Environmental activists in South Sumatra recently protested to revoke the permit for a mining company whose activities have damaged the environment and harmed communities in North Musi Rawas regency. This case represents a broader trend opposing development projects often initiated by the state or private companies.
Despite this growing resistance, the Widodo government recently issued a law granting priority access to religious-based mass organisations for mining business licences, potentially exacerbating the exploitation of natural resources.
While the leaders of Indonesia’s two largest Muslim organisations, Nahdlatul Ulama (NU) and Muhammadiyah, were enthusiastic about this policy, young NU and Muhammadiyah activists who have dealt with mining impacts on the ground for the past decade were disappointed. The activists are worried that accepting such licences might put the religious authorities and the communities at legal and ecological risks and strain their organisations’ capacity.
Youth have been eminent in sparking environmental movements worldwide. In some countries, youth-led environmental movements have successfully forced governments to set new targets for carbon emissions reduction. Their commitment suggests that youth can organise and put intensive pressure on governments to address environmental crises.
In Indonesia, big rallies, such as the Global Climate Strike and Power Up, are youth-led. However, the authors’ research suggests that the progress of Indonesia’s environmental movements, particularly those led by emerging youth activists, has been slow-going and unsteady due to the dominance of state-oligarchic relationships, in addition to existing problems such as incoherent green agendas and weak organisational infrastructure.
The authors gleaned such insights from conversations with dozens of youth environmental activists across Indonesia, focusing on regions such as West and Central Java, North Sumatra, Riau, West, Central, and East Kalimantan, South Sulawesi, and East Nusa Tenggara. This study asked about the activists’ perspectives of environmental problems in their respective areas, and the opportunities and challenges they faced in mobilising people for protests. The authors’ findings indicate that three factors can explain the slow progression of Indonesian environmentalist movements.
First, the intimate relationship between the Indonesian state and oligarchs has created systematic barriers to environmental activism. The distribution of profits derived nationwide from nature-based production in Indonesia was historically monopolised by select groups, such as influential business actors and nationalist politicians, with minimal representation from local communities, often to the environment’s detriment.
According to a study, Indonesia’s policy trajectories, particularly in industries such as extractive mining and palm oil, are unduly influenced by the preferences of influential local oligarchs. For instance, the recent revelation of massive corruption totalling US$17 billion in state losses and involving state-owned tin-mining giant PT Timah, government officials, and business figures exposed close ties between the state and business interests at high levels.
This intimacy of state and oligarchy often manifests as the state’s deployment of coercive apparatuses to uphold oligarchic interests, making youth activists prone to persecution and criminalisation. For instance, in Jambi province, the oligarchs are backed by unscrupulous army and police officers facilitating the illegal drilling industry. This has resulted in stabbing attacks among villagers. Excessive force also loomed large in clashes between the armed military and police forces against the farmers and fishermen of Rempang, in the Riau Islands. The government’s push to relocate the entire Rempang community to facilitate a Chinese-backed business consortium’s renewable energy projects starkly illustrates the state’s disregard for the welfare and rights of local communities in favour of the oligarchs.
Although the authors’ research informants have not experienced similar measures, such violent tactics have curbed their activism by instilling fear. ‘Baron’ (pseudonyms are used for all interviewees), a youth activist from South Kalimantan, testified that he and his friends avoid revealing their faces in their public campaigns, fearing repressive measures like those faced by locals opposing mining companies.
Second, at the movement level, the youth activists are often absorbed in advocating local issues instead of a broader environmental agenda. For instance, Baron revealed firsthand the extraction of coal by local oligarchs and its impact on communities living around the mining areas, such as limited space for people to complain about the mining’s damage to the river water and air pollution. In Riau province, ‘Adina’ and her associates said that they preferred to invest their energy in protesting the rampant occurrence of forest fires and haze. These experiences demonstrate how challenging it is for the activists to forge a unified movement agenda.
Third, the activists struggle to build a strong infrastructure within their organisations. Many youth activists are in the nascent stages of establishing informal collectives, primarily driven by shared concerns about local environmental issues. Such collectives typically consist of three to 30 individuals who have other jobs as their means of survival.
Consequently, as revealed to the authors in an interview with ‘Karel’, from South Sulawesi, the temporary status of their staff often disrupts the collectives’ workflow. Furthermore, these collectives maintain an open and flexible structure, allowing individuals from diverse backgrounds to contribute. However, such a loose structure hampers these collectives from instilling a more profound commitment to their cause.
Financially, some local organisations rely on membership donations to sustain their activities, while others depend on donations from established NGOs, primarily located in Jakarta. These NGOs redistribute the funds they receive from international grants and donors to the local environmental groups. ‘Aksa’’s experience in East Kalimantan illustrates the common practice of youth activists seeking funds from their contacts in Jakarta to organise events like street protests, including for purchasing essential protest equipment like posters. The dearth of organisational resources is the norm rather than the exception for these activists.
Despite the shrinking civic space in Indonesia, the rising global momentum of youth-led climate movements and today’s youth’s better access to information compared to previous generations could serve as a pivot for Indonesia’s youth environmental movements to actively engage with grassroots efforts beyond social media campaigns. Their priority should be to build and broaden power bases by reaching out to various communities such as youth farmers, workers, and urban and rural groups.
By broadening their power bases, such activists could even be seen by political elites as potential partners for securing elected office or other positions. Only then can activists press politicians to meet their demands in exchange for their support, as seen in the Sunrise Movement’s endorsement of US Senator Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, for example. However, in Indonesia’s current democracy, even well-reasoned policies that may provide solutions to the environmental crisis would first require the support of political elites.
This article was first published in Fulcrum, ISEAS – Yusof Ishak Institute’s blogsite.
