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The Asian Corporate Governance Association (ACGA) published its stewardship report today. Ninety-five pages covering twelve Asia-Pacific markets. The headline findings won't surprise anyone working in Asian governance: stewardship codes exist in most markets but implementation is uneven, board access for investors remains difficult, and concentrated ownership structures limit the practical influence of minority shareholders.
What should get more attention is where the report identifies outright gaps.
Indonesia is one of only two major Asian markets, the Philippines being the other, without a dedicated stewardship code. There is no formal framework setting expectations for how institutional investors should vote, engage, or hold portfolio companies accountable. The Indonesian Financial Services Authority (OJK) has folded stewardship language into broader corporate governance documents, but as ACGA notes, these are general and aspirational. Not a substitute for a functioning code.
This matters because Indonesia has simultaneously created two major state-owned investment vehicles in the space of four years. The Indonesia Investment Authority (INA) was established in 2021. Danantara, formally the Daya Anagata Nusantara Investment Management Agency, launched in February 2025 as a larger sovereign wealth fund and holding entity absorbing stakes in some of Indonesia's most strategically significant state-owned enterprises.
ACGA flags governance concerns with Danantara directly: a board dominated by directors with reported political affiliations to the President, limited financial transparency, and audit access that is only available when requested by the House of Representatives. Indonesia's national audit bodies cannot independently examine Danantara's assets and activities.
These are not peripheral issues. They go to the core of how a sovereign entity managing hundreds of trillions of rupiah in state capital is governed, who exercises oversight, and what accountability mechanisms exist for the companies it controls.
What we're tracking from the field
Cascade Asia has been running a dedicated Danantara monitoring program since before the entity's formal launch. Our analytical framework distinguishes between what Danantara says it is and what the observable record shows it to be. That distinction matters considerably when stated commitments to ESG principles, transparent governance, and the Santiago Principles sit alongside a governance architecture in which board composition and oversight mechanisms reflect proximity to the executive branch rather than institutional independence.
We track Danantara across two lines of inquiry. The first covers the governance of the entity itself and the SOEs it absorbs: board composition, director affiliations, regulatory oversight mechanisms, and the structural relationship between Danantara's leadership and the executive branch. The second covers capital deployment: where money flows, under what approval processes, and whether investment decisions align with the commercial mandates Danantara has publicly articulated or with other priorities.
The gap between ACGA's policy-level findings and what investors actually need to make decisions about Indonesian exposure is where field intelligence becomes essential. Stewardship codes, when they exist, create the conditions for investors to engage with companies through formal channels. Voting, dialogue, escalation. When those channels don't exist, as in Indonesia, investors are left with public filings, media reporting, and whatever access they can arrange on their own.
That's not enough when you're evaluating a sovereign entity that has absorbed stakes in Telkom, Bank Mandiri, Bank Rakyat Indonesia, Pertamina, and PLN, among others. The governance dynamics inside these companies are changing. Board appointments are shifting. The relationship between commercial management and political direction is being renegotiated in real time.
The stewardship vacuum is the intelligence problem
ACGA's report frames the absence of a stewardship code as a regulatory gap. From our perspective, it's also an intelligence gap. In markets with functioning stewardship ecosystems, Japan, Australia, increasingly Korea, investors have structured channels for understanding governance dynamics. They can meet independent directors. They can vote against proposals and expect a response. They can collaborate with other investors without triggering acting-in-concert concerns.
None of that infrastructure exists in Indonesia. For investors with exposure to Indonesian state-linked assets, the question isn't whether to wait for a stewardship code. It's how to get governance intelligence now, through direct collection, field networks, and systematic monitoring of the documentary record.
That's the work we do.
Our Danantara monitoring program provides ongoing coverage of governance, capital deployment, and SOE absorption dynamics. Contact us at cascadeasia.com.