Groundwater depletion in Indonesia’s East Bandung Industrial Zone has reached a critical systemic threshold due to decades of unregulated, intensive industrial extraction. This is evidenced by groundwater tables declining by more than 40 meters and land subsidence progressing at rates of 1–10 centimeters annually.

Despite an expansive statutory and regulatory framework, environmental degradation persists unabated, revealing profound structural deficiencies in groundwater governance. This study cross-examines the legal-political root causes of this governance failure and articulates a normative reconstruction model grounded in the paradigms of ecological justice and water sovereignty. Employing a normative juridical research methodology utilizing statutory, conceptual, and case study approaches, this analysis anchors its findings upon Lawrence Friedman’s legal system theory, Edith Brown Weiss's intergenerational equity, Vandana Shiva’s water sovereignty, and Satjipto Rahardjo’s progressive law theory.

The findings demonstrate that ineffective regulatory enforcement stems directly from fragmented institutional coordination, overlapping jurisdictional boundaries, a severe deficit in technology-driven oversight, and an entrenched legal culture that consistently prioritizes short-term macroeconomic expansion over long-term ecological preservation. These conditions sustain an anthropocentric, development-oriented legal-political framework that systematically undermines environmental sustainability and public constitutional rights to water. As its primary theoretical and practical contribution, this study proposes a legal-political reconstruction framework that transforms groundwater from an economic commodity into a public trust resource and ecological asset. This framework outlines enforceable regulatory adjustments, including mandatory zero-net-depletion infrastructure, integrated digital monitoring across provincial authorities, and proactive environmental jurisprudence.