Disasters and Problems of Governance
The head of the Meteorology, Climatology and Geophysics Agency has warned of various factors that could trigger extreme rainfall until February 2021.
The head of the Meteorology, Climatology and Geophysics Agency has warned of various factors that could trigger extreme rainfall until February 2021.
An online press conference on Saturday (23/1/2021) pointed to the global climate phenomenon La Nina as the cause. What can happen within the next month seems to be inseparable from the impacts of long-term decisions.
As usual when there is a disaster, we get many explanations as to why it happened. After that, life goes on as usual, until we get a similar explanation for the next disaster. Such explanations can often satisfy one party, but not others, especially when they are related to technical reasons, the truth of which still depends on a comprehensive understanding of specific conditions in the field. Not infrequently, conflicting interests of different institutions complicate the picture.
Also read: South Kalimantan Flood a Gloomy Picture of Natural Destruction
Forest destruction has frequently been considered the source of disasters, especially floods and landslides. In the field, meanwhile, impacts may also stem from the development of vast mines, plantations, housing, major roads and factories. All of these contribute to disasters, along with other factors, such as rainfall or high tide, and even the movement of the earth’s tectonic plates that trigger earthquakes.
Licensing governance
The problem is actually the general attitude on the part of the state or decision-makers that tends to contradict disaster prevention efforts initiated after recent disasters. Underdal (2010), in his publication Complexity and challenges of long-term environmental governance, said that in facing a decline in environmental quality, there are three characteristics that make governance challenging for decision-makers.
Also read: Floods and Underground Reservoirs
First, the impact of activities outside the period of accountability, namely the presence of longstanding problems, between the occurrence of relatively controlled causes of adverse effects -- for example, destruction of protected areas or violations of spatial planning -- and the negative impacts caused, such as landslides and floods.
This causes a weak attitude of decision-makers, because various positive consequences of decisions will occur only after the period of accountability for a high-ranking official or government regime. The environmental issue is also not a sexy issue in the political arena of Indonesia.
In the 2019 presidential election, for example, the two competing candidate pairs paid little attention to environmental issues, even though effects of the ecological crisis had occurred in almost all regions of Indonesia. According to the director of the One World Foundation, Firdaus Cahyadi, the two presidential candidates did not do much to raise environmental issues in their campaigns. From the start of the campaign period until the end of January 2019, the Joko Widodo-Ma\'ruf Amin pair only raised environmental issues 15 times, compared to economic issues, which were raised 233 times.
Also read: After a Month, Floods and Landslides still Threaten Residents
The same thing happened with the Prabowo Subianto-Sandiaga Uno pair, who only raised environmental issues in their campaign 11 times, while economic issues were mentioned 340 times. If examined further, the campaign content on economic issues offered by the two camps also did not have an ecological perspective.
Second, the cost of damage caused by natural resource extraction and environmental degradation is not included as a cost of economic development. There is uncertainty about the cost of offsetting ecological damage under a wide variety of options for policy instruments to add economic benefits. As a result, it seems as if the economy will continue to grow despite many disasters, because the monetary value of these disasters is not taken into account in the calculation of economic growth.
Third, there is the phenomenon of public goods from long-term policy problems. Long-term policies frequently come at the expense of the public interest. If the accumulated damage to the ecosystem has caused impacts that cannot be compensated at present, policy-makers in the past have actually benefited -- consciously or not -- from the loss of ecosystem services. And those who have to bear the burden is the current generation.
Also read: Managing the Ecosystem Crisis
Likewise, limiting damage to the ecosystem for the future is a public good issue. Certain local governments that have protected areas and safeguard them -- thus playing an important role as a public good for many other local governments -- generally do not benefit directly from this policy. As a result, safeguarding protected areas is considered unattractive for regional governments.
A recent study by the UN Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES, 2019) -- which is based on more than 15,000 scientific sources and government documents -- shows that land use change is the most powerful factor behind ecosystem collapse in the world. According to this study, radical corrections are needed to control excessive consumption and wasteful use of natural resources and to immediately improve the limited paradigm of economic growth.
Bureaucratic-private collusion
In Indonesia, land use change is still very difficult to control. First, this is due to weak licensing oversight. In evaluating permits for oil palm plantations in eight regencies and 24 companies in
West Papua, regency agencies that issue location permits (IUP) often do not carry out their procedures properly. For example, companies are allowed to not complete the land acquisition process; in the IUP location, there are deep peatlands; activities are allowed to continue without an IUP; they do not have timber utilization permits (IPK); the IPK given is for a wider area than the IUP area.
In another example, this time from East Kalimantan, the area of mining site restoration is smaller than it should have been (Kristanti, 2020).
Also read: Forestry and the Job Creation Bill
Second, corruption in permit issuance still dims or even prevents government efforts in working areas that should have been protected up to the last decade. Kenny and Warburton\'s (2020) study entitled Paying Bribe in Indonesia: A survey of business corruption reveals that companies interact with various levels of government and local executives, thereby opening up new opportunities for corruption between the private sector, regency-level bureaucrats and local security forces.
This fact, according to this study, is very detrimental to the natural resources sector. Collusion between companies and state officials has led to an explosion in the number of mining and oil palm permits, accelerating the rate of deforestation and land degradation and encouraging new conflicts and sometimes violence in resource-rich areas.
Of the 672 business representatives interviewed by Kenny and Warburton between July 2019 and February 2020, 33.2 percent said they had been asked for informal fees, and 30.6 percent said they had paid the fees. Of all companies, 35.7 percent strongly believed that the illegal fees were also paid by other businesses in their sector. The companies were classified into extraction, construction, agriculture, manufacturing, trading, logistics and finance firms.
Construction companies topped the list, with 49.5 percent reporting extortion, 44.2 percent paying bribes and 51.6 percent believing such practices are common in their industry. They were followed by extractive industries companies with 47.9 percent, 42.7 percent and 53.1 percent, respectively. The lowest numbers were seen in the financial sector, namely 17.0 percent, 16.0 percent and 22.3 percent.
The state or government has an obligation to carry out a transformation of this way of thinking.
The natural ecosystem can withstand the pressure from human action or climate change for a very long time, but only up to a point. Now, this point in a number of regions appears to have been passed, and the various resulting disasters have become logical consequences that must be accepted.
The three aspects trapping the thinking of decision-makers as described by Underdal above show how so far decision-making has been based on what sociologist Max Weber (1864-1920) called practical rationality. Such a way of thinking and decision-making is oriented toward the random flow of fragmented events as well as from practical rational confrontation with everyday problems, similar to the benefit-cost ratio approach.
Such rational patterns of decision-making have been shown to fail to characterize action that is compatible with long-term changes, such as changes in the ecosystem. Weber reminded us to use substantive rationales in such long-term life phenomena. He said that only actions that were oriented toward substantive rationality -- among other things based on norms and values of humanity and justice -- had the potential to introduce a way of life by overcoming a practical rational way based on interests, a formal rational orientation to rules and the flow of reality from disconnected events. The state or government has an obligation to carry out a transformation of this way of thinking.
Hariadi Kartodihardjo, Professor of Forestry Policy of IPB University.
This article was translated by Hyginus Hardoyo.