Interaction-Driven Organizational Innovation in Public Sector Waste Management: The Role of Partners and Citizens in Bandung City

Abstract

This study examines public sector organizational innovation in sustainable waste management in Bandung City, focusing on how interaction between partner and citizen dimensions shapes organizational change. Using a qualitative documentary case study, evidence was drawn from official documents and secondary empirical studies. The findings show that partnerships with environmental communities, waste banks, and private-sector actors have developed more rapidly than citizen participation. Partners contribute organizational resources, technological support, and bridging functions, while citizen participation in household waste segregation and community-based waste management remains limited and uneven. The 2023 waste crisis created opportunities for organizational experimentation by disrupting established arrangements, increasing pressure for alternative coordination, and expanding engagement with non-governmental actors. However, resulting innovations, including flexible emergency coordination and local waste-processing arrangements, remain largely reactive and only partially institutionalized. The study distinguishes formal collaboration from organizational innovation, which is identified through departures from established routines, changes in resource or coordination arrangements, and implementation or testing of new practices. The study extends Chen et al.’s (2020) partner–citizen perspective by conceptualizing interaction quality—through knowledge exchange, reciprocity, learning, adaptation, and joint problem-solving—as a relational mechanism linking actor contributions to organizational innovation and institutionalization.