'Impoldering Indonesia': Of Universal Water Technology and Unfinishedness in Semarang
Lukas Ley2025, The Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology
https://doi.org/10.1080/14442213.2025.2476949visibility
…
description
19 pages
link
1 file
Sign up for access to the world's latest research
checkGet notified about relevant papers
checkSave papers to use in your research
checkJoin the discussion with peers
checkTrack your impact
Abstract
This article interrogates the social life and afterlife of a Dutch flood control project, or polder, in Semarang, Indonesia. While arguing that there is no such thing as a typical Dutch polder, the article shows how Dutch attempts to claim universal hydraulic knowledge allow partners of a bilateral development project to discuss the sociotechnical contours of an anti-flooding project and legitimise urgent infrastructural intervention. Only upon failing to implement the original polder design and achieve the main project target—involving local residents in bottom-up maintenance and operation—Indonesian and Dutch actors question each other’s expertise and understanding of the problem, blaming both Dutch and Indonesian political culture for failure. Despite remaining unfinished, the polder continues to do important work: people in the Indonesian government claim that it makes coastal neighbourhoods resilient to climate change, while Dutch actors frame it as an initial experiment. The article ends with a discussion of how failed attempts at universalising technology still pave the way for economic exchange. The incomplete polder played a significant role in selling Dutch expertise to flood-plagued cities in Indonesia and Southeast Asia, which suggests an ‘impoldering’ of hydrological knowledge in the age of global flooding.
Related papers
“Dry Feet For All”: Flood Management and Chronic Time in Semarang, Indonesia
Austrian Journal of South-East Asian Studies, 2016
This article describes flood management in poor communities of Semarang, a second-tier city on the north coast of Central Java, Indonesia. Using ethnographic material from participant observation and interviews, the article argues that flood management upholds an ecological status quo – a socioecological system that perpetuates the potential of crisis and structures of vulnerability. While poor residents have developed coping mechanisms, such community efforts follow the logic of maintaining a precarious minimum of safety. Designed in 2009, Dutch-Indonesian anti-flood infrastructure (polder) is supposed to put an end to tidal flooding, locally called rob. As a short-term project, the polder promises to regulate water levels and improve the lives of local residents. While it wants to make flood control transparent and accountable to riverside communities, the project ultimately fails to escape the institutional logic of chronic crisis management. By investigating the temporality and politics of the polder project, this article aims at contributing empirical and theoretical insights to scholarship on socioecological conflicts and crisis.
Why politics matters: an insight from Indonesia's flood management
New Mandala - College of Asia & the Pacific, the ANU, 2021
Patronage politics, like those predominant in South Kalimantan, are a crucial factor exacerbating climate disasters, and governments rely heavily on inadequate technological solutions to mitigate floods.
Water, Water Everywhere: Toward Participatory Solutions to Chronic Urban Flooding in Jakarta
Pacific Affairs, 2015
Jakarta has entered an era of chronic flooding that is annually affecting tens of thousands of people, most of whom are crowded into low-income neighbourhoods in flood-prone areas of the city. As the greater Jakarta mega-urban region-Jabodetabek-approaches the 30 million population mark and the sources of flooding become ever more complex through combinations of global climate change and human transformations of the urban landscape, government responses to flooding pursued primarily through canal improvements fall further behind rising flood risks. Years of field observation and archival and ethnographic research are brought together in a political ecology framework to answer key questions concerning how government responses to flooding continue without significant participation of affected residents, who are being compelled to relocate when floods occur. How do urban development processes in Jakarta contribute to chronic flooding? How does flooding arise from and further generate compound disasters that cascade through Jakarta's expanding mega-urban region? What is the potential for neighbourhoods and communities to collaboratively respond through socially and environmentally meaningful initiatives and activities to address chronic flooding? Floods, urban land use changes, spatial marginalization, and community mobilization open new political dynamics and possibilities for addressing floods in ways that also assist neighbourhoods in gaining resilience. The urgency of floods as problems to be solved is often interpreted as a need for immediate solutions ____________________
The 2007 Jakarta Flood and The Debate On Jakarta’s Future Water Infrastructure
This paper examines the debate in the wake of the 2007 flood in Jakarta, the biggest one to occur in the city’s history. By analyzing textual sources both online and in the archives as well as interviews with several actors in the debate, I demonstrate that a new sociopolitical condition in Indonesia facilitated a vibrant discourse in the wake of a so-called “natural disaster.” In a democratizing society such as Indonesia, state actors no longer monopolized the social production of a “risk object” or a source of danger or harm. I show that the Indonesian public, who participated in the debate, shaped “networks of risk objects” either by “emplacing” a risk object (i.e. defining an entity as an object and linking it to a potential harm) or by “displacing” it (i.e. challenging the existence of a risky object or delinking it from a putative danger) (Hilgartner 1992). These non-state actors managed to insert themselves into a sphere once dominated by the technocrats, in large part because the press was no longer controlled by the state. In doing so they exposed the messiness and vulnerability of the city’s water management system. The “risk objects” they identified run the whole gamut of entities that make up the entire Jakarta’s water management sociotechnical system, which includes water technologies, laws, practices, institutions, conditions, policies, and the environment.
From rising water to floods: Disentangling the production of flooding as a hazard in Sumatra, Indonesia
Geoforum, 2021
In Jambi province, Sumatra, Indonesia, flooding is a recurrent rainy season phenomenon. Historically considered manageable, recent political economic developments have changed this situation. Today, flooding is an environmental hazard and a threat to people's livelihoods and health. Based on qualitative research and literature that has developed relational approaches to risk and water, we investigate past and present hydrosocial relations in Jambi province and reconstruct the changing meaning of flooding. We suggest that flooding as a hazard in Jambi was produced through the introduction of the plantation industry to the area and its prioritization of dry land for agro-industrial development. This development altered the materiality of water flows, reconfigured power relations and changed the socio-cultural dimensions of flooding. Together, these changes have led to a separation of flooding from its original social and geographic realm, producing new risks and vulnerabilities. This paper provides insights into the material and symbolic dimensions that influence how environmental processes come to be imagined, controlled and contested. It shows how tracing the socionatural production of hazards may help explain the increasingly systemic nature of risks and provide insights into the wider social meaning of environmental risks.
Is local wisdom able to build sustainable communities in informal flood-prone settlements? Evidence from Glintung Kampong, Malang City, Indonesia
Local Wisdom : Jurnal Ilmiah Kajian Kearifan Lokal
This study aims to highlight innovative and sustainable measures in adaptation to climate change and the Covid-19 pandemic through integration into flood control efforts based on empirical data in Glintung Kampong, an informal flood-prone settlement in Indonesia and to explore what local wisdom values influence the success of the measures undertaken. This study was designed to use a mixed method combining qualitative and quantitative data. Qualitative data consists of in-depth interviews, observations, and desk studies. Quantitative data is used for the generalization of some qualitative data across a wider field. The study results show that the existence of drainage channel facilities from the government can trigger creative ideas and innovative measures in the community. Community involvement with their “guyub rukun” and “gotong royong” values is the most influential factor in determining the success of the program, followed by community leaders, the ability to adapt to flood risk...
Understanding and Unravelling Development Complexities in Indonesia: Through the Lens of Water Management in Dusun Pondok, Desa Sampang.
For more than a century, the global south has been lacking on a number of development indicators when compared to the global north. Recent economic trends have reflected a narrowing gap between developments in these two blocs. However, there remains much to catch up with on aspects related to socio-politics and awareness towards sustainable development. Literary sources have suggested the gap in development is due to ineffective governance in dealing with development complexities, hindering progresses on sustainable development programme and livelihood improvement projects for many people across the world, especially those in the developing countries. As the largest archipelagic nation in the world, Indonesia has recently registered strong improvement on socio-economic development while taking a giant leap in the process of democratisation and decentralisation. The well-being of Indonesians from both urban and rural realms has improved considerably since its national independence. Still, there remains much room for improvement. By gathering relevant information from a sub-village called Dusun Pondok in Yogyakarta, this research aims to explore development complexities from a number of perspectives using various methods, contributing to the discourse of international development and complexity science in Indonesia and beyond.
Circulation and appropriation of urban technologies: Drainage and traffic infrastructures in Dar es Salaam, 1913-1999
ULB TU Darmstadt, 2023
The infrastructure in African cities has been discussed in the media and political discourses for several decades. The main narrative has been about their failures and unreliability. Electricity blackouts, the failure of water supply systems, traffic congestion and poor sanitation systems have been at the centre of the heated discussions about infrastructure. As a result, urban scholars have paid considerable attention to these systems at the expense of others. Problems relating to drainage infrastructure, especially infrastructure malfunctioning and flooding, often go unnoticed and are understudied, although they occur every year. Drainage failures frequently affect traffic infrastructure by damaging roads, causing traffic congestion and, at times, destroying urban transit systems. Weaving research approaches from urban, science and technology studies, this study examines the most historically-urbanised city of Dar es Salaam in Tanzania to understand and explain the drainage problem and its connection to traffic infrastructure. Emphasising the technical and spatial entanglement, the study argues that the contemporary and past drainage and traffic problems are the result of colonial and post-colonial engineering and planning processes and decision-making. This study uses the splintering-urbanism thesis to posit that it was not merely the racial policy that led to the building of separate urban systems, as argued by social and historical studies of urbanisation. The retrieved archival and documentary sources show that medical and class forces as well as the continuity of colonial and early post-colonial infrastructure regimes were also at play in the unfolding of the drainage problem in Dar es Salaam. As such, the study does not only create knowledge on the drainage problem that occurred invariably but also controverts recent accounts which contends that the drainage problem — a problem that manifests through urban floods — is largely a consequence of climate-related changes and the rise of the sea level. The study demonstrates that, during the colonial and post-colonial periods, the design and distribution of drainage and traffic infrastructure were influenced by local and imperial urban infrastructure circulation and appropriation processes. In particular, the archival and documentary sources reveal that the colonial drainage and traffic systems were an outcome of the colonial technological circulation of certain forms of knowledge, materiality and practices, with limited local appropriation. The study submits that most of the studies on urban infrastructure done in the Global South do no articulate and discuss the context of the infrastructure beginnings in the Global North. With respect to the post-colonial era, the retrieved material indicates that the ill-conceived policy of science and technology, such as the desire to undertake urbanisation through industrialisation without having a critical mass of well-educated people and the appropriation of colonial technical pedagogical structures, led to the failure of the drainage and traffic infrastructure. Along with other socio-economic forces such as the long-term economic crisis that began in the late 1970s and continued until the 1990s, the non-articulated and disconnected infrastructure regimes and the sheer technical and financial dependence on aid the vulnerability and implications of the drainage and traffic infrastructure were exacerbated by uncontrolled and ever-growing urban sprawl. The study concludes that the past and present drainage and traffic problems in Dar es Salaam are an outcome of historical processes that contemporary technocrats and scholars need to understand so that they can develop comprehensive and tangibly lasting solutions. The processes are technological, cultural, environmental and political – the socio-technical processes that could be understood well if they were studied within their unique temporal-spatial landscape. Such an understanding would help to change the local and international agencies’ interventions into, and perspective on, floods, not only in Dar es Salaam but also in other Global South cities.
Related topics
Related papers
Drainage Politics: Flood Management in Surabaya, Indonesia
Swedish International Centre for Local Democracy - Uppsala University, 2023
Flooding is not merely a natural cause but also the implication of polity and policies. The success or failure of flood mitigation depends on the government's firmness in overcoming inequality in drainage system usage. The local government must be fully committed to upholding social justice in flood riskrelated subjects and must provide firm support to street-level bureaucrats so that they can enforce rules, even against privileged and influential groups in society. A healthy local political ecosystem significantly affects successful flood mitigation. Public flood mitigation is most effective when it can be found government leaders that has strong political commitment and solid public pressure. Digital media can be leveraged to influence city governments to commit seriously to flood mitigation.
Historic Institutionalism and Urban Morphology in Jakarta: Moving Towards Building Flood Resiliency into the Formal Planning and Development System
Journal of Regional and City Planning, 2018
This paper examines issues around flooding and rapid urban development in Jakarta, specifically the manner in which the former has influenced the spatial growth of the city over time. It takes a historic-institutionalism perspective within the context of changing government responses to flood management, where previous approaches failed to take into consideration existing local ecology, flood patterns and natural drainage systems. Jakarta is slowly moving towards more sustainable and resilient approaches to flood management through pilot programmes aimed at reclaiming or restoring water bodies while creating urban green space to assist with water absorption, despite the local government not having incorporated sustainable flood management systems or mitigation measures into the formal planning system. This paper shows how flooding has influenced spatial development and urban morphology in the city historically, which has led the city administration to the realisation that new approaches are required. The methodology includes document and literature research, GIS as well as satellite based mapping and imagery to determine spatial development patterns and where additional mitigation measures may be required, as well as flooding and drainage documentation. The paper reveals a series of potential strategies for the initial stages of planning policy implementation and a potential framework for developing planning-incorporated measures at a wider scale across Jakarta's affected areas. This study has wide implications for a number of large developing cities in the Global South that face multiple development challenges in addition to flooding.
The Political Ecology of Flooding in Mega-Urban Regions in Asia: Seeking Spatial Justice through Participatory Disaster Governance in Jakarta
In Jakarta, as in many cities in Southeast Asia and the world at large, widespread flooding is annually affecting thousands of low-income households. In addition to impacts of global climate change, chronic flooding arises from human involvement in the formation and transformation of Jakarta's larger extended mega-urban region (EMUR) of Jabodetabek. To account for the connections between flooding, the production of urban space and its social consequences, the discussion of flood disasters in this paper adopts a political ecology perspective with a spatial justice focus on the morphology of the expansion of Jabodetabek from the 1960s. Particular attention is given to the advent of a new age of urban mega-projects from mid-1980s that continues today. The over-arching thesis is that the ecological deterioration of Jakarta as an EMUR is unevenly experienced as lower-income households are increasingly crowded into densely settled, high flood risk areas. The assessment seeks to link the micro-politics of land development with region-wide attempts to prevent flooding, which are currently treated as separate policy issues.
Building Local Institutional Capacities for Urban Flood Adaptation: Lessons from the Water as Leverage Program in Semarang, Indonesia
Sustainability, 2020
Cities in Southeast Asia face various institutional barriers to cope with climate and water-related challenges. Several international programs for urban flood resilience therefore stress the importance of local institutional capacity building in initiating and delivering flood adaptation solutions. However, research to provide insights and recommendations into whether and how such international resilience programs could enable the building of local institutional capacities remains scarce. To bridge this gap, this paper presents an analytical framework to study institutional capacity building by international resilience programs, focusing on intellectual, social and political capital. The central case is the development and implementation of the Water as Leverage (WaL) program in Semarang, Indonesia. Our main results show that this program was able to stimulate the integration of knowledge, building of local coalitions and creation of adaptation narratives, which contributed to devel...
Living with Water; Infrastructure and Urbanism in Jakarta
Ecocycles , 2021
Cities around the world are at risk of pluvial and fluvial flooding, due to more frequent extreme weather events and uncontrolled urbanisation. Coastal cities are additionally at risk from tidal flooding and sea level rise. Hard surface infrastructure leads to rapid storm-water run off overwhelming conventional drainage systems at peak times. This article examines what constitutes infrastructure in the 21st century and what should its new priorities be? A case study is made of Jakarta, a low lying delta city, where the consequences of unregulated economic development are starting to be addressed. The lack of a city based water supply has led to excessive ground water extraction and the sinking of the city further exacerbating flood risk. City wide flooding has occurred three times in the last 15 years. Water needs to be considered as a primary element in infrastructure strategy and space found for natural systems and active travel. In Jakarta the role of the kampungs (informal settlements) provides an opportunity to address social and environmental difficulties at the same time. This interdisciplinary overview analyses recent infrastructure initiatives and developments and asks what more can be done and what new planning policies and concepts may be required.
A socio-technical investigation of Jakarta's opportunity for leapfrogging towards a Water Sensitive City
2017
This project report has been prepared as an output of the Australia-Indonesia Centre Small Project (Infrastructure Cluster),<i> A socio-technical investigation of Jakarta's opportunity for leapfrogging towards sustainable water management to identify common and distinct principles and practices</i>.
Towards Interactive Flood Governance: changing approaches in Dutch flood policy
2013
markdownabstract__Abstract__ In the course of history, flooding of rivers and the sea brought misery to humanity. Low lying delta’s of large rivers like Bangladesh, New Orleans, the Nile delta or the Netherlands belong to the most vulnerable for flood disasters. Since ancient times people pondered about strategies to avoid flood risks. During last decades of raising awareness about climate change, thinking about dealing with flood risks changed considerably in the Netherlands. The conceptual turnover suits in a broader development towards integrated and interactive water management. Here ‘fighting against’ turned to ‘living with’ water. The way the new perspectives on flood management in the Netherlands developed, is the central theme of this paper. How does thinking about flood management evolve? An analysis of the different policy visions and documents shows the incremental change. Interviews with decision-makers and professional water managers confirms that it seems to be the tim...
Flooding in a city of migrants : Ethnicity and entitlement in Bandar Lampung, Indonesia
2017
This chapter, based on research funded by the Rockefeller Foundation, shows how social geographies produced by historical migrations to the city of Bandar Lampung in Indonesia contribute to vulnerability to flooding, and responses to flood events. In particular, migrant ethnic networks shape not onlyu the contours of precarious everyday livelihoods, but also the political capital people are able to actualize at very localised scales to attract assistance of various kinds. The chapter argues that policy makers need a nuanced appreciateion of the subtle ways past migrations remain significant in shaping vulnerability and defining access to resources - a step that is necessary for ensuring a just approach to flood responses.
Uneven Urbanisation: Connecting Flows of Water to Flows of Labour and Capital Through Jakarta's Flood Infrastructure
2018
This article analyses processes of uneven urbanisation by looking at flood infrastructure. Combining the conceptual frameworks of uneven development with the political ecology of urbanisation, we use flood infrastructure as a methodological device to trace the processes through which unevenness occurs within, but also far beyond, the city of Jakarta, Indonesia. We do this to show how the development of flood infrastructure in Jakarta is shaped by the logic of capitalism through mutually implicated tendencies of socionatural differentiation and equalisation. These processes render waters, resources and labour as similar across places and times to produce different spaces for different populations, within and beyond city boundaries. This theorisation reveals how the urban inequalities (re)produced by flood infrastructure are intimately linked to inequalities (re)produced through the urbanisation of the non-city. Sari: Artikel ini menganalisis proses-proses urbanisasi yang timpang dengan menelaah infrastruktur banjir. Menggabungkan kerangkan konseptual pembangunan yang tim-pang dengan Ekologi Politis Urbanisasi, kami menggunakan infrastruktur banjir sebagai alat untuk melacak proses-proses yang menghasilkan ketimpangan baik di dalam mau-pun di luar kota Jakarta, Indonesia. Kami melakukan ini untuk memperlihatkan bagai-mana pembangunan infrastruktur banjir di Jakarta dibentuk oleh logika kapitalisme melalui tendensi-tendensi yang saling melengkapi berupa pembedaan dan penyamaan sosioalamiah. Proses-proses ini menempatkan air, sumberdaya, dan buruh menjadi mirip melintasi tempat dan waktu untuk memproduksi ruang-ruang yang berbeda untuk pen-duduk yang berbeda, di dalam dan di luar batas-batas kota. Teorisasi ini menyingkap bahwa ketaksetaraan-ketaksetaraan di dalam kota yang di(re)produksi oleh infrastruktur
Watery Incursions: The Securitisation of Everyday 'Flood Cultures' in Metro Manila and Coastal Jakarta
International Quarterly for Asian Studies, 49 (1–2,): 105–126 , 2018
This article explores the normalisation of urban flooding through two distinct sets of securitised practices in two Southeast Asian megacities – localised disaster management surveillance regimes and the policing of informal settlements in Metro Manila and northern Jakarta, respectively. As a point of departure, we problematise the question of how the incidence of recurring floods (and flooding) is diversely interpreted as both event and as an experiential reality, insofar as the manifestation of the floods never entirely occupies a state of either normalcy or exception. It is this fluid state of inbetweenness in which these diverse securitisation trajectories are explored. The first entails the recent emergence of Metro Manila’s disaster Command Centres, marking a break from conventional ways of responding to flood risks. The second case study engages with Jakarta City’s coercive use of its municipal police unit – the Satpol P.P. – in relocating urban informal settlers who have otherwise actively learned to reshape their familiarity to flooding as a non-issue in order to avoid being evicted. While the paper reflects on the formal structures of flood cultures, we illustrate how vernacular interpretations around security entrenched in notions of “living with floods” lead to broader questions of ontological normalisation regarding watery incursions – as both spectacular as well as mundane, routinised events. Keywords: Urban flooding, Disaster Risk Reduction, surveillance, Metro Manila, Jakarta
Loading Preview
Sorry, preview is currently unavailable. You can download the paper by clicking the button above.