At its heart this collection of essays concerns the current state of Indonesian environmental law, departing from the question of whether there is now a coherent and accessible framework for environmental management. The authors provide the reader with an overview of Indonesian environmental policymaking and the political context in which it has emerged. The essays analyse the general features and principles of the Environmental Management Act of 1997, the frameworks for enforcement and dispute resolution, and the relation with the vital areas of forestry law and spatial planning. Two more theoretical discussions that are highly topical in the Indonesian legal environmental discourse contextualise the subject: first, the use and role of the vital concepts of integration, harmonisation and co-ordination of environmental law and policy; and second, the relation between enforcement and voluntary compliance mechanisms. The authors also explore potential paths towards better environmental law in Indonesia.

This book is a remarkable case study of an environmental policy initiative for a national environmental regulatory system in the information age. In 1995 the Indonesian Ministry of Environment took the bold step to launch an environmental disclosure initiative called the Program for Pollution Control, Evaluation and Rating (PROPER). Under PROPER, environmental performance of companies is mapped into a five-color grading scale - Gold for excellent, Green for very good, Blue for good, Red for non-compliance, and Black for causing environmental damage. These ratings are then publicly disclosed through a formal press conference and posted on the internet. Not only did this simple rating scheme create a major media buzz and enhanced environmental awareness of the general public, but it also unleashed a wide range of performance incentives that showed how markets with environmental information could function in a developing country setting. The authors provide a multidisciplinary analysis of how the PROPER program harnessed the power of public disclosure to abate the problem of industrial pollution. They describe how the program has successfully improved the average environmental compliance rate from close to thrity per cent in 1995 to as high as seventy per cent in 2011. This improvement was driven primarily by information disclosure, which avoided expensive and unpredictable legal enforcement through the court system of Indonesia. The combination of institutional history and detailed economic and analyses sheds light on the role of policy entrepreneurs who laid the foundation for disclosure and transparency, despite the constraints of the Suharto regime. The PROPER program is now internationally recognized and continues to serve as a model for many developing countries.

. . . an important addition to the small, but growing, published literature on the development of environmental law in developing countries. It will be of interest to academics and those involved in law development in Indonesia and the other developing countries. Jennifer Mohamed-Katerere, Journal of Environmental Law This book asks whether environmental law and policy in developed countries can be successfully transferred to developing countries. It questions whether developing countries are indeed ready and able to implement new ideas from the developed world, such as the integration of environmental law, and use of market-oriented instruments. The authors draw insights from the case of Indonesia, where they have experience of drafting environmental legislation, and which is itself in the early stages of development. Through these insights they seek to understand why environmental law that has been well developed in theory, can in practice be difficult to monitor and adequately enforce. Indeed, a further question central to the book is why developing environmental law does not necessarily result in an efficient environmental policy. Taking a comparative perspective, and using a multi-faceted methodology that draws on constitutional and administrative law, human rights law, criminal and liability law and international law, as well as law and economics, the authors conclude with an outline of some of the lessons that can be learnt by other jurisdictions seeking to develop environmental law. Lawyers, environmental engineers and social scientists involved in environmental law and policy in developing countries will find much to interest them in this book, as will those concerned with development studies or with a particular interest in the case of Indonesia.

Environmental harms exert a significant toll and pose substantial economic costs on societies around the world. Although such harms have been studied from both legal and social science perspectives, these disciplinary-specific approaches are not, on their own, fully able to address the complexity of these environmental challenges. Many legal approaches, for example, are limited by their inattention to the motivations behind environmental offences, whereas many social science approaches are hindered by an insufficient grounding in current legislative frameworks. This edited collection constitutes a pioneering attempt to overcome these limitations by uniting legal and social science perspectives. Together, the book’s contributors forge an innovative socio-legal approach to more effectively respond to, and to prevent, environmental harms around the world. Integrating theoretical and empirical work, the book presents carefully selected illustrations of how legal and social science scholarship can be brought together to improve policies. The various chapters examine how a socio-legal approach can ultimately lead to a more comprehensive understanding of environmental harms, as well as to innovative and effective responses to such environmental offences.

Although it is commonly asserted that enhanced citizen participation results in better environmental policy and improved enforcement of environmental standards, this hypothesis has rarely been subject to testing on a comparative basis. The contributors to this book set out to study the extent to which citizens can and do exert influence over their urban environments through the legal (and extra-legal) 'gateways' in eleven countries spanning several continents as well as different climates, levels and type of economic development, and national legal and constitutional systems, as well as exhibiting a different set of environmental problems. One interviewee questioned about access to environmental justice, dryly remarked that in his city there was no environment, no justice and no access to either. Yet this view, as will be seen, requires to be nuanced. While few people will be surprised by the finding that legal gateways to environmental justice are largely ineffective, the reasons for this are revealing; but also the richness of detail and the comparisons between the different countries, and also the positive aspects which surfaced in several instances, were indeed both encouraging and sometimes surprising. This book presents the first comparative survey of access to environmental justice, and will be of considerable use to lawyers, policy-makers, activists and scholars who are concerned with the environmental issues which so profoundly affect and afflict our habitat and conditions of social justice throughout the world.

The environment is one of the defining issues of our times, and it is closely linked to questions and dilemmas surrounding economic development. Southeast Asia is one of the world’s most economically and demographically dynamic regions, and it is also one in which a host of environmental issues raise themselves. The Routledge Handbook of the Environment in Southeast Asia is a collection of 30 chapters dealing with the most significant scholarly debates in this rapidly growing field of study. Structured in four main parts, it gives a comprehensive regional overview of, and insight into, the environment in Southeast Asia. Wide-ranging and balanced, this handbook promotes scholarly understanding of how environmental issues are dealt with from diverse theoretical perspectives. It offers a detailed empirical understanding of the myriad environmental problems and challenges faced in Southeast Asia. This is the first publication of its kind in this field; a helpful companion for a global audience and for scholars of Southeast Asian studies from a variety of disciplines.