When Growth Meets Inequality

Introduction

Labuan Bajo

A fishing town on the western tip of Flores and the gateway to Komodo National Park. In 2018 the government named it one of Indonesia's five super priority tourism destinations, and the money followed.

Residents had already been saying the same thing for years. The town was being built for visitors before it was built for the people living in it.

National Tourism Strategic Area, designated a super priority destination in 2018.

Before the road

Getting out was the problem

South of the town there was no reliable way through. In the wet season the track turned to deep mud and a journey to the city took a full day on foot. Residents describe people who did not survive that journey, unable to reach help in time.

The alternative was the sea.

Before the road

Gambling with your life

This is Selat Molo, the narrow gap between mainland Flores and Rinca. Water masses meet here from north and south, and the current runs like a river in a hurry. It is known for whirlpools.

Boats left from Dermaga Lenteng, below Soknar, in open deck wooden fishing boats. The skipper read the tide before committing to the gap.

Every trip to a hospital, a market or a school began with that judgement.

Soknar residents. The crossing was the only alternative to a full day walking.

Before the road

Three hours, or all day

The sail itself is not long. Thirteen nautical miles from Dermaga Lenteng to the Labuan Bajo wharf, two and a half to three hours in a wooden boat.

What took the day was the strait. When the tide ran hard, boats pulled in behind the nearest island and waited, sometimes for hours, until it was safe to cross. Leave at dawn, arrive at dusk. Not because the distance was great, but because the sea decided when you could go.

Residents describe leaving in the morning and arriving in the afternoon. The sailing time and the character of the strait come from published accounts of the route.

Introduction

What was built

A national strategic project, built by the Ministry of Public Works to carry heads of state to a leaders' retreat at the Golo Mori Special Economic Zone.

The contract allowed 222 days. Handover came on 10 March 2023, sixty days before the summit opened. That deadline shaped everything that follows.

Contract signed 21 April 2022, work from 22 April, handover 10 March 2023.

The official record

Not a single cent

We took a social and cultural approach, so there was no compensation, not a single cent. Directorate General of Highways, on the project's land acquisition

The public record states that residents gave their land willingly, and dismantled and moved their own houses to make way.

Ministry of Public Works: the road was built without land acquisition cost.

The corridor

Five villages

The survey went to every settlement the road passes through, from Nanganae in the north to Golo Mori at the far end, to ask what willingly meant in each of them.

Interviews with residents in all five, 8 to 10 April 2026.

Method

How this was measured

A road can be wanted and still be unjustly built. To hold both at once, the survey tested the corridor against five dimensions of justice rather than asking whether people liked it.

The villages · Nanganae

The first village

Three kilometres south of the Labuan Bajo end, the road enters its first settlement. The agency's own drawings label this segment simply: permukiman, housing.

A bridge of sixty metres carries the road across the river here, the longest on the whole corridor. What happened next in Nanganae is the clearest test of whether local knowledge counted as knowledge.

Segment 1 of 5. Nanganae bridge at km 2.694, 60 m, the longest of the four.

The villages · Nanganae

The water finds the fields

The farmers said it before it was built. Road drainage must not be joined to the irrigation. It was.

The carriageway was raised, and the houses beside it were not. Several now sit below the level of the road, so the rains and whatever the surface sheds run down into the yards and into the paddy channels the rice depends on.

Epistemic: technical knowledge offered and ignored. Restorative: residents built their own embankments, nothing was repaired.

The villages · Nanganae

What was drawn, what was there

The design for this segment shows a divided boulevard with planted medians and footways. The agency's own aerial of the same place, taken before the works, shows houses packed tight along a dirt track with standing water at their backs.

Both pictures are true. The distance between them is where the flooding lives.

Design rendering and pre construction aerial, both from the implementing agency.

The villages · Nanganae

The tree in the alignment

A large tree stood exactly where the road was drawn to go, and it was not an ordinary tree. The community held it sacred.

The agency did not simply fell it. It went to the customary elders, and a ceremony was held before anything was moved, an animal offered, permission asked. On a corridor where consent was so often assumed, this is the one place the record shows it being sought.

Epistemic: customary authority recognised and followed. No survey photograph exists. The tree is still standing in 2016 street level imagery: view the 2016 street imagery.

The villages · Cumbi

They asked for it

The state first drew the road around the outside of Cumbi, precisely to avoid taking houses. The residents pushed back. Run it through the village, they said, where the access would be worth something to us. The district head came in person to warn them what that would cost. They insisted, and they won.

This is the part that complicates the story. The community did influence the decision.

Deliberative: real influence over the route.

The villages · Cumbi

What willingly looked like

They were promised a road that would wind around the houses. What arrived was drawn straight. Sixteen homes came down, dismantled by their owners under a three day order, with officials and armed personnel present at the church.

An attendance sheet from a village meeting that had nothing to do with the road was later presented upward as their signed consent.

Procedural: consent manufactured. Restorative: a housing grant, not compensation.

The villages · Kenari

Where the road works

Kenari is the counterweight. Support here is close to total. A mechanic moved his workshop to the new frontage and watched his takings climb as traffic he had never seen before rolled past.

Land was cut here too, by five to fifteen metres, with no payment. People gave it gladly after decades of mud. Yet nobody was formally consulted. Residents heard about the road as rumour.

The design for this stretch is the most elaborate on the corridor: a roundabout, erosion matting on the cut slopes, flame trees and NTT cherry every fifteen to twenty metres, teak every seven. Further north, residents whose land the road had taken said the teak planted along their frontage was not something they wanted.

Distributive: genuine gains. Procedural: absent. Land given from exhaustion, not agreement. Landscaping specification from the agency briefing.

The villages · Soknar

The well under the road

Soknar had been the most cut off of all, and welcomed the road. Residents now run their own pickup service to the city.

Then a second survey shifted the route to keep the line straight and clear of the mosque, and houses marked safe were suddenly in the way. One resident who protested was driven off by neighbours who wanted the road. Under the new asphalt lies a well their grandparents dug.

Procedural: route shifted without notice. Restorative: money handed out privately through the village head.

The villages · Soknar and Golo Mori

The service nobody provided

A road with nothing running on it is only half a road. No public transport was ever put on this one, so two villages built their own.

Residents pooled pickup trucks and set a timetable. Out at seven, back by late morning. It carries the harvest to market, children to school in the city, and anyone who needs a hospital. Miss the return and you pay for a charter.

Distributive: the state funded the corridor and left the service to the people it runs past.

The institutions

Four questions, five offices

Five state bodies planned, built, registered and benefited from this corridor. Put the same questions to each and a pattern appears, clearest of all on compensation, where almost nobody claims responsibility.

Select any answer in the grid to read it in full.

The villages · Golo Mori

They cleared the way themselves

Golo Mori is where the road was always going. The village wanted it so much that households pulled their own yard fences back before the asphalt arrived, clearing the way by hand.

The road ends at the entrance of the Special Economic Zone, the summit venue. Of the village's nine neighbourhoods, roughly four received asphalt. The rest are still waiting.

Distributive: the road serves the zone it was built for.

The villages · Golo Mori

The pipes across the road

Golo Mori has no piped supply, so residents laid their own water lines. The road was built over them with no duct to carry them underneath.

Every vehicle that passes presses on the casing. The pipes split, and the village repairs them again, roughly once a month, at their own cost.

Epistemic: an existing village system was not designed for.

Findings

Not one experience, five

Reading the corridor village by village shows what a single verdict would hide. Kenari and Golo Mori wanted the road and largely gained from it. Cumbi and Soknar carried the cost of how it was delivered.

Select any cell for the evidence, the reason for the reading, and the documentation.