The Cost of Unsustainable Post-Conflict Recovery in Aceh

Abstract

Post-conflict Aceh presents one of the clearest development paradoxes in Southeast Asian history. Despite receiving one of the largest concentrations of post-conflict resources in the region, including more than seven billion US dollars in international reconstruction support and hundreds of trillions of rupiah through Special Autonomy funds since 2008, the province's poverty rate stood at 12.33 percent in March 2025, nearly four percentage points above the national average (BPS, 2025a). This article asks why this happened. Using qualitative document analysis, it examines the foundational legal instruments, institutional reports, and statistical data that governed Aceh's reconstruction from 2005 onward. The analysis integrates three frameworks: Roland Paris's Institutionalization Before Liberalization (IBL) as the primary theoretical lens, Roger Mac Ginty's Hybrid Peace as the secondary lens, and the UN-Habitat Sustainable Reconstruction Framework (SRF) as the operational analytical tool. The findings show that Aceh's reconstruction failed not because resources were absent but because they arrived before the institutional conditions required to manage them productively were built. Governance systems, policy architecture, community participation mechanisms, and service delivery models were all structurally insufficient at the moment fiscal liberalisation occurred. This enabled hybridisation dynamics in which international frameworks and autonomy funds were absorbed into local patron-client networks rather than directed toward development. The article concludes that sustainable post-conflict development requires the prior establishment of enabling conditions, and that transferring resources without those foundations produces not development but new forms of structural vulnerability.