Informality, Paradiplomacy, and Cross-Border Cooperation: The Development of Tourism on Bintan Island, Indonesia

Abstract

This article examines how informality has enhanced the ability of the local government in Indonesia’s Bintan Island to achieve cross-border cooperation for tourism development, despite the constraints imposed by the central government. The local government, the article illustrates, has negotiated between the development of the local tourism industry and its increasingly tense relations with the central government by using informality through patron–client relations. Informality has enabled the local government to mobilise private actors as proxies in its pursuit of cross-border cooperation. The government has also used international standards that govern the tourism industry in designated Free Trade Zones to accommodate local needs, such as employment. Informality provides local stakeholders with benefits from cross-border cooperation while simultaneously providing flexibility for foreign capital to operate in the region. The article concludes that informality is both an instrument that the local government can strategically use to circumvent the powers of the central government and something that local elites can use to maintain and expand patron–client relations to achieve their political and economic interests.