Introduction
The two components of any successful governmental policy are the consistent educating of the general public about the issues and the ability to update and reform the legislative rules and regulations on the issue in question. There are many challenges concerning protecting the environment in Indonesia, which is why the assistance from international bodies, such as the International Development Law Organization, can be very useful and appreciated in terms of sharing experiences and ideas. It also provides the opportunity to look at the challenges from the different perspectives in order to come up with the strategies and solutions.
However, for the training in environmental law to be effective, it needs to consider national, multicultural, and global sides of the problem. Therefore, the objective of this paper is to analyze factors of differentiation between global and multicultural education, to discuss the preparation methods to the workshop on the environmental issues, to identify the role of instructional interventions in reducing future degradation of Indonesia’s environment, and to address measures of education and strategies for improving enforcement of environmental law.
The differences between global and multicultural education
One of the substantially important aspects of the implementation of any change to the governance, policy, or law is public participation (“Lessons learned from the Indonesia-Australia Specialised Training Project, Environmental Law and Enforcement”, 2006). The reason for that is the representation of different perspectives on the issue that opinions of different public groups can provide. This framework also functions on the level of international environmental law, as we can see from the manner in which the environmental law and enforcement workshop were held.
The global education presupposes the standardized approach to the problem in question, sharing the experience of the successful example of the environmental policy in order to implement it in Indonesia. The upside of this approach is that it allows minimizing the influence of powerful businesses in the process of legislative decision-making and affecting governmental structures and law enforcement in the developing countries.
The global education model, in such a way, guarantees that the violations will not be overlooked by the local authorities and judges. Among the participants of the environmental law and enforcement workshop, there were judges and representatives of the law enforcement who could obtain some experiences from that. This approach is oriented on the internationalization of the environmental law, the global environmental education, according to the universalized standards for all the countries, which would guarantee the fair share of mutual responsibility for the state of the environment for each country. Examples of the global education can be, for instance, training in the environmental policy and enforcement practices that were already applied by other countries and at the disposal of international environment protection practices.
However, some may see the minor controversy of that approach since its acting on the standardized basis does not provide flexible solutions for the countries that do not have resources to address all the issues of the environmental policies at the same time, and has to deal with the problems at hand first. That is why the global education needs to be combined with the multicultural education.
The latter applies to the similar set of problems, but it has more specific methods various depending on the specifics of the country. For example, environmental issues in Indonesia include problems with the forestry that has been extensively exploited during the industrialization of the country and pollution of marine and coastline territories. Those are the problems at hand, and in terms of effective solutions, they should be resolved first.
The multicultural education, in this case, is teaching the ways of adapting the international environmental practices to the specifics of the region and searching for a means to preserve the diversity both in the environment and cultural framework (e.g. not to impose the laws). At the workshop, training in multicultural education, for example, concerned the question of how to settle down the disputes between the environmental agencies, i.e. local and governmental authorities, in Indonesia when it is unclear which of them has enough competence. The multicultural training, in this case, helped to adopt the experience with flexibility.
The preparation for the workshop on the environmental issues
The challenge of the workshop was to encourage the attendees to address each of many environmental problems in Indonesia with the understanding of their interrelatedness and importance of every single one of them. The manner in which the workshop with such an objective should be conducted is to divide the issues for the discussion into smaller sections, which will allow drawing attention to each, or at the very least, most of them. However, in order not to disperse the attention of the attendees, all the sections of the workshop should be leaning towards the mutual agenda, which in this case, emphasized the necessity to empower the institutional bodies, governmental and local authorities so that they can enforce the environmental law.
The role of instructional interventions in reducing future degradation of Indonesia’s environment
The main problem of the poor functioning of the environmental law in Indonesia is the bigger industries and businesses violating the regulations. The unstable societal and governmental institutions and the disputes about their competence in dealing with violations in the industrial sector lead the manipulations and abuse of power of the major industries. With the strong institutionalized governmental and law enforcement structures, it would be possible to influence the violators by the means of interventions and bring them to justice.
The measures to improve the functionality of the enforcement organs include judicial trainings, the police trainings, and reforms in the system of prosecution of the violations of the environmental law.
Educating measures to prevent future damage to the environment and strategies for improving enforcement of environmental law
One of the main assets in improving the environmental situation in the country is the awareness of the public about the issues (“Lessons learned from the Indonesia-Australia Specialised Training Project, Environmental Law and Enforcement”, 2006). Educating citizens about the environmental issues is vital for a number of reasons. Firstly, the experience of the developed countries shows that there is a potential for managing the problems of the damaged environment with the cooperation of members of society. And secondly, in Indonesia, the institutionalization will take time, but the non-governmental bodies can start influencing the business corporations quicker if they have the support of the citizens.
Conclusion
Training in the environmental law and enforcement is conducted in the frameworks of global and multicultural education. The introduction and update of new environmental policies should take place at the level of improving enforcement and institutionalization, as well as educating the citizens and encouraging non-governmental protection of the environment.
References
Lessons learned from the Indonesia-Australia Specialised Training Project, Environmental Law and Enforcement. (2006). Development Law Update 6(6), 1-12. Web.