The Ecological Burden of Political Campaigning in Indonesia: An Environmental Justice Analysis
Keywords:
Campaign materials, election waste, electoral governance, environmental justice, political campaigningAbstract
Physical campaign materials remain integral to Indonesian elections, yet their environmental consequences receive limited attention in electoral governance and scholarship. This study examines how political campaigning generates ecological burdens, how existing regulations allocate responsibility for those burdens, and what environmental justice issues arise from current governance arrangements. Using a qualitative desk-review design, the study analyses election and environmental regulations, government reports, scholarly literature, media reports, and other relevant documentary sources through Kuehn’s multidimensional environmental justice framework. The findings show that Indonesian regulations already address recyclable materials, placement, property-owner permission, cleanliness, and removal of campaign materials. However, governance remains less developed after removal, particularly regarding material inventories, traceability, recovery targets, end-of-life management, and allocation of associated costs. The evidence does not establish that particular socioeconomic groups systematically bear disproportionate campaign-related environmental burdens. The study contributes by connecting electoral campaigning, waste governance, and environmental justice and by conceptualising elections as material as well as political processes. It concludes that the principal gap lies in incomplete lifecycle governance rather than regulatory absence. This conclusion implies that stronger material reporting, traceability, and lifecycle accountability are needed to assess environmental performance, clarify responsibility, and support more environmentally accountable electoral governance in Indonesia while providing a basis for more targeted empirical research.
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