Jokowi’s Administration
The plot twist of AMDAL regulation happened in the second period of Jokowi’s administration. They initiated the regulation of the Job Creation Act, which aimed to escalate investment in Indonesia and create many job fields. The regulation used the omnibus method –involving many regulations to be revised.
One of the revised regulations is the Act No. 32 of 2009 on Environmental Management and Protection, especially in the AMDAL regulation.
The Act of No. 6 of 2003 on Job Creation erased the authority of the local government to accept the assessment of the AMDAL and transferred the authority to the central government. In other words, it changes the decentralised system to the centralised one. Moreover, it removed the role of environmentalists (scientists and green activists) as well as the potentially impacted local people.
All of the good ideas in the early reformation and the reasoning behind Act No. 32 of 2009 were gone with the Jokowi administration’s ambition.
Re-centralisation Theory
The democratic theory explains the change from a centralised government to a decentralised one. It allows people to choose the government, upholds human rights as well as gives freedom of expression, and provides justice trials (transparent, independent, and responsible).
In other words, popular sovereignty is a form of people’s resistance to abusive power in a regime that is centralised to set up an authoritarian and tyrannical system.
In Indonesia’s case, from Soeharto’s administration, where the power was controlled by the central government and restricted regulations to secure their power, to Habibie’s administration, where the power was distributed to province and city governments.
Nonetheless, in the last year of Jokowi’s first period of administration, in 2019, Indonesia went back to the centralisation system; in other words, that is re-centralisation.
There is a significant symptom in the re-centralisation of Jokowi’s administration: they misused the power of democracy to restrict democracy. In other words, some regulations were conducted to strict democracy.
The re-centralisation theory is explained in a book titled “How Democracies Dies: What History Reveals About Our Future” by Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt. The authors show four symptoms of a regime that wants to drive a centralised system.
First, the rejection of (or the weak commitment to) the democratic rules of the game; Second, the denial of the legitimacy of political opponents; Third, the toleration or the encouragement of acts of violence; Fourth, the readiness to curtail the civil liberties of opponents, including the media.
Besides, there is another explanation from the book “Why Nations Fail” by Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson. The author explains why developing countries change regimes to other regimes. It is due to the regime’s administration does not know how to democratise the institution, consequently creating another corrupt regime.
