INTRODUCTION

The Province of the Riau Islands (PRI) is one of the provinces in Indonesia created by Law No. 25 of 2002, and which entered into effect in 2004 (BPS Kepulauan Riau 2006). The new province was carved out of the larger Riau Province, following the decentralization reforms of 1999 that intended to bring the government closer to the people through empowering local and provincial governments (Firman 2009). The creation of PRI was one of eight such reform processes that occurred in Indonesia since the onset of Reformasi in 1998.

The separation of the Riau Islands from Riau Province was led by local elites and was motivated by a number of factors, including: long-standing identity tensions in the region; the island dwellers’ feeling of being neglected by the mainland provincial government in Pekanbaru; and the opportunity to garner greater revenues from gas fields in the Natuna Islands (Hutchinson and Chong 2016; Fitriani, Hofman and Kaiser 2005).

In the extant literature on the region's development, Riau (Islands) is known as a site of cross-border development initiated by Singapore government in the 1980s with the creation of the Indonesia-Malaysia-Singapore Growth Triangle (IMS-GT), which includes Singapore, Johor in Malaysia, and Riau (abbreviated as SIJORI). The Singapore government's vision was to manage the “hinterlandization” of its economy by providing capital to its neighbours, while Johor and Riau provided land and labour (Bunnell et al. 2012).

This vision dovetailed with that of the Indonesian government, which began to develop Batam Island from the 1970s. The intention was to build Batam as a site of industrial activity to capture spill-over from Singapore. By 1991, the largest foreign direct investor in the island was Singapore—its main industries of interest being real estate, tourism, metal processing, drilling equipment and electronic component assembly (Toh and Low 1993). With a very high population growth rate from 1990 to 2000 resulting from a large influx of migrant workers from other regions in Indonesia, especially Java (Firman 2004), Batam became the Riau Islands main urban centre.

Batam is not the only site of development in the province .