ASEAN Environmental Democracy Observatory

In 2010, the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) launched the Bali Guidelines for the Development of National Legislation on Access to Information, Public Participation, and Justice in Environmental Matters to support countries in the implementation of Principle 10 of the 1992 Rio Declaration on Environment and Development. The guidelines are widely recognised as the first framework that specifically aims to improve global environmental democracy.

21 October 2024

Location

Theme

Environmental democracy

Environmental Democracy Observatory

In 2015, in collaboration with partners around the world, The Access Initiative (TAI) and the World Resources Institute (WRI) launched the Environmental Democracy Index (EDI), which evaluates 70 countries across 75 legal indicators established by the Bali Guidelines. Among these 70 countries were 6 Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) member states: Indonesia (overall index score: 1.80), Thailand (1.38), the Philippines (1.35), Vietnam (1.16), Cambodia (0.76), and Malaysia (0.58). Since then, the index has not been updated.

Through this ASEAN Environmental Democracy Observatory (EDO) initiative, the Westminster Foundation for Democracy (WFD) in collaboration with the Research Centre for Politics and Government (PolGov) of Universitas Gadjah Mada have reworked the methodology and expanded its scope to cover the implementation - in addition to legal formal - requirements of environmental democracy. In the longer term, WFD and PolGov plan to establish an EDO community of practice to undertake a regular assessment to update the observatory with the aim of incentivising governments to "race to the top" in upholding environmental democratic rights.

Methodology

Upon conducting an initial assessment on the 2015 EDI, we concluded that the methodology employed an approach that leans heavily towards the legal formal aspects of environmental democracy. Our updated methodology intensifies the extent to which a country is evaluated not only in terms of regulatory compliance in line with the Bali Guidelines, but also the multifaceted aspects of policy implementation. By strengthening this aspect of the methodology, the observatory will be able to fairly assess each country based on their progress and then propose recommendations for improvement.

Our methodology utilises three primary strategies:

A supply-demand framework

A supply-demand framework which is frequently used in public policy analysis and specifically in the evaluation of policy implementation. Here, supply pertains to government regulation and demand pertains to activities of civil society or citizens in relation to the government––including in exercising the three pillars of environmental democracy: access to information, public participation, and access to justice. The framework is part of the bigger concept of the relationship between statehood and citizenship, albeit adapted to the context of environmental issues, against a macropolitical backdrop that is tailored in accordance with the type of a country’s political regime and the quality of citizenship. Public perception of environmental issues can either be too abstract or too technical depending on their levels of expertise and awareness. As such, it is important to underscore that not all citizens have a sufficient understanding of their impact, root causes, and significance. In natural resource governance, for example, some citizens could be able to draw links between diminishing access to water and increasing mining activities, whereas others would think of the two as entirely separate issues. To an extent, this can explain why environmental experts and activists tend to have a higher demand for access to public information compared to the average citizens. Therefore, our assessment methodology emphasises on the analyses between demands from civil society organisations as a representation of citizens and supply in terms of government laws and regulations.

A greater emphasis on access to justice

Our approach places a much greater emphasis on the access to justice pillar of environmental democracy. We argue that access to justice is ultimately the core pillar that underscores the importance of the EDO. Access to information and public participation are clearly important in any democratic context, but they are meaningless "without adequate legal protection of the rights and opportunities afforded under national law." In this sense, we treat access to information and public participation as prerequisites to access to justice.

The assessment of policy implementation

We incorporated the assessment of policy implementation into the EDO methodology. The EDI assigns a significantly higher proportion of the scoring based on the availability of regulations and less on the quality and effectiveness of their implementation in a country to another. This could explain why Indonesia, for example, ranked 16th (worldwide) and first (Asia) out of the 70 countries assessed in the 2015 EDI despite limited evidence to substantiate that the relevant policies and their enforcement have been sufficient and effective in ensuring environmental democracy at the time as well as in recent years. By updating the methodology to include proportional scoring of the effectiveness of policy implementation, we expect that the observatory will produce more reliable and accurate picture of the state of environmental democracy in Southeast Asia.

The three pillars of Environmental Democracy

An icon of a document with a magnifying glass

Access to information

The ability of citizens to gain access to public information on the state of the environment and public authority actions on the environment freely, effectively, and timely without any legal or procedural restrictions.

Public participation

The ability of citizens to participate in all stages of environmental decision-making freely, effectively, and timely without any fear from prosecutions or harassment.

An icon of weighing machine indicating equality

Access to justice

The ability of any natural or legal persons to access independent and impartial justice mechanisms to challenge public authority decisions, actions or inactions, and policies on the environment.