Reconstructing Environmental Criminal Law Enforcement through Restorative Justice: Legal Substance, Structure, and Culture in the Context of Bitung City
Abstract
Environmental criminal law enforcement in Indonesia continues to rely on a retributive paradigm centred on custodial punishment and monetary fines, an approach that frequently fails to repair the ecological damage it is meant to redress. This article addresses that gap by formulating a reconstruction of environmental criminal law enforcement grounded in restorative justice, using Bitung City, a port and industrial hub within a designated Special Economic Zone in North Sulawesi, as its locus of analysis. The research is normative-juridical in nature, combining a statute approach and a conceptual approach with secondary case material drawn from published legal instruments, court decisions, and government and academic reports concerning Bitung’s industrial development; no primary interview data were collected, and this limitation is disclosed explicitly. Drawing on Lawrence Friedman’s three elements of a legal system, namely substance, structure, and culture, together with Braithwaite’s responsive-regulation model and the ecological-justice literature, the analysis finds that Indonesia’s environmental legal substance narrowly confines restorative case-closure to minor offences, its enforcement structure remains fragmented across civil-servant investigators, police, prosecutors, and local government, and its enforcement culture still measures success by case volume rather than restored ecological function. The article proposes a reconstructed model that integrates restorative mechanisms across all three elements, positions ecological restoration as a primary rather than supplementary sanction, and cautiously considers ecocentric doctrines that recognise the environment itself as a rights-bearing subject. The article contributes an operational, three-dimensional framework for reconciling legal certainty with ecological justice in industrial coastal cities such as Bitung.