Indonesia

Indonesia governs the world's largest archipelago — over 17,000 islands, 275 million people, and 700 languages — through a presidential system that decentralised power to over 500 districts and cities after Suharto's fall in 1998. This 'Big Bang' decentralisation transferred authority over education, health, and infrastructure to local governments, many of which lacked administrative capacity, creating a patchwork of governance quality across the archipelago. The economy depends on natural resource extraction — palm oil, nickel, coal, tin — and the government has increasingly used export bans and processing requirements to force value-added manufacturing domestically, following an industrial policy model that mirrors resource nationalism in biological terms: the organism retains its metabolic products rather than exporting raw materials. Indonesia's political system operates through presidential coalition-building, where the president must assemble multi-party support across ethnic, religious, and regional lines — a consensus-building requirement that produces stability but limits the speed of structural reform.