The Urban Lawyer’s Brief
On September 16, 2021, activists gathered outside the Central Jakarta District Court holding placards shaped like infants — a blunt visual argument about who pays the price for the capital’s air. Inside, judges delivered a verdict few expected a court to hand down against a sitting president: President Joko Widodo, along with six other senior officials, had been negligent in protecting citizens’ right to clean air. The court ordered the president to tighten national air quality standards, the health minister and Jakarta’s governor to devise real control strategies, and instructed regular emissions testing for the fleet of ageing vehicles clogging the city’s roads. A year later, the Jakarta High Court rejected the government’s appeal and upheld the ruling in full.
It is worth sitting with how unusual that verdict was. A citizen lawsuit — filed by thirty-two ordinary residents, not a government agency or an NGO with standing granted by statute — had used the law to force the state’s hand on a problem it had spent years treating as background noise. This is air quality regulation functioning exactly as it is supposed to: as an enabler, a lever ordinary people can pull when institutions won’t move on their own.
And yet the very same legal architecture, viewed from a different angle, is also what keeps that problem intact.
The Case for Law as Enabler
The Jakarta lawsuit worked because Indonesian environmental law gives citizens more than an abstract right. Article 28H(1) of the Constitution — the same provision underpinning the country’s waste management law — guarantees a good and healthy living environment. Law No. 32/2009 on Environmental Protection and Management operationalizes that guarantee into concrete government obligations: setting ambient standards, planning air quality management, and controlling pollution at its source. Critically, the framework also recognizes citizen standing (gugatan warga negara), meaning private individuals — not only prosecutors or regulators — can go to court to compel the state to perform duties it already owes them.
That combination — a constitutional hook, statutory duties, and standing to sue — is what makes environmental law more than aspiration. It converts a policy failure into a legal claim, and a legal claim into a court order with a deadline. Without it, Jakarta’s chronic smog would have remained a public health statistic instead of a judicial finding of fault.
The aftermath bore this out, at least partially: the ruling contributed to pressure that led to Government Regulation No. 22 of 2021, which finally revised Indonesia’s decades-old ambient air quality standards — standards that had gone unchanged since 1999, even as the science on particulate matter’s health effects moved dramatically in the interim.
The Case for Law as Barrier
But PP 22/2021 did not arrive in isolation. It was issued as an implementing regulation of the very same Job Creation Law (UU No. 11/2020) — the sweeping omnibus law passed in 2020 to streamline business licensing — that environmental lawyers and civil society organizations warned would gut the permitting system meant to prevent pollution in the first place.
Before the omnibus law, a business had to obtain a standalone environmental permit (izin lingkungan), a legal instrument separate from its general business license, built around a required environmental impact assessment (AMDAL). Revoke the environmental permit, and the underlying business activity still had to stop. The omnibus law folded that environmental permit into the general business license itself, replacing it with an “environmental approval” that functions more as an internal precondition than a standalone, independently enforceable safeguard. Legal researchers have noted that this merger means sanctioning one now sanctions both simultaneously — which sounds efficient, but in practice raises the political and economic cost of ever pulling the trigger on enforcement, since revoking a polluter’s environmental compliance now also means revoking its right to operate at all.
Layered onto this is the enforcement doctrine PP 22/2021 itself embraces: ultimum remedium — criminal sanctions as an absolute last resort, with administrative sanctions as the default response to violations. In principle, this is a reasonable regulatory philosophy: give industry a chance to correct course before treating pollution as a crime. In a country where local environmental agencies are chronically under-resourced and where administrative sanctions are rarely followed through to actual closure or fines, it functions instead as a standing excuse for inaction — the same institutional weakness that let the Jatiwaringin landfill burn for weeks and that lets provincial coal plants exceed emissions limits for years without consequence.
Even the revised ambient standards born from the 2021 court victory drew criticism from the very environmental lawyers who helped win it, who argued the new limits, while stricter than before, still fell short of the World Health Organization’s guidelines and needed reassessment within a year of adoption.
Two Faces of the Same Statute
What the Jakarta case demonstrates, ultimately, is that “the law” on air quality is not one thing. It is simultaneously a sword citizens can wield against government inertia, and a set of loopholes industry can rely on precisely because enforcement has been deliberately softened in the name of investment ease. The same regulatory apparatus that let thirty-two residents force a president to act is embedded in a permitting system engineered, quite openly, to make enforcement action against polluters harder to take.
This is not a contradiction so much as a design choice — one that reflects a familiar tension in Indonesian regulatory policy between ease of doing business and protection of public goods. Citizen lawsuits are powerful, but they are also slow, expensive, and rare; they cannot substitute for a permitting and enforcement system that works by default rather than by court order. Until that system is rebuilt — not loosened further in the name of efficiency — clean air in Indonesian cities will keep depending on the exceptional willingness of a handful of citizens to sue their own government, rather than on the ordinary operation of the law meant to protect them in the first place.
— Farid Hanggawan