BRICS Indonesia: Beyond a Diplomatic Stage

Indonesia's entry into BRICS certainly deserves close examination. However, gauging that membership solely by how quickly the government issues a "BRICS roadmap" risks producing premature conclusions and oversimplifying a strategic choice. In my view, the more critical question is not whether Indonesia possesses a single roadmap for its participation, but rather whether there is a traceable and verifiable link connecting BRICS membership, the economic diplomacy agenda, policy instruments, and national development priorities---projected onto a forward-looking timeline.

Membership in an international organization does not automatically yield direct investments, technology transfers, job creation, or enhanced competitiveness. Nevertheless, this does not mean that Indonesia lacks a clear strategy within the BRICS framework. The trajectory throughout 2025 demonstrates a gradual process: economic diplomacy has been directed toward food and energy security, downstream industrialization, the digital economy, the blue economy, energy transition, and market expansion, while Indonesia's engagement in BRICS, the OECD, the G20, and APEC is positioned within a framework of strategic diversification. Thus, the more pertinent issue is not the presence or absence of a strategy, but whether these various agendas have been integrated into a coherent strategy with verifiable indicators of success.

This distinction is crucial because BRICS is neither the OECD nor the European Union. To my knowledge, BRICS operates primarily as a political and diplomatic coordination forum for Global South nations working through consensus. It lacks a founding treaty, a dedicated budget, or a permanent secretariat typical of international organizations with deeper levels of integration. Consequently, expectations that BRICS membership should immediately yield domestic reform packages or uniform economic integration must be grounded in the appropriate institutional context. BRICS is more sensibly understood as a platform that provides access, networks, and negotiation opportunities. Its strategic value materializes only when Indonesia successfully links this platform to domestic policy.

For instance, in September 2026, Bank Indonesia participated in the meeting of BRICS Finance Ministers and Central Bank Governors in Mumbai. Indonesia advocated for the use of local currencies and cross-border payment connectivity, alongside discussions on digital transformation, artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, and sustainable finance. This agenda is more than a mere political statement, as it addresses concrete instruments within the international payment and financial system. Similarly, in Indonesia's bilateral relations with China, Bank Indonesia and the People's Bank of China renewed their local currency transaction cooperation, expanding its scope to cover current account, capital account, and financial transactions. This demonstrates that Indonesia had already been building part of the policy infrastructure required to navigate global economic fragmentation well before that agenda expanded further within BRICS.

Therefore, it is premature to characterize BRICS as a diplomatic stage without tangible results simply due to an inability to comprehend policy and its underlying processes. Conversely, it would be equally erroneous on our part to claim every Indonesian economic policy as a direct product of BRICS.

For example, Indonesia's investment realization in 2025 reached Rp1,931.2 trillion, exceeding the government's target of Rp1,905.6 trillion. Downstream investments reached Rp584.1 trillion, representing a 43.3 percent increase from the previous year. These figures indicate that Indonesia's industrialization agenda is indeed moving forward. However, there is no sufficiently strong methodological basis to assert that this achievement is a direct result of BRICS membership. BRICS is not an automatic engine of development; it is one of several platforms that can be leveraged to expand development opportunities already defined by national strategy. The causal relationship is not BRICS leading to economic growth, but rather: BRICS provides access, the government sets priorities, domestic institutions construct policy instruments, the business sector capitalizes on opportunities, and economic outcomes emerge through a broader process.

In other words, a more substantive metric is whether Indonesia can maximize its BRICS membership into project pipelines, financing access, market expansion, technology transfer, industrial capacity building, supply chain diversification, and food and energy security.

Trade data provides an additional reason to examine this matter with care. China, the United States, and India simultaneously serve as Indonesia's top three non-oil and gas export destinations. From January to November 2025, these three nations accounted for approximately 42 percent of Indonesia's total non-oil and gas exports. While China remains the largest export market, the United States continues to be a vital market, and India holds a strategic position.

Therefore, the most constructive critique of Indonesia's BRICS engagement is not that the country is playing on the global stage without a domestic agenda. A more accurate critique is that the government needs to render the connection between its domestic agenda and BRICS far more transparent, measurable, and accessible for public evaluation.

Indonesia could, for instance, establish five-year benchmark indicators regarding investment from BRICS nations, export values to BRICS markets, the number of downstream industrialization projects, technology transfers, infrastructure financing, local currency usage, energy cooperation, food security, and developments in digital and artificial intelligence sectors. With such indicators, the public can distinguish symbolic diplomacy from the diplomacy of delivery. At this juncture, BRICS indeed faces a test. However, the test is not whether Indonesia can appear important on the international stage, but whether that diplomatic capacity can be linked to domestic bureaucratic, industrial, financial, technological, and human resource capacities. Are we prepared to manage the benefits of BRICS?

If this linkage is successfully forged, BRICS need not be viewed as a substitute for Western institutions, let alone as a geopolitical project requiring Indonesia to align with a specific camp. It can function as one of Indonesia's instruments for strategic diversification in an increasingly fragmented world economy. Consequently, debates surrounding BRICS should not linger on whether Indonesia is overly active abroad or whether BRICS is too large and heterogeneous to deliver benefits. The more relevant questions are: what does Indonesia bring to BRICS, what does it seek to gain, through which instruments, within what timeframe, and how will the results be measured?

Ultimately, the strength of a foreign policy is determined not only by a nation's posture at the diplomatic table, but by its capacity to align that posture with national capability. BRICS opens a space. National strategy determines how that space is utilized. Domestic institutions dictate whether opportunities translate into policy. And the real economy serves as the ultimate proving ground for the results.

By this standard, BRICS can neither be deemed a success nor a failure at this stage. Its membership remains a process in development. What can be stated with greater certainty is that there are strong indications the government does not treat BRICS as its sole avenue for foreign economic policy. The next challenge is transforming these dispersed agendas into a measurable delivery system. That is the true point of evaluation---not whether Indonesia commands a global stage, but whether Indonesia can utilize that stage to expand its national capacity.