Systems at Edge: The Five-Card Masterstroke & The Shift to Abundance

The Ground Indonesia Is Moving

TL;DR: Indonesia’s recurring haze is connected to more than fires. It raises questions about how land, livelihoods, education, technical capability and industrial development interact. This article traces five connected parts of that system and explores how Indonesia and its regional partners could move from repeatedly managing crises to building the productive capacity that prevents avoidable hardship. The invitation is to examine the system together and identify what could change its outcomes.

Key Learnings: Systems Thinking Applied to Indonesia’s Haze Crisis

Core Thesis

The recurring haze crisis in Indonesia is not merely an environmental problem but a systemic economic issue requiring integrated solutions across five interconnected domains (“cards”).

The Five-Card Framework

Card 1: Land & Environment

• 16 million of 24 million hectares of Indonesian peatland are fire-prone
• 637,000-900,000 hectares burned in 2026 (after declining to 214,000 in 2025)
• 283,000+ respiratory illness cases reported across 7 provinces
• Key insight: Agricultural residues (palm oil waste, crop stalks) could become productive inputs rather than disposal problems, creating economic alternatives to burning

Card 2: Employment & Livelihoods

• 146.54 million employed vs 140.66 million not employed (2026 projection)
• 64 million out of 288.6 million population formally employed (34% of employable population or 1 in 5 population with formal employment)
• Target: Move 90-128.8 million workers from informal to formal employment
• Proposed wage bridge: $250-350/month (Years 1-5) → $450-650 (Years 5-10) → $800-1,200 (Years 10-20)
• Key insight: People won’t stop burning if they lack economically viable alternatives

Card 3: Mathematics & Technical Capability

• Indonesia’s PISA 2022 math score: 366 vs OECD average of 472
• Only 18% reach Level 2 proficiency vs 69% in OECD countries
• Ranked approximately 70th of 81 participating countries
• Key insight: Economic transformation requires mathematical capability to plan production, design systems, and manage industrial processes

Card 4: Regional Production Architecture

• Proposed division of labor:
  • Indonesia: Resources, production sites, workforce
  • Singapore: Capital, finance, logistics, IP
  • Malaysia: Machinery, engineering, industrial equipment
  • India: Market access (2.1 billion ASEAN+India population)
• Key insight: Regional cooperation can create production networks that individual countries cannot build alone

Card 5: Calamity, Kinship & Institutional Capacity

• 190,000 deaths from natural disasters (2000-2022)
• 24 million people affected by disasters
• 9+ million students enrolled in madrasah system (2025/26)
• Key insight: Institutions shaped by survival needs may influence educational priorities and technical capability development

Proposed 15-Year STEM Pipeline

Critical Systems Relationships

The Economic Pipeline:
Population/Education → Technical Capability → Investment/Enterprises → Production/Processing → Markets → Employment/Income → Security/Reinvestment

Feedback loops work both ways:

• More productive economy → resources for education/restoration
• Better technical capability → improved production/environmental management
• Secure incomes → wider household choices

Methodological Rigor

The analysis demonstrates exceptional intellectual honesty:

• All projections clearly labeled as estimates, not predictions
• Data sources explicitly cited (UNFPA, BPS, OECD PISA, USDA)
• Uncertainties acknowledged (e.g., formal/informal employment figures “unreconciled”)
• Hypotheses distinguished from established facts
• Calls for validation before claiming definitive numbers

The Fundamental Question

“What if the recurring haze were not only an environmental problem, but also an outcome of how land, labour, education, production and income interact?”

This reframes the crisis from:

• ❌ Environmental enforcement problem
• ✅ Economic system design challenge

Possible Next Steps for Exploration

1. Explore economic restructuring with Indonesian partners. STRLDi would be pleased to share its national unemployment and economic diversification study, which applies systems thinking to examine the factors that may be sustaining unemployment and constraining diversification. The study could provide a starting point for a shared understanding of the challenges and the approach to exploring them.
2. Examine the commercial viability of converting agricultural biomass into compost, including its potential contribution to soil restoration and productive agriculture.
3. Model the enterprise requirements for a potential shift of 48.8 million people into formal employment, identifying the sectors, investment, production capacity and markets needed to support such a transition.
4. Explore a regional STEM educator exchange programme to strengthen mathematics and science teaching, technical skills and the development of future industrial capability.
5. Map production requirements across connected sectors to identify opportunities for coordinated investment, regional cooperation, value addition and employment creation.

Most Powerful Insight

“Relief is essential. Accountability is essential. But lasting change requires redesigning the system that reproduces the crisis.”

The haze persists not because people don’t know it’s harmful, but because the economic system makes burning rational for individual actors while distributing costs across the entire region. Only by changing the underlying economic incentives can the pattern be broken.

When the system changes, the smoke clears. It does not have to be forever.

Author’s Note:

I lived in Singapore and experienced the haze for almost 20 years until I moved to Botswana in 2008 for work. Now, nearly 20 years later, in 2026, the region continues to experience recurring haze and its consequences.

Indonesia’s haze crisis fluctuates in severity, but it has not been eliminated. Reported burned area fell from approximately 1.16 million hectares in 2023 to 214,000 hectares in 2025, before surging to an estimated 637,000 hectares in January–August 2026; subsequent estimates reached 637,000–900,000 hectares by October. In October 2026, PM₂.₅ in Singapore reached 284 µg/m³, while more than 283,000 respiratory illness cases were reported across seven Indonesian provinces. These figures show that a period of declining fires can be followed by a major resurgence. The challenge, therefore, is not simply to suppress fires each year, but to change the underlying conditions so that the system no longer repeatedly produces them.

That passage of time prompted me to ask: why does the problem persist, and what would it take to shift the system that reproduces it?

Recent conversations, including those with Melissa Aratani Kwee, Eileen Lim, Miftahul Huda and Jack Sim, prompted us to put these thoughts to paper.

I have proposed assembling a team, including Indonesian partners, to explore how economic restructuring could address both unemployment and recurring haze. I would be happy to share STRLDi’s signature study as a starting point for this work.

Melissa’s post: How to Solve the Haze Forever

Related discussion

Relief is essential. Accountability is essential. But lasting change requires redesigning the system that reproduces the crisis.

What can we build together that changes the outcome?

Imagine placing five cards on a table in front of someone responsible for the future of Indonesia: peatland fires and transboundary haze; a vast workforce with insecure livelihoods; mathematics and technical capability; a regional manufacturing opportunity; and a country repeatedly exposed to natural calamities. Each card belongs to a different policy domain. Each has its own institutions, budgets, experts, and performance measures.

Now imagine that the five cards are not separate problems. They are connected parts of a single economic system.

What would become visible if we stopped looking at each card independently and began tracing the relationships between them? What if the recurring haze were not only an environmental problem, but also an outcome of how land, labour, education, production and income interact? And what if the same system that repeatedly generates vulnerability could be redesigned to produce the conditions for greater security and abundance?

A note on the projections: The population figures used in this article are projections, not exact predictions. Any error is too small to materially alter the systems argument or justify delaying the work proposed here. The purpose is to understand how Indonesia can build an economy that prevents recurring fires, protects human health, and creates productive livelihoods. The work must now move forward.

This is an inquiry into that possibility. It begins with the ground itself.

Palm Oil Production and Haze: A Global Comparison

The global palm oil industry produces an estimated 81.44 million tonnes of palm oil in the 2025/26 marketing year. Indonesia and Malaysia account for approximately 82% of that output. Yet the recurring haze affecting Southeast Asia is not a uniform consequence of palm oil production around the world. It is associated particularly with fires in Indonesia, where plantation development, peatland drainage, land clearing and drought interact.

1. Global production by country

The following table uses USDA Foreign Agricultural Service estimates for the 2025/26 marketing year.

The other producing countries include Ghana, Cameroon, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Guinea and other countries in tropical Africa, Latin America and Asia. The USDA summary groups smaller producers together, so a complete country-by-country volume list requires the underlying production dataset.

2. Where is haze attributable to palm oil production?

The critical distinction is between smoke from all fires in a palm oil-producing country and smoke attributable specifically to fires associated with oil palm production. These are not interchangeable quantities.

3. How much haze can be attributed to oil palm?

A peer-reviewed study by Marlier and colleagues, published in Environmental Research Letters in 2015, examined fires during Indonesia’s 2006 burning season. It found that fires within the combined oil palm, timber and logging concessions accounted for about 41% of total fire emissions in Sumatra and 27% in Kalimantan. Those figures cover three industries, not palm oil alone.

Within those concessions, the estimated contribution differed sharply by island: oil palm accounted for approximately 10% of concession-related fire emissions in Sumatra and 67% in Kalimantan during that study period. These are historical estimates of fire emissions, not percentages of all haze in Indonesia today, and they should not be presented as current global attribution figures.

The study’s geographical contrast is important. It shows that even within one country, the relationship between palm oil production and fire emissions differs by location. Peatland extent, drainage, the type of land being cleared, the distribution of concessions, and the proximity of fires to populated areas all influence the outcome.

4. Why does production result in severe haze in some locations but not others?

Three mechanisms help explain the difference:

• Peatland drainage: Draining peat for plantation development lowers the water table, allowing organic soil to dry and become combustible. Peat fires can smoulder underground for weeks or months.
• Land clearing and fire use: Fires may be used to clear land, including land being prepared for plantations. Fires that escape control can spread well beyond the original clearing site.
• Drought: Prolonged dry conditions, including those associated with El Niño, increase the likelihood that fires will ignite, spread, and persist. Winds can carry the resulting smoke across national borders.

NASA’s analysis of the 2015 Indonesian fire season documented these mechanisms and showed why attributing all Indonesian fire emissions to oil palm alone would be inaccurate: fires are also associated with timber, logging, small-scale agriculture and other land uses.

Conclusion

The global comparison establishes a clear starting point: Indonesia and Malaysia produce the overwhelming majority of the world’s palm oil, but the recurring transboundary haze crisis is particularly associated with fires in Indonesia. The available research also demonstrates that the contribution of oil palm to fire emissions varies substantially between regions, even within Indonesia.

There is no comparable global dataset in the sources reviewed that quantifies the amount of haze attributable specifically to palm oil production for every producing country. Accordingly, a country-by-country table assigning tonnes of smoke or percentages of haze to each producer would go beyond the available evidence. The next step in establishing that comparison would be to combine plantation and concession maps with satellite-detected fires, land-cover changes, peatland data and atmospheric emissions modelling for each producing country.

Card 1 — The ground beneath the smoke

Indonesia’s peatlands are not ordinary agricultural land. Peat stores large quantities of carbon in waterlogged organic matter. When peatlands are drained, the ground can dry, oxidise, and become vulnerable to fire. Fires can burn below the surface, persist after flames appear to have disappeared, and produce haze that crosses national borders. The consequences extend beyond forests: public health, transport, schools, business operations and regional relations are all exposed.

The scale is not abstract. In October 2026, Reuters reported estimates of 637,000–900,000 hectares burned during the 2026 fire season, with more than 283,000 respiratory illness cases reported across seven Indonesian provinces. These are reported estimates and cases, not a definitive final national tally. Reuters also reported that approximately 16 million of Indonesia’s 24 million hectares of peatland were considered fire-prone, and that only a small proportion of peatland affected by earlier restoration efforts had been restored. See Reuters’ October 2026 reporting on peatland degradation and its regional haze explainer.

The familiar response is to suppress fires, restore damaged land, enforce regulations and prepare for the next dry season. These activities matter. But another question sits underneath them: what economic arrangement makes the land-clearing decision attractive in the first place, and what alternative would make it more valuable to keep the ground productive and wet?

Consider the agricultural residues generated by Indonesia’s productive economy: oil-palm empty fruit bunches, crop stalks and other plant materials. These can be waste-disposal problems, or they can become feedstock for processing enterprises. The distinction depends on collection systems, processing technology, quality control, transport costs, market demand and the economics of the alternative uses.

The proposition is not to extract peat and sell it as compost. It is to protect peatlands while investigating whether above-ground agricultural residues can be processed into mature organic soil amendments. Such products might serve Indonesian agriculture, support soil restoration in suitable highland farming areas, or find export markets if the economics and agronomic evidence justify it.

Peatlands in Indonesia range in depth from shallow deposits of 50 cm to extreme depths of more than 17 to 18 meters, with an overall average depth of roughly 5 to 6 meters. [1, 2]

Key Facts About Indonesian Peat Depths

• General Distribution: Most Indonesian peatlands (about 80%) are less than 3 meters (300 cm) deep, while deeper layers occur in specific inland basins and river valleys. [1]
• Deepest Sites: Inland and upstream sites—such as those near Putussibau in West Kalimantan and areas in Sumatra and Papua—can reach 10 to 18 meters deep (equivalent to a six-story building). [1, 2, 3]
• Coastal vs. Inland: Coastal peatlands are generally shallower because they formed more recently after sea levels stabilized, whereas inland tropical peatlands have accumulated organic matter for tens of thousands of years. [1]
• Regulatory Threshold: Under Indonesian regulations like Presidential Decree No. 32 of 1990, peatlands 3 meters or deeper are designated as protected ecosystem functions for water, carbon, and biodiversity, while shallower peats (<3 meters) are more frequently exposed to agricultural conversion. [1, 2]

Garlic provides one possible test case. Research in northwest Ethiopia has examined the effects of fertilizer and manure on garlic yields and soil properties (study record). This does not establish that Indonesian compost would be commercially viable in Ethiopia, or that compost alone could replace Indonesian food imports. It establishes a reason to investigate soil restoration, nutrient requirements, crop response and the economics of transporting or producing compost locally.

The first question, therefore, is not simply how to stop the fire. It is how to create a productive economic use for materials and land that the present system undervalues.

Pause here: If agricultural residues could support commercial processing, soil regeneration and stable employment, what would have to change for that value to be realised at scale?

Card 2 — The ground beneath livelihoods

The next card appears to belong to a different discussion: employment. Yet it is connected to the haze. The question is not simply how many people have jobs, but how livelihoods, land use and the organisation of production interact—and whether the economy offers people viable alternatives to practices that impose costs on the wider population.

Indonesia’s population was approximately 285.7 million in 2025, according to UNFPA’s population data. The planning model explored in this analysis uses a population of approximately 287.2 million in 2026, rising towards 318 million by 2046. The 2046 figure is a model projection, not an observed population count; its assumptions need to be stated and tested.

A growing population requires more than more jobs in the abstract. It requires productive capacity that grows fast enough to provide incomes, goods and services for the people entering the workforce. The critical question is whether the economy creates enough year-round, sufficiently productive work to reduce reliance on irregular or seasonal earnings.

The working population table estimates 146.54 million people employed and 140.66 million not employed in a population of 287.2 million. These figures must be interpreted carefully: people who are not employed are not necessarily unemployed, since this category also includes children, students, retirees and others outside the labour force.

• Key insight: People won’t stop burning if they lack economically viable alternatives

The formal and informal employment figures above retain the original working model’s estimates; they do not reconcile with the 146.54 million employed total and must therefore be treated as a separate, unreconciled scenario pending verification against official Indonesian labour-force data. The seasonal-worker and field-burning figures are illustrative assumptions, not official statistics. These categories overlap and must not be added to the employment totals.

The relationship worth investigating is this: where households face irregular income and few accessible alternatives, immediate cash can outweigh the longer-term environmental costs of a land-clearing practice. A worker cannot be expected to exchange a day’s income for an uncertain promise of future sustainability. Nor can a prohibition, by itself, create the productive jobs that make a different choice economically possible.

This does not establish that informal workers or seasonal agricultural workers are responsible for fires. The question is who carries out or commissions field burning, what economic incentives sustain it, who benefits, and who bears the costs. The illustrative estimate of one million people involved in field-burning activities must be validated before it can be presented as a national count; it may also overlap with agricultural employment, seasonal work, and informal employment.

This is where Card 1 and Card 2 begin to connect. If biomass collection and processing were developed into viable enterprises, agricultural residues could generate demand for collection, sorting, transport, compost production, quality testing, packaging, distribution and equipment maintenance. But the number of jobs, their duration, their wages, and their capacity to displace harmful practices would all have to be demonstrated. They cannot be assumed from the volume of available biomass alone.

The proposed three-stage wage bridge gives the question a measurable form:

These are proposed targets, not forecasts or established Indonesian wage outcomes. They would need to be tested against local wage levels, productivity, prices, regional differences, business costs and international competitiveness. The model’s ambition is to move people towards formal, year-round employment—not to claim that every informal worker can be absorbed by a single bioeconomy.

The model also proposes a long-term target of moving 48.8 million people from informal into formal employment. That is an exceptionally large transformation. Its feasibility depends on the total investment required, the number and scale of viable enterprises, labour productivity, the pace of industrial expansion and the jobs created elsewhere in the economy. The number is a hypothesis to test, not a result already achieved.

The deeper systems question is whether Indonesia can redirect economic activity towards forms of production that provide livelihoods while restoring land, reducing the incentives for harmful burning and creating more value domestically. If short-term land-clearing incentives remain economically attractive while alternatives remain inaccessible, the pressures sustaining the problem may persist even when authorities intervene against the fires.

Pause here: If a national economy needs to create productive employment on this scale, which industries could absorb labour while simultaneously addressing environmental damage, food vulnerability and dependence on imported value-added products?

Card 3 — The ground beneath technical capability

The third card is mathematics.

In the OECD’s PISA 2022 results for Indonesia, Indonesian 15-year-old students scored 366 in mathematics, compared with the OECD average of 472. Only 18% reached at least Level 2 proficiency, compared with 69% across OECD countries. Among the 81 participating countries and economies, Indonesia’s score was near the bottom of the distribution, at approximately 70th place in a simple ranking by mean score.

Top 10 countries and economies in PISA 2022 mathematics

Source: OECD, PISA 2022 results. These are positions in a simple ordering by mean mathematics score; statistical uncertainty means adjacent positions should not be interpreted as definitive differences in performance.

The contrast raises a fundamental national planning question: what mathematical capability does Indonesia need to plan its economy, determine what it should produce and at what scale, build its industries, and equip its population to participate in them?

Mathematics is needed first to calculate what Indonesia should produce, in what quantities, where, when, and for which markets. This requires calculating the land, capital, energy, transport, infrastructure and workforce needed across connected sectors. Mathematics is then needed inside each enterprise to calculate soil nutrients, compost formulation, agricultural yields, material balances, processing temperatures, machinery capacity, costs, quality and productivity. IT can support and automate these processes, but it cannot replace the mathematical reasoning required to design and manage them.

1. The mathematics capability gap

The proposed milestones are planning ambitions, not forecasts. The objective is to strengthen foundational mathematics across the school population while developing the advanced capabilities required for engineering, manufacturing, research and industrial innovation.

2. Education capacity: examine teachers, not just headcount

Our working model applies assumed student-to-teacher ratios to Indonesia’s reported 44.59 million students.

The important question is whether Indonesia has the right distribution of qualified mathematics and science teachers, effective teaching methods and classroom support—not simply whether it needs more teachers.

3. Bring regional STEM teaching capability into Indonesian schools

Indonesia could mobilise experienced mathematics and science teachers, teacher educators and technical specialists from across the region, including suitably qualified retired educators from Singapore and Malaysia who are willing to participate. They would work alongside Indonesian teachers, teacher-training institutions and technical schools, strengthening teaching capability at every level.

The programme would begin in primary school, where mathematical foundations are established, and continue through junior and senior secondary education, vocational schools, universities and postgraduate specialisation. The purpose would not be to rely indefinitely on imported educators. It would be to strengthen Indonesian teachers and institutions so that they can sustain and multiply the capability themselves.

Mathematics and science would also be taught in connection with what Indonesia needs to calculate, design and produce. Students would see how mathematical reasoning applies to agriculture, soil restoration, food processing, machinery, metallurgy, manufacturing and other productive sectors. The curriculum would develop both the ability to calculate and the ability to understand what those calculations make possible.

4. A 15-year STEM pipeline, with industrial development beginning around Year 6

The education pathway and the industrial pathway must develop together. Indonesia should not have to wait 15 years for the first results: the full horizon develops successive generations of capability, while selected postgraduate specialists return earlier to help build productive sectors.

The placements in Singaporean and Malaysian firms must be structured as deliberate learning experiences. Participants should learn how enterprises are financed, engineered, operated, maintained and scaled, and how technical decisions connect to costs, productivity, quality and markets. Their return should be linked to identified sector-development roles and credible investment plans, rather than treated as a placement programme that ends when graduates come home.

5. Calculate the enterprises and jobs the pipeline must support

The employment model must connect the desired shift towards formal employment to actual production capacity. The working proposal aims to move 48.8 million people from informal to formal employment over time. This is a target, not an established forecast, and the number of enterprises required cannot be calculated responsibly without specifying sector output, enterprise scale, productivity and employment assumptions.

The calculations must run in both directions. Planners need to determine the required output, number and scale of enterprises, jobs by sector and occupation, and mathematical and technical capabilities required. They can then calculate the number and distribution of teachers, training places and specialist-development opportunities needed to supply those capabilities. The model must also test whether investment, infrastructure, productivity and market demand can sustain the planned output and employment.

The 15-year STEM pipeline is therefore not a separate education initiative. It is the capability-building component of the economic plan: stronger mathematics education from primary school onwards, regional educators multiplying Indonesian teaching capacity, postgraduate specialists learning inside Singaporean and Malaysian firms, and the first returning specialists helping to build Indonesian industries around Year 6.

The central question for national planners is: What must Indonesia learn to calculate, design and produce—and at what scale—to build the economy its population needs?

Pause here: Mathematics and STEM capability

If a country must calculate what to produce, in what quantities, where and when—and then engineer the processes that make production possible—what mathematical and scientific capabilities must it build from primary school onwards, and how can those capabilities be connected to industrial development within the first six years?

Inflection: From the need for jobs to the knowledge and technical capability required to create them.

Card 4 — The ground beneath the regional economy

The fourth card concerns geography, capital and markets.

Indonesia has the population, natural resources and potential production scale to support much more extensive manufacturing and agricultural processing. Singapore has strengths in finance, international trade, logistics, headquarters functions and intellectual property. Malaysia has industrial experience, engineering capability and manufacturing supply chains. India offers a much larger market that could be connected to a regional production network.

These roles are a proposed architecture for cooperation, not a claim that the countries have agreed to such an arrangement.

Under this model, the division of productive functions would be deliberate:

The point is not merely to trade more. It is to connect capabilities so that more stages of production can be developed, retained and expanded within the region.

The combined population of ASEAN and India is approximately 2.1 billion people, depending on the reference year and population estimates used. That is a measure of potential market scale, not proof of purchasing power or guaranteed demand. A market of that size becomes economically meaningful only when products are competitive, distribution works, standards are met, trade arrangements are viable and households or businesses can afford what is produced.

The potential industrial network is broader than compost. Agricultural processing, machinery, oleochemicals, mineral downstreaming, battery materials, logistics and other manufacturing activities could provide different layers of demand for technical skills and productive investment. The exact portfolio would need to emerge from market analysis, resource assessments, infrastructure requirements and commercial feasibility—not from assuming that every proposed industry will succeed.

For the bioeconomy example, the commercial test is particularly important. Is it more economical to transport wet compost across long distances, or to process residues near their source and export a higher-value, quality-controlled product? Would the economics support local soil-restoration markets first, with export markets only where they make sense? What equipment, standards, energy, water, transport and working capital would be required? These are questions for agronomists, engineers, investors and producers to investigate together.

The regional arrangement also creates a reason to invest in the STEM pipeline. Indonesia would not merely need workers to collect biomass; it would need people who can operate plants, design equipment, improve processes, manage industrial quality and develop products for competitive markets. Singapore and Malaysia would not merely be sources of finance or machinery; their institutions and enterprises could become partners in capability development. India would not simply add a population figure; it would need to become a real market for specific products at competitive prices.

Pause here: Regional production architecture

What if Indonesia’s productive resources and workforce, Malaysia’s industrial expertise, Singapore’s capital and regional coordination, and access to ASEAN and Indian markets were planned as complementary parts of one production system? What could the region produce together that individual countries would struggle to build alone?

Inflection: From developing national capability to organising regional capability at scale.

Card 5 — Calamity, kinship, education and the capacity to build abundance

1. The scale of Indonesia’s exposure to calamity

Indonesia’s geography exposes its population to earthquakes, tsunamis, volcanic eruptions, floods, droughts and fires. The OECD reported that between 2000 and 2022, natural-hazard disasters caused almost 190,000 deaths and affected nearly 24 million other people in Indonesia. The 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami alone caused more than 167,000 deaths in Indonesia.

The regional comparison is important: Indonesia is among Southeast Asia’s most disaster-exposed countries, but it should not be described as ranking first in every measure. For example, an ESCAP analysis of disaster fatalities relative to population over 1970–2024 places the Philippines above Indonesia on average annual disaster mortality as a percentage of population.

Sources: OECD, ESCAP and the WorldRiskReport.

2. The emerging hypothesis from my Saudi study

An emerging insight from my unpublished study of Saudi Arabia is that religion may help sustain kinship structures that become critical to survival under conditions of severe hardship and calamity. These structures can organise protection, mutual assistance, family obligations and continuity when individuals and households face threats beyond their capacity to manage alone.

I want to examine whether this relationship helps us understand Indonesia. When protection and survival occupy a large place in social organisation, what influence might that have on educational priorities, the allocation of human effort and the development of scientific, technical and productive capability? The question is not whether religious commitment prevents innovation, but whether institutions shaped partly by the need to protect people from hardship also help determine how much capacity a society builds to reduce that hardship.

3. What proportion of Indonesia’s students passes through madrasahs?

Indonesia’s formal madrasah system has three main levels: Madrasah Ibtidaiyah (MI), primary; Madrasah Tsanawiyah (MTs), junior secondary; and Madrasah Aliyah (MA), senior secondary. The latest BPS figures for the 2025/26 school year give the following enrolments.

Source: BPS-Statistics Indonesia, Ministry of Religious Affairs school statistics for 2025/26. These are enrolments at three different educational stages, not a count of unique individuals or the cumulative number educated through madrasahs since independence.

These figures establish the scale of the formal madrasah system today: more than nine million student enrolments across its three levels. They do not yet tell us what proportion of Indonesia’s population has passed through madrasahs since independence in 1945, because students move between stages and generations, and the figures do not include every form of pesantren education.

4. What does a student spend time learning?

The Grade 10 curriculum comparison gives us a direct measure of how scheduled learning time differs between formal madrasah and mainstream senior secondary education.

One teaching period is 45 minutes. These figures are drawn from the curriculum structures discussed earlier; the categories are not fully equivalent, so this table compares the specified subject allocations rather than total curriculum time.

The comparison shows that the formal MA curriculum allocates substantial dedicated time to Islamic religious studies, while the cited Grade 10 SMA structure allocates more scheduled time to natural sciences. Mathematics receives the same number of periods in the two structures. The question is what these differences mean when considered alongside national learning outcomes and the skills demanded by a productive economy.

5. The national capability question

Indonesia’s PISA 2022 mathematics score was 366, compared with the OECD average of 472. Only 18% of Indonesian students reached at least Level 2 proficiency in mathematics, compared with 69% across OECD countries.

At the same time, BPS reported that in August 2025 Indonesia employed 41.25 million people in agriculture, forestry and fishing, against 20.31 million in manufacturing. The national unemployment rate was 4.85%, representing 7.46 million people.

These figures do not prove that madrasah education causes Indonesia’s mathematics or employment outcomes. They establish the national development challenge against which the educational system and its different pathways can be examined.

The question is whether Indonesia’s educational pathways, social institutions and economic structure together provide enough of the capabilities needed to move from a large population and resource base to widespread technical competence, productive enterprises and secure employment.

6. From a State of Defense to a State of Abundance

A society exposed to severe calamities must protect its people. The question is whether protection remains predominantly a response to recurring hardship, or whether it is accompanied by sufficient investment in the productive capacity that can reduce vulnerability over time.

State of Defense describes the repeated mobilisation of resources to withstand and recover from shocks. State of Abundance describes the building of technical knowledge, productive enterprises, secure livelihoods and resilient infrastructure, while retaining the capacity to respond to disasters.

The five cards connect at this point: land management affects fire risk; biomass can become a productive input; production requires technical capability; technical capability depends on education and training; and industrial development requires enterprises, investment and markets. The challenge is to organise these elements so that protection is strengthened by the capacity to create value and reduce avoidable hardship.

Pause here:

If the institutions that help a population survive calamity also shape how its people learn, work and organise their lives, how can Indonesia build on those institutions to develop the mathematical, scientific, technical and productive capabilities needed to reduce the hardship future generations must endure?

Inflection: From repeatedly managing the consequences of hardship to building the capacity to prevent avoidable hardship.

From five cards to one economic pipeline

The system can be represented as a chain of relationships:

Population and education → technical capability → investment and enterprises → production and processing → markets → employment and income → household security and reinvestment.

Land, soil, food security and disaster resilience both shape and are shaped by this pipeline. The relationships also run in reverse. A more productive economy can create resources for education and restoration; better technical capability can improve production and environmental management; more secure incomes can widen the choices available to households. Whether these feedback effects become strong enough to change the overall trajectory is an empirical question.

The proposed transformation therefore has several different horizons. Immediate livelihood and residue-collection experiments could test whether alternative income can be generated without burning. Over the first five years, regional partnerships and processing enterprises could establish whether there is a commercially viable base for expansion. Over 10–20 years, if investment, markets and education align, higher-value production could create demand for a larger and more specialised technical workforce. The 15-year STEM pipeline would need to begin early because industrial capability takes time to develop.

The model’s wage bridge—US$250–350 a month in the first stage, US$450–650 as processing and manufacturing expand, and US$800–1,200 in higher-value industrial roles—is one way of making the ambition measurable. So is the proposed target of moving 48.8 million workers into formal employment. Neither should be treated as guaranteed. Both require a transparent account of investment, enterprise numbers, productivity, wage affordability, labour demand and the pace at which jobs can actually be created.

The same discipline applies to import substitution. The working material cites Indonesian imports of more than 2.6 million tonnes of soybeans annually and approximately 600,000 tonnes of garlic. These figures need to be checked against the relevant trade year and commodity definitions before publication as current totals. Even when import volumes are confirmed, compost alone cannot be assumed to replace those imports: crop suitability, seed, irrigation, varieties, agronomy, storage, processing, prices and farmer incentives all affect domestic competitiveness. The opportunity is to test whether better soil management and stronger agricultural value chains can contribute to reducing food vulnerability—not to promise that one input can solve it.

The practical question is whether Indonesia can move from treating peatland fires, informal employment, educational capability, food imports, manufacturing and disaster exposure as separate policy concerns to examining their combined economic consequences. A systems view does not remove the need for specialist knowledge. It gives specialists a common structure in which to test how their decisions affect one another.

That is the work of discovery: establish the data, map the causal relationships, test the assumptions, identify the leverage points, and learn whether the proposed pathway can work at scale.

Questions for Systems Thinkers

To our readers across regional planning, institutional investment, research, and corporate strategy:

• 💡 What surprised you most about how peatland hydrology, highland food import substitution, and mathematics education lock into a single economic pipeline?
• 🚀 What excited you about the prospect of a 20-year cross-border bioeconomy pipeline connecting Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, and an ASEAN + India market of 2.14 billion people?
• 🔍 What curiosity did this raise for you regarding how we measure informal labor and soil capital?
• 🧭 What would you like to see happen next—or what would you personally like to do next to explore this?
• 🛠️ If our region were to actually execute an idea of this scale—what do you think it would take to pull it off?

Core set — for the main LinkedIn article

#SystemsThinking #Indonesia #HazeCrisis #EconomicTransformation #SustainableDevelopment #IndustrialPolicy #ASEAN #ClimateResilience #STEMEducation #SustainableLivelihoods

Audience-specific hashtag sets

Environment, peatlands and forestry

For environmental researchers, restoration professionals, forestry agencies and haze-prevention networks.

#PeatlandRestoration #ForestRestoration #HazePollution #FirePrevention #LandscapeRestoration #NatureBasedSolutions #SustainableLandUse

Industry, employment and economic transformation

For industrialists, economists, investors, enterprise-development leaders and workforce planners.

#EconomicTransformation #IndustrialDevelopment #Manufacturing #JobCreation #ProductiveCapacity #InclusiveGrowth #EconomicDevelopment

STEM, education and technical capability

For universities, education policymakers, engineering professionals and skills-development institutions.

#STEMEducation #TechnicalEducation #SkillsDevelopment #HumanCapital #MathematicsEducation #FutureOfWork #Innovation

ASEAN, trade and regional production

For regional policymakers, chambers of commerce, supply-chain professionals and cross-border investors.

#ASEAN #ASEANEconomicCommunity #RegionalIntegration #SupplyChains #TradeAndInvestment #SoutheastAsia #RegionalDevelopment

Systems thinking and public policy

For systems researchers, strategic planners, institutional leaders and policy designers.

#SystemsThinking #SystemsChange #SystemsLeadership #PublicPolicy #ComplexityScience #PolicyInnovation #OrganisationalLearning