Hybrid Legal Governance and Fragmented Child Protection: Normative Pluralism, Cultural Brokerage, and the Politics of Marriage Dispensation in East Java

Abstract

Despite the legislative advancement represented by Law No. 16 of 2019—which equalised the minimum marriage age at nineteen years for both sexes—child marriage continues to constitute a pressing legal and social problem across East Java province. This article interrogates the structural ambiguities that undermine the effective implementation of child marriage prevention policy within the province. Employing a socio-legal methodology that integrates normative analysis with empirical field inquiry, the study draws on two complementary theoretical frameworks: Clifford Geertz’s concept of cultural brokerage, to illuminate how religious elites and community leaders mediate and localise national legal norms, and Boaventura de Sousa Santos’s theory of interlegality, to map the overlapping jurisdictional claims of state law, Islamic jurisprudence, and customary practice that together produce a hybrid normative order. The research finds that the persistence of child marriage in East Java is not reducible to isolated legal failures but instead reflects a structural fragmentation of child protection rooted in competing normative authorities. This fragmentation is compounded by the absence of operationally binding local regulations, the limited institutional coordination among relevant agencies, and the state’s constrained capacity to intervene in religious discourse that sustains the social legitimacy of early marriage. The article proposes a framework of legal glocalisation as a corrective strategy, one that combines proactive regulatory reform with integrated multi-stakeholder collaboration encompassing local governments, the Ministry of Religious Affairs, health practitioners, peer educators, civil society organisations, and Islamic scholarly bodies including the Indonesian Ulema Council (MUI) and local pesantren networks.