City Leadership In Para-Diplomacy: Drivers Of Jakarta’S International Engagement In Addressing Covid-19 Pandemic

The outbreak of COVID-19 pandemic has impacted all the world’s aspects, including the interactions among governments. While some either chose to be conflicting with others or overlooked the pandemic, the rest attempted to collaborate in addressing the new global threat. Mega-cities in many countries were the most suffering regions due to the enormous virus confirmed cases, deaths, and economic declines, intertwining with other urban issues. As the largest city in Southeast Asia and in Indonesia, Jakarta also experienced the unprecedented crisis. However, apart from the efforts to tackle the crisis at home, the city showed its international engagement in addressing the issue together with other world’s cities as its para-diplomacy. This research aimed to answer the driving factors encouraging the city for such engagement. This research employed the qualitive method with a descriptive analysis and the city leadership theory proposed by Rapoport, Acuto and Grcheva. This research found that the Jakarta’s international engagement in addressing the pandemic as the city leadership action was driven by the role of city leader, decentralization and global city networking, and the regional COVID-19 policies and internet representing three elements in the theory: actor, structures, and tools. This paper argues that cities within the global city networking have demonstrated their stronger role during the pandemic, providing opportunity for nation branding by regional initiatives in handling the pandemic in addition to state foreign policy. As cities have been more consolidated within the networks, seeing the city leadership in responding to global issues merits attentions among scholars.