Who Bears the Burden of Indonesia's Waste Emergency? Risk Society, Governance Capacity Gaps, and the Crisis of Ecological Citizenship
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.56371/ijess.v7i1.795Keywords:
Waste Emergency, Risk Society, Governance Capacity Gaps, Ecological Citizenship, Environmental JusticeAbstract
Indonesia is facing a recurring waste emergency in which the accumulation of municipal solid waste increasingly exceeds the capacity of local systems to collect, process, and safely dispose of it. This is not merely a technical failure of waste management infrastructure, but a sociological problem concerning who is exposed to waste-related risks, who has access to adequate services, who bears the costs of governance gaps, and whose voice is represented in decision-making. Official data illustrate the scale of the problem: the Ministry of Environment reported 56.63 million tonnes of waste generation in 2023, with 60.99% unmanaged, while SIPSN recorded 34.21 million tonnes in 2024 from 317 districts and cities, with 40.26% classified as unmanaged. By the end of 2025, 336 districts and cities had been identified as experiencing waste emergencies. This article employs an integrative literature review and policy document analysis to examine how waste risks are produced, distributed, and governed. The analysis integrates risk society, environmental justice, governance capacity gaps, and ecological citizenship. Findings indicate that waste emergencies reflect cumulative environmental and health risks, unequal exposure and service access, fragmented coordination, weak institutional capacity and enforcement, and the reduction of citizenship to behavioral responsibility. The article proposes a triple burden of waste emergency framework comprising exposure burden, service burden, and voice burden, arguing that a just transition requires redistributing not only waste flows, but also institutional responsibilities, resources, decision-making power, and protection.
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