Ten Years of Tol Laut: A Policy Evaluation of Indonesia's Subsidized Inter-Island Shipping Program

Abstract

Indonesia's Tol Laut (Sea Toll) program has subsidised regular container shipping to remote and underserved ports for a decade, yet no published evaluation has assembled the scattered evidence on its performance into a single structured account using a recognised evaluation framework. This study conducts a desk-based policy evaluation of Tol Laut using the OECD Development Assistance Committee's five evaluation criteria — relevance, effectiveness, efficiency, impact, and sustainability — applied to government route-performance reporting and the published academic literature on the program and comparable archipelagic connectivity schemes. Document analysis of eleven substantive sources indicates strong evidence for the program's relevance and measurable effectiveness in improving scheduled connectivity to Indonesia's outermost regions, but persistent efficiency limitations centred on chronic return-cargo underutilisation, and impact and sustainability evidence that is positive in aggregate but obscured by locally variable conditions that route-level statistics do not capture. The evaluation concludes that Tol Laut's central unresolved weakness is not connectivity provision but the empty-backhaul problem, and that closing this gap requires demand-side, community-integrated interventions rather than further route or subsidy expansion alone.