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Agatha Debby Reiza Macella, S.A.P., M.Si.
Journal of Law, Public Policy and Public Finance (2026)
When a legal system consolidates two instruments into one, the doctrinal question is whether the surviving instrument succeeds to the functions of the instrument revoked, or merely replaces it. This article examines a consolidation in which the distinction is consequential and unresolved. Article 138 of Provincial Regulation No. 8 of 2024 on the Spatial Plan of Central Java Province revokes, among other instruments, the provincial coastal and small islands zoning plan of 2018 and the detailed spatial plan for one strategic area of 2016, integrating coastal planning into the general spatial plan pursuant to Article 245(b) of Government Regulation No. 21 of 2021. The consolidation is lawful and its policy rationale is intelligible. What the article identifies is a gap in succession: the revoked coastal instrument operated at a resolution and with a subject matter that the surviving general plan does not reproduce, and the seventeen strategic areas the new regulation designates have no detailed plans through which the finer resolution might be restored. The province holds 828.82 kilometres of coastline, 540.27 of it facing the Java Sea in a margin subject to documented tidal inundation and subsidence. The article argues that absorption of a specialised instrument into a general one should be accompanied by an express statement of which functions transfer and which lapse, and that in the absence of such a statement the revoked functions are not preserved by implication.