Home affairs ministry ties fiscal incentives to waste performance, awarding five Sulawesi governments Rp15 billion

A Makassar ceremony that attached money to waste performance

The Ministry of Home Affairs closed the Sulawesi leg of its Apresiasi Pemerintah Daerah Berprestasi 2026 on the evening of Friday 18 September 2026, gathering governors, mayors and regents in Makassar for the second batch of a recognition exercise the ministry runs with detikcom. Minister of Home Affairs Muhammad Tito Karnavian presented the awards in person across four categories. One of them was pengelolaan sampah dan lingkungan asri, waste management and a clean environment.

In the provincial tier of that category, South Sulawesi was named best performer and Southeast Sulawesi second. Governor Andi Sudirman Sulaiman and Governor Andi Sumangerukka collected the trophies directly from the minister. South Sulawesi received a fiscal incentive of Rp6 billion, and Southeast Sulawesi Rp4.5 billion.

In the city tier, Parepare in South Sulawesi placed first and received Rp2 billion, Palu in Central Sulawesi placed second with Rp1.5 billion, and Kotamobagu in North Sulawesi placed third with Rp1 billion. Mayor Tasming Hamid accepted for Parepare, Mayor Hadianto Rasyid for Palu, and Deputy Mayor Rendy Virgiawan Mangkat for Kotamobagu. Taken together, the waste category alone moved Rp15 billion of fiscal incentive into five Sulawesi budgets in a single evening.

The assessment behind the awards covered integrated waste management, environmental quality and the practical effect of regional programmes on residents rather than documentation alone. The ministry framed the category around Gerakan Indonesia ASRI, the national movement for a safe, healthy, clean and beautiful environment, and around the reduce, reuse and recycle hierarchy that anchors Indonesian waste policy.

How the incentive tiers are structured

The Sulawesi ceremony is one stop in a national circuit. Batch II of the 2026 awards has already run in Batam for Sumatra, in Bali for Java and Bali, in Balikpapan for Kalimantan, and in Jakarta for Maluku and Nusa Tenggara, with Papua and Sulawesi completing the map. Regions compete inside their own tier, so provinces are measured against provinces, cities against cities, and regencies against regencies.

Speaking at the Maluku and Nusa Tenggara ceremony held at Hotel Bidakara in Jakarta on 17 September, Tito Karnavian set out the mechanics plainly.

The reward takes the form of a fiscal incentive. Some receive 2 billion, some 1.5 billion, some 1 billion.

Those figures describe the city and regency tiers. The provincial tier in Sulawesi carried larger sums, at Rp6 billion and Rp4.5 billion, which reflects the wider span of coordination a province is expected to deliver across its member districts. In the housing category the reward converts into physical output instead of cash, with the top performer receiving 300 units under the self help housing stimulus programme, the second 250 units and the third 200 units.

Bachril Bakri, acting inspector general at the Ministry of Home Affairs, described the scoring as a joint exercise rather than a ministry judgement. Relevant ministries and agencies take part, and the indicators are drawn from data each of those bodies already maintains. That matters for a sector where self reported claims have historically been hard to compare between regions. Tito framed the wider purpose as motivation rather than ranking for its own sake, expressing the hope that the event would encourage healthy competition and build communication between regional heads, and that regions outside the winners' circle would treat the result as a reason to improve.

The track record behind the Sulawesi winners

The awards did not arrive from nowhere. South Sulawesi had already been recognised in February 2026 by the Ministry of Environment as the best provincial mentor for waste management, an award presented at the national waste management coordination meeting in Jakarta. The province ranked second nationally, behind East Java, for the number of regencies and cities moving toward clean status, with certificates going to Bone, Parepare, Maros, Pinrang, Sidrap and Bantaeng. Governor Andi Sudirman Sulaiman tied that result to strengthening synergy with district governments, particularly through the ASRI programme.

Parepare's first place in the city tier follows a deliberate provincial decision to treat the city as a model. Earlier in 2026 the province asked Parepare to prepare a grand design for integrated waste management and positioned it as a pilot for the Gerakan Indonesia ASRI rollout, building on a national waste management ranking that had already placed the city among the country's stronger performers. Palu's recognition rests on a similar base. Mayor Hadianto Rasyid described the award as evidence that sustained effort produces results, saying that Palu continues to move, to put itself in order, and to prove that commitment to the environment can produce achievement at the national level.

South Sulawesi also offers one of the clearer operational data points of the year. After the province and Makassar ended open dumping at TPA Tamangapa in Antang on 1 August 2026 and restricted the site to residue only, daily arrivals at the landfill fell from roughly 1,000 tonnes to between 200 and 300 tonnes. That is the kind of measurable shift the new assessment framework is designed to reward.

Performance based funding against the 2029 target

The national context gives the incentive its weight. Indonesia generates 144,562 tonnes of waste a day across a population of 285.4 million, growing at about 1.48 percent a year, and roughly 25 percent of that volume is currently managed. The country operates 522 final disposal sites, of which about 70 percent still function as open dumps, alongside 40,267 smaller processing facilities including TPS3R units and waste banks. Vinda Damayanti Ansjar, deputy for waste and hazardous materials management at the Ministry of Environment, has set out a staged path in which 2026 concentrates on governance, ending open dumping and reactivating material recovery facilities, 2027 turns to large scale facility construction, and 2028 and 2029 close the gap toward the national medium term development plan target of full waste management by 2029.

Against that timetable, the Rp15 billion distributed in Makassar is modest in absolute terms. Its significance lies elsewhere. Waste management has long sat with regional governments as a mandate carrying thin discretionary funding, and the constraint most often cited by district environment agencies is not ambition but operating budget for collection fleets, sorting labour and facility maintenance. An incentive that lands as untied fiscal support, awarded on verified performance, addresses exactly that pressure point. It also converts a policy goal into a comparable score, which is a precondition for any serious performance based transfer at larger scale.

The direction is consistent with the signal given in Batang on 30 July 2026, when President Prabowo Subianto asked for the waste problem to be resolved by the end of 2027 and proposed a national cleanest city competition carrying Rp20 billion for each of the five best performers. What happened in Makassar shows that idea maturing into an operating mechanism with named categories, cross ministry indicators and money actually disbursed.

Sirkularium's view for government and public institutions

For provincial and district leaders, the practical lesson is that waste performance is now being measured with data held outside the region's own reporting, and that the measurement carries a budget consequence. Regions preparing for the next cycle would do well to ensure their SIPSN reporting is current and reconciled with landfill weighbridge records, because comparability is what the scheme rewards.

A competition that pays for verified results changes the internal conversation about waste from a cost line to be contained into a performance line that can earn its own funding.

For finance and planning agencies, the more interesting question is what these incentives are spent on. A one off Rp1 billion to Rp6 billion transfer is best deployed where it unlocks recurring capacity, for example sorting equipment at TPS3R sites, organic processing that permanently removes tonnage from landfill haulage, or the operating subsidy that keeps a material recovery facility running through its first difficult year. Spending it on a single asset that then lacks a maintenance budget would waste the opportunity.

Three things are worth watching. The first is whether the Sulawesi results are followed by published scorecards, since transparency on the indicators would let regions outside the winners' circle diagnose their own gaps. The second is whether the scheme is repeated in 2027 with a larger envelope, which would confirm it as a standing instrument rather than a one year gesture. The third is whether the assessment begins to weight upstream reduction, separation at source and recycling rates more heavily than end of pipe cleanliness, because the 2029 target cannot be met through disposal improvements alone. On the evidence of Makassar, the instrument is sound and the incentive is real. The question now is scale.