Who Pays for Economic Growth? Unequal Ecological Risks in Indonesia’s Eight-Percent Growth Model

Abstract

Indonesia’s ambition to achieve rapid economic growth, including an eight-percent growth target, raises an important question about how the environmental and social costs of development are distributed. Economic growth indicators generally capture production, investment, and income while providing limited insight into pollution, ecosystem degradation, displacement, public health impacts, and the loss of community livelihoods. This article examines Indonesia’s growth-oriented development model through the concept of environmental externalities and distributive environmental justice. It asks whether the benefits generated by infrastructure, extractive industries, industrialization, and resource-based development are distributed proportionately with the risks they create. The analysis focuses on the structural separation between economic beneficiaries and communities exposed to ecological damage. Such disparities may occur across regions, social classes, generations, and urban-rural spaces. The article argues that environmental costs are frequently treated as external to economic calculations even when they generate substantial long-term burdens for communities and public institutions. Consequently, headline economic growth may coexist with declining environmental quality and increasing social vulnerability. A more comprehensive assessment of development should therefore incorporate ecological costs, social reproduction, public health, and intergenerational justice into economic decision-making. The article concludes that sustainable growth requires moving from a narrow growth-centered paradigm toward a model in which environmental integrity and social well-being constitute fundamental measures of economic success.