How Young People in Indonesia see themselves as Environmentalists

ABSTRACT

Very little is known about environmental awareness in Indonesia. This article helps to address that ignorance with data from a survey of 1,000 senior high school students in Yogyakarta and Surabaya. The selected schools participate in environmental education (EE) programmes such as the Eco schools programme and Adiwiyata. Almost 90% of our respondents self-identified as environmentalists – no doubt reflecting their participation in EE programmes. However, low levels of reported environmental behaviours raised questions about what it meant to identify as an environmentalist in Indonesia. We explored students’ understanding of environmental issues at local, national and international levels; what they thought they could do about these issues; the perceived barriers to solving the problems; and who was responsible for solving the problems. Students identified waste/rubbish as the main problem locally, but were not well informed about environmental issues nationally and internationally. They are vague about how to ameliorate environmental problems, reflecting the weakness of EE in problem-solving. They never identified consumption as a problem. According to students, ‘society’ – rather than governments, industry or consumers – is responsible for addressing environmental problems, but they identified society’s lack of environmental knowledge, care and awareness as the main barriers to solving environmental problems.

KEYWORDS:

• Environmental awareness
• environmental behaviour
• environmentalist identity
• Indonesia
• school students

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Lyn Parker is a Professor in Asian Studies at the University of Western Australia and an anthropologist who has specialised in the anthropology of Indonesia. Email: [email protected]

Kelsie Prabawa-Sear is a PhD candidate at the University of Western Australia and is researching how environmental education can contribute to the development of environmentally active youth in Indonesia. Email: [email protected]

Wahyu Kustiningsih is a lecturer in the Department of Sociology, Faculty of Social and Political Science, Universitas Gadjah Mada, Indonesia. Email: [email protected]

ORCID

Lyn Parker http://orcid.org/0000-0003-2218-9919

Notes

1 Australia Research Council Discovery Grant, ‘Fostering Pro-Environment Consciousness and Practice: Environmentalism, Environmentality and Environmental Education in Indonesia’ (DP130100051).

2 We use the terms ‘Global North’ and ‘Global South’ with reservations. As two of the authors are Australians, living in a rich country in the southern hemisphere, Global North feels odd. However, these terms are preferred to ‘developed’ and ‘developing’ due to the assumptions inherent in this pair.

3 Exceptions include Crosby (2013); Nilan and Wibawanto (2015).

4 This article does not cover what we can call ethno-environmental attitudes and knowledge, i.e. local knowledge and ‘traditional’ understanding of local ecologies. While we recognise that these are important in the context of natural resource management at the local level (Laumonier, Bourgeois and Pfund 2008), such understandings are outside the scope of this article.

5 For instance, in 2004 the Minister for the Environment wrote: ‘We must acknowledge that our attention to and consciousness of environmental problems is still very low. This is caused by the fact that most people in Indonesian society have not yet awoken to a real perception of the environment’ (Kantor Menteri Negara Lingkungan Hidup /Office of the State Ministry for the Environment 2004).

6 The World Meteorological Organisation, Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change and other eminent organisations use a 30-year period as the standard reference period with regard to climate change. The period 1961 to 1990 is the last standard reference period and 1991–2020 is the next standard reference period.

7 The questions were grouped according to scale. The first set of four questions was about the local level: A. What is the most important local environmental issue? B. Whose responsibility is it to fix this problem? C. What do you think you can do about it? D. What are the problems/constraints that hinder those efforts? The next set of four questions was about the national level, and the third set about the global level. Piloting of the surveys revealed that we had to change the wording for ‘local’. We settled on ‘Apa masalah lingkungan yang paling penting di tempat tinggal anda saat ini?’ (What is the most important environmental issue where you currently live?).

We would be the first to acknowledge that identifying ‘the most important environmental problem’ at any level is a difficult task. Indeed, we would expect that answers would vary among scientists and environmentalists. We were not seeking ‘the right answer’; rather, we wanted to explore students’ understandings of what they might consider constitute ‘environmental problems’ at different scales.

8 The Adiwiyata programme is a nationwide environmental education programme that was developed in the Ministry of the Environment in 2006. Implementation began with primary schools in Java, in 2006. By 2013, it was claimed that around 1,000 schools were involved, and ‘some 463 schools, in 28 provinces of Indonesia, were awarded the National Adiwiyata Certificate by the Ministry of Environment’ (Global SCP 2015).

9 The structure of the Indonesian education system is described in Jackson and Parker (2008).

10 In senior high school, students must choose one of three streams. The science stream is the most academically prestigious and consists of subjects like physics, chemistry and mathematics. Next comes the social science stream, covering geography, history and economics, and the least prestigious is the languages stream. Not all schools offer all three streams; the most common streams are science and social science. We had 55.1% of our respondents from the more academically prestigious science stream. We tested the significance of subject stream for the survey questions addressed below, and found there was no significance.

11 It is common in schools in Indonesia for students to complete work communally, sharing ideas and answers.

12 The gender aspects of environmentalism in Indonesia are very interesting. Our fieldworkers noted that although girls are disproportionately active as the ‘foot soldiers’ of environment clubs and organisations in schools, the leaders of ENGOs are almost always young men, and this was the pattern found in Blora also (Crosby 2013).

13 According to the 2010 census, 87.18% of the population follow Islam; 6.96% Christianity; 2.91% Catholicism; 1.69% Hinduism and the reminder Buddhism, Confucianism and ‘other’ (BPS 2010a).

14 Vocational schools can be public or private: we had two of each in our sample. Madrasah are administered by the Ministry of Religion (MOR), rather than the Ministry of Education and Culture (MOEC). However, 70% of their curriculum comes from MOEC; the additional curriculum (30%) comes from the MOR.

15 Some exceptions include Dillon, Kelsey and Duque-Aristazabel (1999), Payne (2001).

16 The term in Indonesian, sampah, does not distinguish between waste and rubbish.

17 See Blaikie et al. (2004), Cannon (1994), Warren (2016).

18 This is documented in other articles in this special issue, see Tanu and Parker (2018) and Prabawa-Sear (2018).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Australian Research Council: [Discovery Grant, ‘Fostering Pro-Environment Consciousness and Practice: Environmentalism, Environmentality and Environmental Education in Indonesia’ (DP130100051)].