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Shangri-La Jakarta, February 2026

The summit carried a distinct energy: not the cautious optimism of post-pandemic recovery, but something more urgent. A room full of ASEAN’s most consequential decision-makers arriving at the same uncomfortable conclusion that Indonesia’s 5% growth plateau, once a source of quiet pride, has become a ceiling.

This year’s theme, “Coming Together to Boost Resilient Growth and Shared Prosperity,” was not aspirational rhetoric. It was a diagnosis. Indonesia has demonstrated remarkable resilience through global fragmentation. The question now is whether that resilience translates into ambition, and whether the policy architecture exists to support it.

Three threads ran through every substantive conversation:

Regulatory certainty before connectivity. Long-horizon investors considering commitments through the new Indonesia City Investment Accelerator are not deterred by risk. They are deterred by ambiguity. Policy harmonisation across ministries is not a bureaucratic nicety; it is the single most valuable thing Indonesia can offer capital allocators right now.

The human capital gap is structural, not cyclical. The “Investing in People” session was the most candid of the summit. Indonesia does not have a jobs shortage. It has a workforce capability gap, one that no amount of FDI will resolve without a coordinated, locally executed certification and training architecture. The B57+ Asia-Pacific chapter launch is a meaningful step, but urgency of execution matters more than the elegance of the framework.

Green capital is a competitive weapon, not a compliance burden.

Conversations with the Global Ethical Finance Initiative reinforced a long-held view: Indonesia is not playing catch-up on the energy transition. It holds the most strategically valuable position in ASEAN’s geoeconomic future. Carbon policy, structured correctly, is a lever for sovereign competitiveness.

Beyond the main programme, the sidelines were equally productive. It was a genuine pleasure to reconnect with my old friend Sofyan Djalil, CEO of the Indonesian Business Council, whose clarity of thinking on Indonesia’s structural reform agenda remains as sharp as ever. I also had the opportunity to meet Coordinating Minister for Infrastructure and Regional Development Agus Harimurti Yudhoyono, whose mandate sits at the very centre of where capital commitment and policy execution must converge.

Separate conversations on the sidelines touched on Danantara and the broader consolidation of state-owned enterprises across several strategic industries. The direction of travel is clear: Indonesia is moving deliberately toward a more coordinated deployment of sovereign capital, with SOE rationalisation increasingly seen not as restructuring for its own sake but as a prerequisite for attracting the scale of private and foreign investment the country’s ambitions demand. What struck me most, however, was the candid acknowledgement of just how much operational and structural transformation lies ahead if these entities are to achieve the market capitalisation growth Danantara is targeting. The number of individual interventions required across governance, commercial positioning, balance sheet discipline, and sector-specific efficiency is substantial. It is precisely the kind of work our Phoenix turnaround programme was built for, and conversations like these remind me why that capability matters in this market.

Indonesia is at an inflection point. The infrastructure of ambition is being assembled. What comes next depends entirely on execution.