ABSTRACT
Nabiel Makarim did not know he would one day be Minister of the Environment, but back in 1993 he took the initiative to create a system of public environmental pollution ratings. In an interview for this book, he told us that the Ministry of Environment was desperate to find some policy that would work. Industry had little respect for their regulations and always had better lawyers. Makarim told us that the industry did not even believe it when the Ministry announced its intentions with the Program for Pollution Control Evaluation and Rating (PROPER); they probably did not think that Indonesia’s environmental enforcement agency, BAPEDAL, would have the necessary capacity. Thus, they were taken by surprise when confronted, quietly and carefully, with the first private disclosure of ratings and saw to their dismay that BAPEDAL had amassed serious amounts of technical information. Some managers even commented that the regulator appeared to know more about the plants than the engineers and managers themselves.
