Why citizen participation is not helping to stop environmental pollution in Indonesia
More than three quarters of the 237 million Indonesian population has no access to tap water. They are dependent on water from rivers often polluted by industry. Laure d'Hondt conducted research into why it is so difficult to tackle these polluters and will defend her PhD dissertation on 17 October.
Her research is part of the research programme Legal Empowerment as a means to development? A political-legal study of rights invocation by pollution victims in China and Indonesia. D'Hondt: 'The programme is a collaboration between the University of Amsterdam and the Van Vollenhoven Institute of Leiden Law School. Traditionally, the Institute has close ties with Indonesia among other things because the legal systems of Indonesia and the Netherlands have the same basis. This also applies to environmental and water legislation. Indonesia, therefore, is interested in Dutch environmental legislation and enforcement, and vice versa.'
D'Hondt's research initially focussed on the position of victims of pollution. What can they do to stop industrial pollution? How can they get compensation, and why is this so difficult? During fieldwork in North Maluku on pollution from mining, she discovered that the response of the government to industrial pollution was generally very limited. Instead, citizens were given the opportunity to negotiate with the polluting industry. 'This often occurred under the pretext of greater citizen participation in governance, alternative dispute settlement and alternative regulation, with no strict standards and enforcement from the government. This all sounds great, but in practice it appears that when citizens after a while are unable or hardly able to achieve anything to tackle pollution, environmental objectives are no longer taken into consideration. Mediation often lead to compensation for the population, for example employment in the industry or donations.'
'A good example of this issue is a case that occurred in West Java. A number of major landowners presented themselves as victims of the polluting textile industry. Because of the polluted water, their rice fields had become increasingly unproductive and this had led to protests against the factory and the government. In negotiations with the industry they were given the position of employment agent: they were allowed to allocate jobs at the factory to members of the community. People who had previously worked for the landowners in the rice fields, could now get work in the industry via the employment agencies, provided they paid the employment agency three to eight times a month’s wage. The landowners and other community leaders were satisfied with the new situation and stopped protesting against the pollution. The workers also kept quiet because they were afraid of losing their jobs. The local environmental department was aware of the situation in which the pollution continued unabated and also the growing inequality among the members of the community. The environmental department had in part facilitated the negotiations, under the pretext of citizen participation, and in the belief that the government could not enforce measures without these having been agreed to during the negotiations between citizens and the industry. The public environmental interest had disintegrated into a private issue. Regulation to a large extent had been replaced by citizens who had been given the responsibility to arrange compensation.'
Actually tackling pollution is thus largely dispensed with. 'To understand this, I also had to look at the role of the government. So I observed three local environmental departments. The differences between the departments are considerable, but the one common denominator is the inconsistency of their actions in the regulation process. As a result, there is little chance of an industry that has committed a violation being confronted with any significant consequences, and the deterrent effect of enforcement is thus nihil.' The failing government approach can partly be explained by corruption and a lack of capacity. 'This research however also shows that government authorities feel little accountability for not reducing pollution.'
Although industrial pollution is hardly being tackled to any extent, citizen participation appears to be a popular approach among Indonesian civil servants, policy makers and NGOs. 'In environmental legislation much attention is paid to citizen participation, while the legal basis for consistent enforcement by the government has deteriorated on a number of critical points in recent decades.’ Citizen participation is also seen as something positive in the West. 'But in western countries there is often a reasonably good basis for enforcement by government authorities under administrative law, and citizen participation and alternative regulation can be complementary in this regard. This basis does not exist in Indonesia, and citizen participation and alternative regulation replace consistency in regulation by the government, with all the negative consequences this entails.'
Project
D'Hondt concludes that citizen participation in Indonesia is often not successful in contributing to solutions to environmental issues. 'In addition the research has revealed a lot about the dynamics between regulation and searching for compensation for citizens who are wronged. It also shows that when public interests are at stake and citizens play a role in the regulation process, it is very important to analyse the connection between the processes of regulation and looking for compensation.'
In 2016 D'Hondt's research led to setting up a two-year project Making Environmental Regulation Work for the People, funded by the Dutch embassy in Jakarta. 'It was a collaboration between the Van Vollenhoven Institute, the Indonesian environmental NGO Indonesian Center for Environmental Law, various Indonesian academic experts and the Indonesian Ministry of the Environment and Forestry. The project has contributed to the development of water legislation, enabled more research and provided training on enforcement for civil servants working at local environmental departments. In this way the project has made a significant contribution to improvements in regulations on industrial water pollution in Indonesia.'
Supervisor Professor A.W. Bedner on Laure d'Hondt's research:
'Laure's dissertation is so special because she has been able to connect various themes in law & society. She started with research on access to the law for Indonesians who had been the victim of water pollution, but she soon discovered that these issues could only be analysed properly if she also involved the whole system of government standards and enforcement. To achieve this she carried out extensive fieldwork in all sorts of areas: affected communities, NGOs and public environmental departments.
This broad approach has enabled her to demonstrate that access to the law is not only hindered by a distorted balance of power, but also by fundamental problems in the legal framework. Many public service departments are not aware of which measures they can best apply to address environmental violations. As a result they prefer to mediate between polluters and victims rather than enforce regulations. This preference is reinforced because various groups of victims have different interests and are seldom in agreement about the desired remedy. These insights are not only of academic interest, but are also of interest to NGOs, donors and all others who are trying to achieve a cleaner environment.'
Text: Floris van den Driesche
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