy at the helm of Bappenas, this orientation reflects a distinctive combination of deep academic experience in agriculture and a long-standing understanding of President Prabowo Subianto’s policy direction. It allows him to approach development planning not merely as a technocratic exercise, but as a means of strengthening Indonesia’s economic capabilities from within.
Productivity, downstreaming, investment and value creation are consequently treated not as isolated administrative targets, but as interconnected elements of a long-term development agenda. In an increasingly uncertain geopolitical environment, this gives development planning a sharper strategic dimension: building the capabilities that allow Indonesia to retain more choices as external conditions change.
When External Partnerships Strengthen Domestic Capacity
Indonesia’s relationship with Belarus offers an illustration of how this logic can operate in external economic relations. The strategic value of the relationship lies not simply in increasing bilateral trade, but in the possibility of connecting Indonesia’s domestic needs with investment, technology and productive capacity at home.
When Belarusian President Aleksandr Lukashenko visited Indonesia in July 2026, the two countries launched a 2026–2030 roadmap for cooperation. Subsequent developments show why the relationship is relevant to Indonesia’s development agenda.
Rachmat Pambudy’s long record as an academic and practitioner in the agribusiness sector, including his involvement with farmers’ organizations, makes agriculture more than simply an administrative portfolio in his role as Minister of National Development Planning and head of Bappenas. This background provides useful context for his September 2026 discussions with Belarusian Ambassador Raman Ramanouski on opportunities for cooperation in agriculture, industry and investment.
The meeting was notable because it brought together two dimensions that are often treated separately in discussions of food security: securing agricultural supplies and building domestic productive capacity.
For Indonesia, such cooperation offers the possibility of bringing technology, investment and industrial capabilities into domestic production chains rather than simply obtaining agricultural inputs from abroad.
The connection between development policy and geopolitics becomes more tangible at this point. Diversifying partners can reduce concentrated dependencies, but the strategic value becomes greater when such partnerships also strengthen domestic capacity.
Indonesia does not have to choose between openness and self-reliance as binary alternatives. External relationships can instead be used to expand domestic capabilities, provided that cooperation is structured around investment, technology, production and value creation.
Strategic Autonomy in the Indonesian Context
This approach offers a more specific way of understanding strategic autonomy in Indonesia. Strategic autonomy does not have to mean the ability to meet every need independently. In an interconnected global economy, a degree of external dependence will remain and can even generate economic benefits.
What matters more is the ability to manage that interdependence.
Diversifying suppliers expands Indonesia’s options, while diversifying investment partners can reduce concentrated risks. At the same time, strengthening domestic industry improves the capacity to absorb shocks, while greater domestic value added allows Indonesia to capture more economic benefits from its resources and markets.
Under this approach, strategic autonomy is essentially the ability to manage interdependence from a position of greater strength, rather than rejecting interdependence altogether.
This also explains why domestic development priorities have geopolitical consequences. Food security affects the ability to withstand external disruptions, industrial capacity shapes the response to changes in global supply chains, and the ability to generate greater value added ultimately affects Indonesia’s position in the global division of labor.
Development planning is therefore not separate from external strategy. It helps determine the material conditions that allow a state to preserve its policy choices when the international environment changes.
Implications for the Global South
For countries across the Global South, Indonesia’s experience suggests that strategic autonomy does not have to be built by reducing engagement with the global economy. An alternative is to use that engagement to progressively strengthen domestic capacity.
This requires more than trade policy or economic diplomacy. It requires continuity in national planning, the ability to identify risks, coordination of investment and industrial development, and the capacity to connect domestic needs with opportunities offered by different external partners.
The role of national planning therefore becomes increasingly strategic—not as a substitute for diplomacy or economic policy, but as a means of connecting these different decisions to long-term development objectives.
Indonesia does not ultimately have to choose between becoming more self-reliant and remaining connected to the world. The challenge is to build external relationships in ways that make that connectivity a source of greater national capacity.
As geopolitical fragmentation makes countries increasingly aware of vulnerabilities in supply chains, food, energy and industrial capacity, the ability to plan development with these risks in mind becomes part of strategic capacity itself.
For Indonesia, the more important geopolitical question is not simply who the country works with, but what those relationships produce for national capacity. This is where development, planning and geopolitics ultimately converge. ***
