Aquaculture productivity and shipping gaps hold back Indonesia’s coastal provinces

Indonesia’s seas are among the richest in the world, spread across more than 17,000 islands and supporting capture fisheries, aquaculture, marine tourism and maritime transport that together underpin the livelihoods of millions of coastal residents. Yet a new study of 20 Indonesian provinces with strong marine economies finds that the country’s marine sectors and its broader regional development are advancing unevenly, and that two specific weaknesses — low aquaculture productivity and a weak marine transportation sector — are the largest obstacles to better coordination between the two systems.

The research, published in Environmental and Sustainability Indicators, was conducted by Herfita Rizki Hasanah Gurning of IPB University and colleagues, who set out to answer a question that has largely been overlooked in previous work: do provinces with strong marine economies also possess the economic, social and environmental capacities needed to sustain them, and are comparatively developed provinces actually making full use of their marine potential? Earlier studies had tended to treat regional development simply as economic growth or environmental carrying capacity, rather than as a distinct, multidimensional system in its own right.

To build a comparable sample, the team first used K-medoids clustering on data from 34 Indonesian provinces covering 2019 to 2023, drawing on indicators of marine and brackishwater fisheries intensity, marine transport intensity, marine tourism intensity and the share of coastal villages. The two-cluster solution proved statistically strongest, with the highest Silhouette Coefficient of 0.448 and the lowest Davies-Bouldin Index of 0.761, and it kept a balanced minimum cluster size of 14 provinces. Twenty provinces emerged with comparatively high marine economic intensity, and these formed the analytical sample. Notably, the researchers measured marine subsector contributions against non-mining gross regional domestic product, a deliberate choice to avoid distorting results in provinces where extractive industries dominate headline output figures.

The study then applied Grey Relational Analysis, a technique well suited to settings where comprehensive provincial marine data are scarce, to construct a Marine Economy Performance Index and a Regional Development Performance Index for each province in 2019 and 2023. The marine economy index captured economic scale, economic structure and economic efficiency, while the regional development index combined economic indicators such as non-mining growth and unemployment, social indicators including poverty, the Human Development Index and the Gini ratio, and environmental measures comprising a composite environmental quality index and a disaster risk index from Indonesia’s National Disaster Management Authority.

The results reveal a striking divergence between the two systems. Average marine economic performance barely moved, slipping from 0.55 in 2019 to 0.54 in 2023, while average regional development performance rose from 0.56 to 0.62. Within the marine economy, the structure dimension improved markedly, from 0.60 to 0.65, reflecting diversification away from primary fisheries dependence and stronger marine tourism, but the efficiency dimension fell from 0.53 to 0.44 as capture fisheries and aquaculture productivity weakened across many provinces. Bali made the most dramatic climb, rising from twelfth to second place in marine economic performance as its structure score reached a perfect 1.00, while North Maluku held first place with its efficiency dimension hitting the ideal value. At the other extreme, DKI Jakarta plummeted from sixth to twentieth as its productivity scores collapsed.

Regional development told a different story. Bali rose from third to first place with an index of 0.77, Riau Islands held second, and West Nusa Tenggara and North Sulawesi posted some of the largest gains. The economic dimension improved most, from 0.59 to 0.67, and the environmental dimension rose from 0.54 to 0.61, but the social dimension advanced only modestly, from 0.54 to 0.58. That slower social progress matters, the authors argue, because economic and environmental gains in coastal regions do not automatically translate into improvements in welfare, inclusion or human development, and unequal benefit distribution remains a persistent challenge in marine-dependent communities.

The core of the analysis lies in the coupling coordination degree, a measure that combines the proportional balance between the two indices with their overall development level. Average coordination improved only slightly, from 0.74 in 2019 to 0.76 in 2023, leaving most provinces in the intermediate coupling range of 0.7 to 0.8. No province reached the high-quality coupling category, defined as 0.9 or above. Bali and North Maluku entered the good coupling range, at 0.85, after improving both subsystems simultaneously, while Aceh moved up from primary to intermediate coupling. By contrast, North Kalimantan slipped from good to intermediate coordination, and DKI Jakarta showed the sharpest imbalance, with regional development improving even as marine economic performance declined sharply. No province recorded the reverse pattern of rising marine performance alongside falling regional development.

To pinpoint what was holding coordination back, the team deployed an Obstacle Degree Model using entropy weights, which quantifies how far each indicator sits from its ideal state and how much it constrains the system overall. The findings were unambiguous. The marine economy subsystem accounted for 65.43 percent of the total obstacle degree in 2019, rising to 68.25 percent in 2023. Within it, the productivity of marine and brackishwater aquaculture was the single largest obstacle, growing from 28.93 percent to 30.27 percent, followed by the contribution of marine transportation to regional output, which climbed from 14.66 percent to 17.34 percent. Together these two indicators accounted for nearly half of all constraints by 2023, and their dominance intensified over the study period.

The provincial heatmaps add important nuance. Aquaculture productivity was especially problematic in North Kalimantan and the Riau Islands, where its obstacle degree exceeded 40 percent, while marine transportation was the dominant constraint in Bali despite the island’s overall gains. In North Maluku, disaster risk emerged as the leading obstacle in 2023, showing that even provinces with strong coordination can carry acute vulnerabilities in a single dimension. Prior research suggests aquaculture performance is often limited by capital constraints, high feed costs, disease outbreaks, declining water quality and unreliable electricity, while Indonesia’s maritime transport challenges include limited port capacity, weak intermodal connectivity and insufficient institutional coordination, though the study itself is diagnostic rather than causal and does not identify which mechanisms operate in each province.

The policy implications are concrete. The authors argue that provincial governments should prioritize aquaculture productivity through better production technology, water-quality and disease management, infrastructure, and access to capital; strengthen the economic role of marine transportation through port capacity, logistics and intermodal connectivity; and embed disaster-risk reduction more systematically into coastal planning. Just as importantly, because the obstacle structure differs from province to province, a uniform national approach is unlikely to work. Provinces where both systems improved need policies that consolidate gains, while those with stagnant or declining marine performance need targeted interventions. As Indonesia pushes its blue economy agenda across a fragmented archipelago, the study suggests that converting marine potential into broad-based regional benefit depends less on expanding production than on fixing the specific, measurable bottlenecks — above all pond productivity and maritime connectivity — that keep the sea and the shore from developing together.

Subject of Research: Coupling coordination between marine economy performance and regional development across coastal Indonesian provinces

Article Title: Coupling coordination and obstacle analysis of the marine economy and regional development: Evidence from coastal Indonesia

Article References: Gurning, H. R. H., Fauzi, A., Rustiadi, E., & Pravitasari, A. E. (2026). Coupling coordination and obstacle analysis of the marine economy and regional development: Evidence from coastal Indonesia. Environmental and Sustainability Indicators, 32, Article 101513. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.indic.2026.101513

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1016/j.indic.2026.101513

Keywords: Indonesia, marine economy, regional development, aquaculture productivity, coupling coordination degree, marine transportation, coastal provinces, blue economy, Grey Relational Analysis, obstacle degree model, disaster risk, sustainable development