Challenges and opportunities of digitalising waste management: Towards a socially and environmentally just green transition in Indonesian smart cities

project summary

This project (DigSmart) examines the role of the digitalisation of waste management (WM) in the development of sustainable smart cities, and under which conditions it can foster a more inclusive, equitable, and environmentally just green transition in Indonesia. Indonesia is among the top 10 greenhouse gas emitters worldwide and a majority of these emissions stem from waste produced in cities. This waste crisis coincides with Indonesia’s rapid digitalisation as evident in the government’s decision to create ‘Smart Cities’ across the archipelago. To develop recommendations for achieving a ‘just green transition’, DigSmart combines insights from anthropology, data science, communication studies, and environmental science, which is necessary to understand both the forces that govern the current waste crisis and the effectiveness and impacts of new digital intermediations within existing sociocultural landscapes.

DigSmart will first investigate how the waste crisis and digital technologies are problematized in green transition (media) discourses in Indonesia. In long-term ethnographic research, we will then study how digital technologies are developed and deployed in the WM sector, and how this contributes to, challenges, or transforms existing WM systems, practices, and knowledge. In parallel, we explore the environmental and socioeconomic costs and benefits of the deployment of digital technologies for the green transition, which requires both ethnographic and environmental science tools. Here we address the tendency to emphasise the benefits of digital technology in solving environmental issues, while neglecting its associated ‘costs’ such as e-waste and social inequalities as well as the sociocultural contexts that it is supposed to be used in. We problematize that the use of digital green solutions occurs within pre-existing power structures and investigate how this can amplify and reproduce social and organisational inequalities. For us, this includes avoiding Java-centrism that stands for one-sided scholarly interest, but also disparity in infrastructural provisions between the inner islands (Java and Bali) and the rest of Indonesia. Through our case studies, we explore both the centre and the so-called periphery. Working and collaborating across these research trajectories and sites, DigSmart aims to enhance capacity building across the sociotechnical and multi-scalar domain of WM and within and between core research institutions in Indonesia.