Participation Theater: Why Papua Barat’s Special Autonomy Failed Indigenous Communities

West Papua’s Special Autonomy (Otsus) fund exceeds IDR 1.5 trillion, yet 20.66% of the province’s population lived in poverty in March 2025, revealing a disconnect between fiscal transfer and community influence over planning. This study examines how four actor groups—executive, legislative, cultural, and community—engage across the Otsus planning cycle, applying Arnstein’s Ladder to interviews, observation, and documents, coded in NVivo 14 against its eight participation levels with triangulation. Every actor group remained confined to the tokenism zone, concentrated at Placation; the executive recorded the highest quotation count, while the community group recorded the fewest. The Development Planning Deliberation Forum (Musrenbang) was found to validate decisions already taken, since the Regional Government Work Plan (RKPD) is drafted before the forum opens. Six interlocking barriers were identified that exclude Indigenous voices from budgeting: closed budgetary design, a missing aspiration-to-budget bridge, absent Indigenous values in budget templates, a historical trust deficit, fragmented inter-institutional coordination, and limited capacity among marginalised groups. These findings suggest that constitutional recognition alone cannot lift participation up Arnstein’s ladder when budgeting architecture keeps it down, and point to the need for an independent Otsus planning body and revised Special Regional Regulations (Perdasus), embedding substantive participation into the budgeting cycle.