Abstract
<title>Abstract</title> <p>Coastal development policy is formulated in arenas where governmental agencies, elected officials, state-owned enterprises, investors, civil-society organizations, and coastal communities compete to define problems, control spatial and fiscal resources, and determine distributive priorities. This article systematically synthesizes a 50-record corpus identified in an uploaded Scopus AI report to explain how actor contestation shapes coastal development policy, with Indonesia as the principal analytical setting. The review applies a PRISMA-informed but explicitly adapted procedure because the source report does not disclose the original search string, duplicate-removal log, excluded records, or full study-level data. Thematic coding focuses on actors, resources, arenas, mechanisms, institutional moderators, and policy outcomes. Six recurrent mechanisms emerge: bureaucratic bargaining, jurisdictional conflict, state-corporate coalition formation, party-system and distributive competition, technocratic exclusion, and participatory counter-mobilization. Contestation is most consequential at the intersections of spatial planning, licensing, budgeting, and project implementation. Decentralization expands local discretion but also fragments authority and creates opportunities for elite capture, while institutional capacity, transparency, participation, and horizontal coordination moderate whether conflict produces negotiated integration or persistent policy dissonance. The evidence base is strongest on implementation and integrated coastal management, but remains comparatively weak on causal links between political competition, actor power, and coastal budget allocation. The review proposes an actor-contestation framework and a research agenda centered on process tracing, network analysis, comparative subnational design, and the integration of political economy with fiscal and spatial data.</p>