On Proxemics episode 013, hosts Mercy Tahitoe and Stephanie Sicilia put a deceptively simple question to their guest — Jeffrey Haribowo, Corporate Affairs Director for the cocoa business at Mars Wrigley Indonesia: is public relations just polishing a company’s image, while public affairs quietly rewrites the law? It sounds like a turf war between two job titles. It is really one of the most useful distinctions in modern communications — and one that even seasoned practitioners blur. Here is the full answer the episode only had time to sketch.
Public relations manages perception — how audiences see an organisation. Public affairs manages policy — the laws and regulations that organisation must operate under. PR works on the story; public affairs works on the rules that govern the story. They share tools and instincts, but answer to different audiences, on different clocks, with different definitions of winning.
- PR shapes how you are perceived; public affairs shapes what you are permitted to do.
- PR’s audience is the public and the media; public affairs’ audience is regulators and lawmakers.
- Public affairs is evidence-based advocacy — data and documented impact, not opinion.
- In Indonesia, public affairs works up a legal hierarchy: constitution → statute → government regulation → ministerial regulation.
- Confuse the two and you bring a press release to a fight that needed a policy paper.
Listen & watch
The YouTube player is episode 013; the Spotify and Apple embeds open the series (episode-level deep links to follow).
What is public relations?
Public relations is the practice of managing an organisation’s reputation and its relationships with the public. Its raw materials are narrative, media, timing and tone. When a company launches a product, apologises for a mistake, announces a partnership, or tries to shift the mood around its brand, that is PR at work — the craft consultancies like Praxis are built around. The audience is broad — customers, journalists, employees, the general public — and the scoreboard is sentiment: media coverage, share of voice, brand favourability, whether the room warms or cools.
Crucially, PR does not change the rules an organisation lives under. It changes how those rules, and the organisation itself, are understood. It is a discipline of persuasion and storytelling, and its best work is often invisible: a crisis that never escalated, a reputation quietly rebuilt.
What is public affairs?
Public affairs is the practice of engaging the policy and regulatory environment that governs an organisation. If PR asks “how do people see us?”, public affairs asks “what are we allowed to do, and who decides?” Its arena is the machinery of government: the ministries drafting regulations, the legislators writing statutes, the agencies interpreting and enforcing them.
In Indonesia, that machinery is a hierarchy, and public affairs works up and down it — from the constitution (Undang-Undang Dasar) at the top, to statutes (Undang-Undang), to government regulations (Peraturan Pemerintah), down to the ministerial regulations (Peraturan Menteri) that decide the day-to-day. A single ministerial decree most people never read can reshape an entire industry. Public affairs is the discipline of noticing that decree while it is still a draft — and having something credible to say about it — specialised work that dedicated public-affairs firms like Prajna are built for.
That credibility is the part outsiders miss. Good public affairs is not lobbying in the cynical sense of a quiet word and a favour. It is evidence: data, research, and a documented account of impact — how many jobs, which supply chains, what second-order effects a proposed rule would trigger. Assembling that evidence usually begins with disciplined media monitoring — the kind Explicar specialises in.
PR vs public affairs: a side-by-side
| Dimension | Public relations | Public affairs |
|---|---|---|
| Core question | How are we perceived? | What are we permitted to do? |
| Works on | The story | The rules |
| Primary audience | Public, media, customers | Regulators, legislators, ministries |
| Arena | Media, events, social | Policy, regulation, lawmaking |
| Timescale | News cycle, launch week | Legislative sessions, years |
| Currency | Narrative and relationships | Evidence and data |
| Success looks like | Favourable coverage, sentiment | A workable rule — or a bad one that never passes |
Where PR and public affairs overlap
The two disciplines share DNA. Both are about influence, both require reading an audience precisely, and both fail the same way — when they are reactive instead of planned. A company that only calls PR after a crisis has already hit is in the same position as one that discovers a regulation only after it has passed. In both cases, the real work is upstream. Many organisations also house both functions under one “corporate affairs” umbrella, which is exactly why the roles get blurred — and why being precise about the difference matters.
Why the distinction matters
Because the two require different people, different evidence, and different definitions of success — and organisations that treat them as one thing tend to under-invest in the harder, slower one. Perception problems are visible; you feel the bad press. Policy problems are invisible until they are law, and by then the room to influence them has closed. On the episode, Jeffrey Haribowo put the bar for public affairs bluntly:
“Public affairs itu nggak boleh debat kusir. Lo harus evidence based.”
— Jeffrey Haribowo, on Proxemics 013 (23:36) · “Public affairs can’t be a pointless argument. You have to be evidence-based.”
The line captures the whole discipline. Bring opinion to a policy table and you lose to whoever brought a spreadsheet. The counter-arguments are built on data, so yours must be too.
A quick glossary
- Public affairs
- Evidence-based engagement with the policies and regulations that govern an organisation, across the whole lawmaking process.
- Undang-Undang Dasar (UUD)
- Indonesia’s constitution — the top of the legal hierarchy.
- Undang-Undang (UU)
- A statute passed by the legislature (DPR) with the government.
- Peraturan Pemerintah (PP)
- A government regulation that implements a statute.
- Peraturan Menteri (Permen)
- A ministerial regulation — granular rules that shape an industry day-to-day.
- Debat kusir
- An Indonesian idiom — literally a coachman’s quarrel — for an argument that goes in circles and settles nothing.