The WRI believes Indonesia is capable of providing the needed information to residents and is working toward doing so.
The WRI released a report on Aug. 30 about transparency and the struggle for clean water in Indonesia, Mongolia and Thailand.
The report found that many Indonesians don’t know whether their water is safe for irrigation, bathing or drinking.
The WRI, a Washington-based thinktank, worked with local organizations and residents to obtain information about their water that should be readily available by law.
Some of that information is supposed to be proactively provided to communities by the government; some of it should be available through formal information requests.
In many cases when there was a response, government officials didn’t know how to find the information requested and had to ask residents for the specific names of the documents they wanted.
Much of the proactively released information resided in official publications or websites, not in local forums more accessible to communities.
Water use doubled in Indonesia from 2000 to 2015, according to the WEPA, which noted in the report: “The country is facing a crisis of unprecedented proportions with the decreasing availability of clean water resulting from environmental degradation and pollution.” The Ciujung River in western Java rapidly became polluted in the 1990s when pulp and paper mills, as well as other companies, began discharging into it.
It compares the situation in Indonesia to that in Thailand, where the WRI found information was more readily available: “The fact that Thailand passed its RTI [right-to-information] law in 1997 — over a decade before Indonesia and Mongolia — may indicate that information request response rates can improve over time as government officials develop the knowledge and capacity to implement the law, while at the same time the public’s knowledge of the law deepens.” Excell said the WRI brought officials from Indonesia to the United States to see how information about local waterways is effectively reported there.
This is what officials should prioritize, Excell said, as they work to improve transparency.