The Dutch-Indonesian program in Indonesian Studies was inaugurated in January, 1975 as a four-year, bilateral exchange of research materials and personnel in het humanities and social sciences.

The principal aim of the Program, one which links its diverse aspects and activities, is to stimulate the use by Dutch and Indonesian scholars of the enormous body of information about Indonesia written in Dutch to ensure, in other words, that the traditions of scholarship on Indonesia which many Dutch and Indonesian scholars have worked to establish during the colonial period would continue to be developed as a new generation of Dutch and Indonesian researchers take up the study of Indonesian societies and cultures.