Environmental Justice and Community Rights in Natural Resource Governance in Indonesia

Abstract

Indonesia's extensive natural resource utilization has generated significant environmental and social challenges, particularly for local and Indigenous communities whose livelihoods and territories are directly affected by resource exploitation. This study examines the protection of community rights within Indonesian environmental law, identifies legal challenges affecting environmental justice, and formulates a governance model for strengthening community protection in natural resource management. The study employs normative legal research using statutory, case, and conceptual approaches. Primary legal materials consist of constitutional provisions, legislation, regulations, and relevant judicial decisions, while secondary materials include scholarly literature on environmental law, human rights, environmental justice, and natural resource governance. The findings indicate that Indonesian environmental law provides a substantial normative basis for environmental and community rights, yet substantive protection remains constrained by regulatory fragmentation, institutional restructuring, uncertainty in customary rights recognition, limited meaningful participation, and weaknesses in accountability and access to justice. Environmental justice requires the integration of distributive, procedural, recognition, and corrective dimensions within natural resource governance. Based on these findings, the study proposes a Participatory Environmental Governance Model (PEGM) integrating legal recognition, transparency and access to environmental information, meaningful community participation, collaborative decision-making and monitoring, accountability, and access to justice. The model positions communities as rights-bearing actors and environmental governance partners rather than passive recipients of development decisions. The study contributes a normative framework for reconciling natural resource utilization with environmental sustainability, community rights, human rights, and substantive environmental justice.