Does the Environment Matter? Assesing Indonesia Public Service Innovation Towards Environmental Issues

Environmental issues in the Sustainable Developments Goals (SDGs) create complexities such as increasingly limited resources, ambitious goals, and dispersed interests. The government remains a vital determinant in efforts to overcome environmental degradation in achieving the SDGs. In the notion of public sector innovation, it is crucial to overcome environmental problems with various challenges, namely using new approaches to increasingly complex problems. Therefore, this study looks at various patterns of public service innovation related to environmental issues. This study is in the context of Indonesia, which has so far struggled to achieve the SDGs goals. The researcher then analyzed the Public Service Innovation Competition report document from 2014 to 2021, which became Indonesia’s sole representation of public sector innovation data. In the end, it was found that public service innovations in Indonesia tended to be less focused on environmental issues. However, at every level of government, both Ministries and Regional Governments, innovations related to the environment have emerged. On the other hand, most institutions tend to create innovations regarding waste management, but only a few other sectors, such as energy and clean water. In the spatial domain of institutions, local governments with a rural character tend to create more innovations related to the environment than local governments with an urban character. In the spatial area of Java and Outside Java, it turns out that local governments outside Java have created more innovations related to the environment than local governments on the island of Java.