This article was originally published by Inside Indonesia.
Cooperatives are making a comeback. This time, they are coloured in red and white. The government’s Koperasi Merah Putih (Red and White Cooperative) promises to revive Indonesia’s long-standing ideal of small-scale collective enterprise while ushering them into a new financial age. But behind the patriotic palette lies a different ambition: to make rural poverty investible, turning what was once a bottom-up solidarity model into something treated as an investible asset.
This idea of cooperatives as engines of rural development is not new. Since their colonial inception, cooperatives have been positioned as instruments of collective risk-buffering in the absence of collateral. But Koperasi Merah Putih imagines something far larger. Its goals are built around scaling up, absorbing land and infrastructure, and competing like a business. The future it projects is shaped less by rural realities than by financial fantasies, asking communities to operate at a scale and with an investment logic few can sustain.
So, what kind of cooperative is this and what future does it imagine? The clearest clues came not from policy documents, but from the people who believe they can shape how future financing is imagined. During my fieldwork on plantation debt between 2023 and 2024, I attended several national consolidation meetings for palm oil smallholders. These gatherings, usually held in hotel ballrooms near Jakarta’s financial district, were organised by smallholder unions with financial support from the state to socialise new labour and environmental regulations. In Indonesia’s palm oil sector, company-bind smallholders, known as plasma, have been organised into cooperatives since the 1990s, which mediate access to credit, supply chains and state subsidies.
At one such meeting in mid-2023, a young sustainable finance consultant, invited by the union as an outside expert, stood before hundreds of cooperative leaders, district officials and company representatives. With the confidence of an investment banker in a Hollywood film, he spoke of cooperative Initial Public Offerings (IPOs), hedge fund interest and the importance of taking on ‘productive debt’. His vision was bold, even seductive, and yet detached from the structural limits smallholders face.
What follows is an attempt to unpack that moment. Not because it was exceptional, but because it captures the sweeping dreams of scale now shaping how cooperatives are imagined, financed, and, through Koperasi Merah Putih, governed.
To continue reading this article and gain full access to its insights, please visit the source page linked below:
Simanjuntak, A. H. 2026. Dreams of Scale: From Koperasi Merah Putih to Hedge Funds and IPOs. Inside Indonesia.