Coping with Forest and Land Fire Regulatory Challenges in Indonesia: an Assessment to the Regulatory Enforcement

Abstract

The uncontrolled expansion of plantation activities within peatland areas is one of the
major trigger causing forest and/or land fire (Fire) in Indonesia. To deal with such problems
including other influencing variables such as land use management, Indonesian law provides
various options of regulatory instrument. The law indicates strong message that the Fire must be
stopped, reflected through stipulations on regulatory instruments including command and control
type of regulation (direct regulation) and alternative approaches to hold compliance. After
exacerbate Fire in 2015, many protests from the people, neighborhood countries and broader
international parties encouraged Indonesian government to be more active in conducting
regulatory enforcement of some regulatory instruments. Some of the examples are the imposed
administrative sanction and lawsuit against companies within 2015 to 2017. However, the
regulatory enforcement has not been assessed as to whether it has obtained significant
improvement to stop Fire. This paper attempt to assess whether regulatory enforcement on
selected Fire cases has met the regulatory objective particularly to stop the Fire. This research finds
that output of the applied enforcement for violation on Fire provisions remains incoherent with the
regulatory objective while the strategy of enforcement is not well-systemized.