Enhancing Sustainability Development for Waste Management through National–Local Policy Dynamics

Abstract

Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) require nations to increase policy coherence for sustainable development, including waste management (WM). However, the policy implementation of sustainable WM in Indonesia is still questionable because pollution was detected from poor WM practices. Hence, a question arises: is the WM policy coherent with sustainable development across the government levels? This article aims to analyze the WM policy coherence for sustainable development. We chose the South Tangerang municipality for this study since this area represents a municipality that faces an overcapacity landfill problem. Our study undertakes a policy analysis of WM policy documents at government levels and uses interviews with regulators to strengthen our analysis. The results show that the WM policy is still far from sustainable development, that the municipal or provincial governments delayed translating the national WM policy, and that WM policy needs to shift from a linear to a circular economy of resources. We recommend for future studies further explore the WM stakeholder’s connection to global, national, provincial, and local governments. The recommendation of our study for policymakers at all government levels is to consider circular economy concepts in implementing WM policy.