Integrating Sustainable Environmental Law and Maqāṣid al-‎Sharī‘ah: A Preventive Legal Framework for Disaster ‎Governance in Disaster-Prone Regions

Abstract

Disasters in disaster-prone countries are increasingly recognized as the cumulative outcome of environmental degradation and regulatory failure rather than purely natural events; however, existing scholarship on environmental constitutionalism, climate litigation, and ecosystem-based disaster risk reduction (Eco-DRR) has paid limited attention to how statutory fragmentation weakens preventive disaster governance at the domestic level. This study addresses that gap by examining the coherence of Indonesia’s environmental protection, disaster management, and spatial planning laws through a normative doctrinal methodology employing statutory, conceptual, and comparative legal analysis. The research systematically maps regulatory mandates and evaluates whether sustainability principles operate as binding pre-disaster obligations. The findings reveal four forms of fragmentation conceptual, functional, enforcement, and structural that prevent environmental norms from being institutionally integrated into disaster mitigation frameworks. Although precautionary and intergenerational equity principles are formally embedded in environmental law, they remain disconnected from disaster risk mapping, ecosystem protection mandates, and spatial enforcement mechanisms. By reframing environmental degradation as a legally constructed pre-disaster violation, this study advances environmental constitutionalism and resilience theory, positioning sustainable environmental law as the normative foundation of preventive disaster governance while highlighting the complementary normative role of Islamic harm-prevention principles. The study implies that effective disaster mitigation requires mandatory cross-sectoral harmonization mechanisms integrating environmental licensing, spatial governance, and disaster risk reduction into a coherent and enforceable legal architecture capable of strengthening long-term ecological resilience.