Enhancing Mining Supervision to Protect the Environment through Collaborative Community-Based Monitoring

The degeneration of mining supervision in Indonesia is a direct consequence of the enactment of Law Number 3 of 2020 and Law Number 6 of 2023, which systematically reallocate local supervisory authority and recentralize it within the central government, thereby undermining supervisory effectiveness and impairing environmental justice and the rights of affected communities. This research aims to assess the effectiveness of mining supervision in Indonesia and to formulate an optimization framework through a balanced integration of top-down and bottom-up policy approaches. This research adopts a normative method, employing a statutory approach to examine legal gaps within the regulatory framework governing mineral and coal mining as well as environmental protection. The findings show, first, that the effectiveness of Indonesia’s mining regulatory regime can be classified into two analytical approaches: (1) theoretical and legal (internal) approaches and (2) external approaches grounded in empirical implementation. Second, based on this classification, the research proposes an optimization framework that aligns top-down supervisory mechanisms with bottom-up governance through the concept of ‘community-based monitoring’ as a means to safeguard community rights and distributive justice. This framework is expected to serve as a philosophical, juridical, and sociological foundation for the development of Indonesia’s mining law, at both the primary and secondary regulatory levels