Borobudur Law and Society Journal

A civil judgment that is final and binding settles a dispute only if the losing party complies with it, and in Indonesia many winning parties must still apply for execution under the HIR and RBg. Legal culture is often invoked to explain this gap, but the evidence has not been assembled. This article asks how legal culture shapes parties’ acceptance of, or resistance to, final and binding decisions, and what that implies for Indonesian civil execution. It is a structured literature review of one database, Semantic Scholar, reported under PRISMA 2020; 26 studies published from 2019 to 2026 were included from 342 records, and the 17 that can be identified were mapped by decision type, design and relevance. Only a few concern civil decisions, and none measures compliance with civil judgments directly; most are indirect evidence from criminal, customary, arbitral or administrative settings. Read with that limit, the literature suggests five propositions: finality does not secure compliance; legal traditions moderate but do not determine responses; customary mechanisms gain compliance through moral authority; perceived external pressure weakens legitimacy; and clear reasons and participation increase acceptance. Confidence is low to very low. The findings support clearer operative clauses, reasoned and accessible judgments, and court-supervised settlement before coercive execution, and call for direct empirical research on Indonesian execution.