Governing Drift:Legal Challenges in Indonesia’s Cross-Border Marine Waste Management in Malacca Straits

DOI

10.2991/978-94-6239-785-9_37How to use a DOI?

Keywords

Transboundary Marine Pollution; Marine Waste Management; Maritime Borders; Cross-Border Waste

Abstract

Indonesia is increasingly confronted with transboundary marine debris, with impacts most visible in maritime border areas such as the Malacca Strait. Although Indonesia has enacted an extensive body of domestic environmental legislation and is bound by international duties, most prominently under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), the practical effectiveness of its marine waste governance remains unclear. This article analyzes Indonesia’s fulfillment of its responsibilities to safeguard and conserve the marine environment as stipulated in UNCLOS Articles 192–198, while also highlighting the legal and institutional barriers that hinder enforcement in border areas. Utilizing normative legal research, the study examines primary sources such as UNCLOS provisions, Indonesian environmental regulations, and pertinent regional agreements, while triangulating these materials with secondary scholarship and case-based examples from significant marine zones. This article will examine how efficiently Indonesia has fulfilled its responsibility to safeguard the global marine ecosystem in managing transboundary waste. What problems still make it hard to carry out these duties? The study demonstrates that Indonesia’s obligations conform to established norms. In practice, though, they don’t operate as well because institutional mandates are broken, there isn’t enough enforcement capacity at the subnational level, and there aren’t any enforceable regional institutions that deal with marine debris. Indonesia has not fully utilized the available international legal mechanisms, such as UNCLOS dispute settlement or state responsibility, to address transboundary harm. The article argues that significant improvement requires institutional consolidation and coordination, the creation of regional legal frameworks with clearer compliance expectations, and a more explicit integration of marine environmental protection into Indonesia’s foreign relations and maritime diplomacy.

Copyright

© 2026 The Author(s)

Open Access

Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits any noncommercial use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Dhiana Puspitawati
AU  - Fransiska A. Susanto
PY  - 2026
DA  - 2026/10/07
TI  - Governing Drift:Legal Challenges in Indonesia’s Cross-Border Marine Waste Management in Malacca Straits
BT  - Proceedings of the UUM 13th International Legal Conference 2025 (UUMILC 2025)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 540
EP  - 554
SN  - 2667-128X
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/978-94-6239-785-9_37
DO  - 10.2991/978-94-6239-785-9_37
ID  - Puspitawati2026
ER  -