Potential Social Impacts of the Capital Relocation Plan of the Republic of Indonesia: Identification and Management Alternatives

Abstract

: The plan to relocate the Republic of Indonesia's National Capital to East Kalimantan will certainly have impacts, including social impact. This impact certainly must be managed, especially the negative impact, to avoid or prevent, overcome, minimize, or control it. The environmental study carried out in 2019 is a Strategic Environmental Assessment (SEA) because this project is a national strategic project. The purpose of this SEA is to provide protection directions and criteria for environmental security and identify the condition of social and economic aspects. Through SEA, one of the priority strategic issues is recognized, namely social dynamics. The SEA drafting team provided some recommendations. However, it turns out that these recommendations do not cover social feature priority issues. Therefore, it is necessary to identify the social impacts or Social Impact Analysis (SIA) of this project plan. Because the National Capital is planned as an area, every physical development project plan planned within it must be accompanied by an Environmental Impact Analysis (EIA), including an SIA. Identification of potential impacts using the simple interaction matrix method succeeded in identifying some social impacts. Because currently the capital relocation project has entered the construction stage, identification of potential impacts is carried out to predict the impacts that may occur during the construction and operation stages. Four positive impacts are possible during construction: increased in-migration, increased employment opportunities or reduced unemployment, increased population, and more even distribution of Indonesian population. The negative impacts are increased population density and the occurrence of social conflict. So, there are more positive impacts than negative impacts. All potential impacts during the construction phase are predicted to continue into the operation phase, however, the intensity is predicted to decrease slightly, especially with increased employment opportunities.