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Sticks and carrots in urban waste management in Indonesia

The Adipura Award has been used as sticks and carrots to encourage Indonesian cities and urban regions to be clean and green since 1986

Jonatan A. Lassa (The Jakarta Post)
Kupang
Tue, March 5, 2013

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Sticks and carrots in urban waste management in Indonesia

T

he Adipura Award has been used as sticks and carrots to encourage Indonesian cities and urban regions to be clean and green since 1986. It stopped for a few years after the fall of Soeharto in 1998 but was rejuvenated during Megawati’s presidency in 2002.

Every year, there is an Adipura contest among metropolitan cities, big cities, medium cities and small cities in Indonesia. Additional categories include the best cities in urban-forest ratio, the best city markets and the best city parks.

In the 2009 Adipura, Bandar Lampung city won in the big cities category. The perception was, however, that the real face of the city was a lot dirtier. Some people even noted that heaps of garbage could be found in many places. But, yes, the officials were happy.

The situation changed when some of the local and national media broadcast that Bandar Lampung was the dirtiest city in Indonesia in 2012.

There are some pretty good reasons why people were not happy with the Adipura assessment in 2012. I talked to taxi drivers, garbage collectors, officials at mayor’s office and city environmental agency and they all seemed to agree that the city had gotten cleaner and better at managing its waste over the last three years. They said it would have been easy to accept if the city had been at the bottom in 2009 but it is not acceptable in 2012. Why? People feel that there has been a wrong stick and wrong carrot.

Rewards and punishments were not dished out at the right time and place. Some people even suggest that there was meddling from the provincial government because of the ceaseless political bickering between the city and provincial administrations: The provincial government picks two out of four Adipura assessors. Suspicion of the provincial government by city officials may be trivial but there is an interesting fact worth mentioning here.

The budget for the city parks and cleansing department (CPCD) for 2009 was only US$247,000. When the new mayor of Bandar Lampung took office in 2010, the CPCD budget dramatically increased by 700 percent to $1.8 million.

The city then increased its CPCD budget to $3.2 million and $5.5 million in 2011 and 2012 respectively. The city spent about 20 times more on keeping itself clean in 2012 than it did in 2009.

There is obviously a something going on in Bandar Lampung. There is clearly excellent waste management in the city. One can easily see trash and garbage being removed from streets and roads day and night. I could almost say that the CPCD work 24/7 to clean the city. The question is this: Can this investment in waste management be sustained through future regime changes?

When challenged, a few city officials believed the Adipura assessor downgraded the city based on the city’s coastal areas.

Someone at the environmental department argued that almost all coasts in cities in Indonesia are in poor condition. Therefore, apple-to-apple comparison, one cannot use coastal conditions to downgrade any particular city.

However, there is a deeper problem here. The coastal littorals of the city were hit by the Krakatau tsunami in 1883 and thousands of people were killed. The area continues to be occupied by vulnerable groups today. In addition, it is true that over the last 30 years, the city was unable to properly clean up its trash.

The coastline of Bandar Lampung has expanded into the sea. Local communities use garbage as a raw material to landfill the coast. As a result, the coast has advanced 10 to 100 meters into the sea.

This form of community-based coastal reclamation is complemented by uncontrolled reclamation by the private sectors. The “new” settlements resulting from this urban malpractice cannot be fully seen as informal because the government has legally extended electricity and water services to these areas and collects land and housing taxes from the areas too.

In October 2012, with help from Lampung University students, I interviewed 14 men and women in seven villages who have been living on the coastline of the city for 30 years or more. What we found is that there are still challenges. There is a big gap in the perception of the communities on the coasts and the local government concerning the definition of garbage.

One man’s trash is another man’s raw material. Informal reclamation using waste is an effort to adapt to urban pressure. This activity continues today despite significant reforms by the city government over the last three years.

Future vulnerability toward coastal disasters and climatic extremes is being laid down today. When extreme weather or new tsunamis are unleashed in the future, these coastal communities will
become communal graveyards.

There is a polycentric waste management system in Bandar Lampung. Different institutions deal with different sources of trash.

Waste on the coastline and near the shore solid is the responsibility of the marine and fisheries department. Refuse at urban markets is looked after by the market managers. The parks and cleansing department deals with the waste in the streets, canals and selected public spaces.

They are all part of the team that developed the master plan for solid waste management in 2011, supported by Asian Cities Climate Change Resilience Network (ACCCRN). Funds for the departments have been increased too.

Bandar Lampung is moving on the right track, towards an adaptive and resilient city. With the emergence of innovative leaders like Joko Widodo in Jakarta and Herman HN in Bandar Lampung, we can hope for better urban development in Indonesia in the near future.

The writer is a Research Fellow at the Institute of Resource Governance and Social Change (IRGSC), Kupang. He is also post-doctoral fellow of ACCCRN, Indonesia. This is a personal opinion.

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