After the New Order: Space, Politics, and Jakarta

Chapter 6. Green Governmentality

119 Chapter 6 Green Governmentality The waterfront debate discussed in the previous chapter took place at the end of Suharto’s rule (1966–1988). It sparked controversy and it could be seen as setting in motion a “green movement” for the reformasi of the postSuharto era. The debate has broadened the public’s awareness of the importance of preserving the city’s green assets and gives direction for urban development as well as social and ecological movements. It has also made “Go Green” a new slogan for people living in Jakarta today (figure 6.1). Perhaps more importantly, it shows how environmental and sociopolitical issues are inextricably intertwined. In this chapter, I conceive the green discourse as a “technology of thought” that constitutes what Foucault would call a political rationality of governance.1 I draw out the governmentality side of the aspiration for a green environment in the context of post-Suharto Jakarta. I delineate the reworking of “green environment ” in Jakarta as a domain of both political and ethical discourses that operate at the level of subject formation. I argue that a new configuration of power—based on collaboration among experts, clusters of communities, and the city government—is taking shape to govern the urban population. It does not overlook the environment and the impending hazards of global warming and efforts to make Jakarta and Indonesia a better place to live. Instead, this configuration offers a different context for an understanding of the ways in which the political cultures of the government and those of the citizen groups intersect in transforming the city. Approaching Green Discourses “Go Green” has become a catchall for urban development for people living in Jakarta today. This chapter looks at the ways in which different actors, 120 after the new order institutions, and interpretative communities encounter and contest each other through various green environmental discourses. It looks at the increasing interest in a green environment among activists, architects, and middle-class residents of Jakarta who work in tandem with municipal efforts to provide more open green spaces for the city. It shows how the dynamic integration of society and nature occurs in the context of neoliberal model of governance and the specific sociopolitical crisis of Indonesia following the collapse of the authoritarian New Order regime of President Suharto. The massive exploitation of natural resources under the neoliberal (or neocolonial) order means that it is no longer possible to argue that the state is (or, in the case of Indonesia, ever was) the protector of the environment for all citizens. With an increasing number of Figure 6.1. “Go Green,” a message from the Jakarta city government, South Jakarta, 2010. Photo: L. Kurnia and A. Kusno. green governmentality 121 people living in deteriorating social and physical environments (beyond the state’s capacity to repair), the deployment of green imagery is the end point of an exhausted regime of mass environmental exploitation. In this context, I show how metropolitan citizens and local authorities have mobilized to produce a so-called green environment. Their efforts to alleviate environmental degradation, however, are inseparable from their attempts to gain sociopolitical legitimacy. Since the end of Suharto’s rule, an increasing body of work has attempted to chart the changes in Indonesian urban regional governance, social movements , and the infrastructural space of urbanization.2 These authors have shown the complexity of decentralized governance in relation to cities and to democratic development within Indonesia. This chapter seeks to contribute to the discussion they have opened up on postauthoritarian Jakarta by considering the actions of individuals and groups in civil society as the locus of authority . Specifically this chapter aims at an analysis of power and knowledge by focusing on the green environment discourses, following the lead of Michel Foucault’s work on governmentality.3 Thus I highlight the much publicized “green turn” in urban governance in Jakarta as neither ideological nor truthful (regardless of its merits) but as a pedagogical framework for managing social imagination in resolving the political crisis of postauthoritarian Indonesia. I tease out, discursively, different modes of representations and contexts that constitute this green imagination and consider the various events and practices in Foucauldian terms, as ways of governing the conduct of individuals and groups at a particular historical moment.4 I start with a consideration of the current initiatives of the middle-class citizen...