"Trouble Inventing Paradise: Beijing-Based Development Bank Faces Inflection Point as Concerns Mount Over ‘New Bali’ Project", 5 February 2024

...in the weeks leading up to the Mandalika International Street Circuit, authorities had descended upon communities living around the racetrack, allegedly destroying private property, restricting residents’ movement, and cracking down on those who dared to protest...

Life hasn’t seemed much easier for those who have moved away. More than 60 households have been relocated to designated resettlement sites, far from the shore where their livelihoods once depended on fishing and farming seaweed, and with limited access to clean water and amenities...

The multimillion dollar tourism project in Mandalika...has for years been mired in land disputes, allegations of state-sanctioned violence against local communities, and compensation schemes denounced as inadequate—problems that critics say its primary funder, the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB)...has persistently turned a blind eye to...

Siva Jyosyula, senior social development specialist at the AIIB, tells TIME...“Everyone thinks that the whole project is driven by AIIB and the AIIB should address everything, which is actually not true.” Rights experts have countered that the impact of the entire tourism project in Mandalika, including both the racetrack and the components financed by the AIIB, should be considered as a whole...

According to a survey of Mandalika residents published last year by the Indonesian Coalition for Monitoring Infrastructure Development, 70% of respondents reported feeling coerced during the land acquisition process, while 79% said they experienced financial difficulties due to the Mandalika project...

Residents and rights advocates claim that recent visits by the AIIB have only proven its indifference about—or unwillingness to engage meaningfully with—aggrieved communities in Mandalika...“I asked AIIB to take responsibility for a better life for the affected communities. But the AIIB didn’t dare, and didn’t want to,” Adi Wijaya, a resident of Ebunut, a once thriving hamlet that has been reduced to a fraction of its size as the racetrack cut squarely through it...

The AIIB insists that it has made every effort to engage but also points to the sheer scale of the Mandalika project as a mitigating factor...“It’s not logistically feasible to meet all the local people,” says Sangmoo Kim, a senior investment operations specialist at the AIIB who was on the site visits...“The project is quite complex, and also sensitive in different ways. And for that reason, there are different views and interests and issues,”...