Abstract
Despite the proliferation of regulatory bans, Indonesia remains the world’s second-largest plastic polluter. This persistence exposes a design failure in current behavioural public policy: interventions typically rely on future-oriented information (e.g., climate change) that fails to override present bias; the tendency to discount future costs for immediate convenience. This paper presents a conceptual framework to address this gap. While acknowledging that structural factors (e.g., waste infrastructure and enforcement) are foundational, we argue that current environmental narratives are often cognitively incompatible with the decision-making context where immediate convenience is prioritized. We propose resolving this by shifting from abstract, long-term appeals to "Immediate Impact Narratives." Drawing on behavioural decision theory, we posit that interventions must artificially create immediate consequences to neutralize temporal discounting. Specifically, framing plastic waste as an immediate visceral risk (e.g., direct microplastic contamination in local food supplies or visible infrastructure blockage) can effectively align sustainable goals with short-term cognitive preferences. This study moves beyond the traditional focus on information deficits, arguing instead for narrative compatibility. It offers a pragmatic pathway for policymakers to bridge the intention-action gap: fighting the "now" (present bias) with the "now" (immediate tangible impact narratives), potentially catalyzing broader civic support for structural improvements.