<![CDATA[Background: Government Regulation No. 11 of 2021 grants Village-Owned Enterprises (BUMDes) legal entity status without any territorial limit on their markets. Yet official data record only 22 exporting BUMDes out of about 66,000, and none is identified as trading through cross-border e-commerce platforms, revealing a gap between formal legal capacity and actual participation. Objective: This study examines the legal capacity of BUMDes to engage in cross-border digital trade under Indonesian law currently in force, identifies regulatory and institutional barriers, and proposes an institutional model informed by a comparison with Malaysia. Methods: This normative (doctrinal) socio-legal study combines statutory, conceptual, and comparative approaches based solely on documentary sources. Provisions of the village, electronic commerce (PMSE), and export regimes were analyzed through systematic and teleological interpretation and gap analysis, and Malaysian arrangements were compared functionally along seven dimensions. Results: BUMDes hold formal legal capacity to export, but the village, PMSE, and export regimes follow the conflicting logics of local empowerment, domestic market protection, and facilitation for established exporters, producing institutional stagnation. Malaysia's Digital Free Trade Zone (DFTZ) and rural digital programs illustrate a facilitation-first pathway, whereas Indonesia follows an institution-first pathway that grants legal status without trade facilitation. Conclusion: Malaysia offers functional insights rather than a transferable template, because the DFTZ has its own documented limitations. The proposed BUMDes Export Aggregation Model, which uses BUMDes Bersama as export aggregators within a joint regulatory sandbox, is a normative proposal that requires empirical validation.]]>
