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In Indonesia, district is the third-level administrative subdivision, below regency or city.[1][2][3][4] The local term kecamatan is used in the majority of Indonesian areas. The term distrik is used in provinces in Papua. In the Special Region of Yogyakarta, the term kapanewon is used for districts within the regencies, while the term kemantren is used for districts within Yogyakarta, the province's only city.[5] According to Statistics Indonesia, there are a total of 7,288 districts in Indonesia as of 2023, subdivided into 83,971 administrative villages (rural desa and urban kelurahan).[6]
During the Dutch East Indies and early republic period, the term district referred to kewedanan, a subdivision of regency, while kecamatan was translated as subdistrict (Dutch: onderdistrict).[7] Following the abolition of kewedanan, the term district began to be associated with kecamatan which has since been directly administered by regency. Mainstream media such as The Jakarta Post,[8][9][10] Kompas,[11][12][13] and Tempo[14][15][16][17] use "district" to refer to kecamatan; however machine translation services like Google Translate often incorrectly uses "district" to refer to regencies instead.
District in Indonesia is the third-level administrative subdivision, below regency or city (second-level) and province (first-level). According to the Act Number 23 of 2014, district is formed by the government of regency or city in order to improve the coordination of governance, public services, and empowerment of urban/rural villages.[18] District head is a career bureaucrat position directly appointed by regent or mayor. The local district term kecamatan is used in the majority of Indonesian areas, with camat being the head.
During the Dutch East Indies and early republic period, the term district referred to kewedanan, a subdivision of a regency. Kewedanan itself was divided into kecamatan, which was translated as subdistrict (Dutch: onderdistrict).[7] Following the abolition of kewedanan, the term district began to be associated with kecamatan which has since been directly administered by regency. In English-language dictionary, subdistrict means "a division or subdivision of a district", hence the translation of kecamatan as subdistrict is no longer precise since the absence of kewedanan as district.[19][20] The 1982 publication of Statistics Indonesia translated kecamatan as district.[21]
With the release of the Act Number 21 of 2001 on the Special Autonomous of Papua Province, the term distrik was used instead of kecamatan in the entire Western New Guinea.[22] The difference between the two is merely the naming, with kepala distrik being the district head. It was later followed in 2019 by another autonomous province, the Special Region of Yogyakarta, where kecamatan was replaced with kapanewon and kemantren. Sultan Hamengkubuwono X, the region's governor and the monarch of Yogyakarta Sultanate, issued Gubernatorial Decree Number 25 of 2019, which restored the old naming convention for the region's subdivisions. Kapanewon (a subdivision of regency) is headed by a panewu, while kemantren (a subdivision of city), is headed by a mantri pamong praja.[5]
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