CAPÍTULO V. LA MEDIACIÓN TRANSFORMATIVA EN LOS CONFLICTOS COMUNITARIOS
5.5. El acuerdo de mediación comunitaria con efectos restaurativos
The discussion above argues that state territorialisation strategies have interacted with the production of local vulnerabilities. While these strategies have been justified under the guise of humane intervention and ‘development’, they have also responded to political agendas such as building support for the transmigration program. This isn’t to say that evacuations
and relocations are never justified. Indeed these state actions regularly save lives and many past eruptions have proven their importance (see Mei et al., 2013; Newhall and Punongbayan, 1996; Wilson et al., 2012). Rather, the approach taken above demonstrates that the process of territorialisation, through which state claims to land are made following eruptions, bears important considerations for vulnerability. However, these claims may be locally contested causing the state to alter their position (see also Li, 1999b; Wadley, 2003). Furthermore, local recipients can accrue unintended benefits through these plans such as access to what can become productive livelihoods in the outer islands, or the purchase of more land locally (see also Peluso, 2005; Wadley, 2003). Overall, I argue that analysing the concept of ‘territoriality’ through politically driven representations of hazardous space provides a framework through which to obtain a nuanced and historically embedded picture of vulnerability in Indonesia’s volcanic landscapes.
My interpretation of the hazardscape demonstrates how political representations of risk (Collins, 2009; Mustafa, 2005), enacted through territoriality (Rebotier, 2012), can significantly influence local conditions of vulnerability. In particular, the way local and political claims to land are made and negotiated historically affects who owns what land and at what risk. However, in the Dieng example political representations of hazardous land have had both positive and negative outcomes on local conditions of vulnerability (Figure 17). This conclusion confirms the utility of the access model, while demonstrating how it can be enhanced through considering territoriality strategies as part of a broader and more politically informed ‘hazardscape’. While territoriality has been linked to vulnerability frameworks elsewhere (Donovan et al., 2012b; Rebotier, 2012), this chapter demonstrates how this concept is of particular use in the context of Java’s volcanoes, many of which are sites where the state has historically enacted transmigration as a mechanism to shift people away from hazardous geographies.
Figure 17. A schematic explanation of the construction of vulnerability and capacity in Dusun Simbar drawing on the access model (Wisner et al., 2004) and concept of territorialisation (Peluso, 2005; Vandergeest and Peluso, 1995). Vulnerability is explained as an issue of access to land influenced by population growth, the cultivation of export commodity crops and state territoriality strategies.
5.3. Chapter conclusion
The chapter above has argued that the construction of vulnerability is a complex process with the utilisation of hazardous land bringing opportunity alongside disadvantage (Figure 17). Three political ecology approaches used to understand vulnerability have been applied, namely the access to resources model (Wisner et al., 2004), territoriality (Peluso, 2005; Peluso and Vandergeest, 2001; Vandergeest and Peluso, 2005) and the hazardscape (Mustafa, 2005). Drawing on these frameworks, vulnerability is firstly described as a product of colonial and New Order Regime policies that promoted the growth of export oriented commodity crops, lowland conscription to the cultivation system, and population growth – all of which contributed to smaller sizes of lowland land holdings and upland migration (Boomgaard, 1999; Hefner, 1990; Li, 1999a). Within the plateau itself, local
patterns of land distribution have led to the poorest people often farming the most hazardous areas, including land surrounding Timbang and Sileri Craters and Forestry land on the upper slopes. While access to this land has provided an easier point of entry to the land market, those occupying this hazardous land also suffer the greatest impacts in the event of an eruption or landslide.
By incorporating the concept of territorialisation into the hazardscape, I have described how the state spatially demarcated land as hazardous with aims to recruit people into the then politically significant transmigration program of the 1970s. However, this state-led transmigration also inadvertently facilitated re-occupation of the most volcanically hazardous land and by failing to evacuate people from the area of greatest risk, increased vulnerability for some by exposing them to more frequent crop failures due to volcanic eruptions. However, it also reduced conditions of vulnerability for those who were otherwise landless and could use this land as an interim ‘stepping stone’ towards the acquisition of more land. Additionally, vulnerabilities were reportedly reduced for those families who persisted in South Sumatra following the transmigration. As will be elaborated on in the following chapter, these processes have also influenced how farmers have been able to capitalise on the coming potato boom.
However, while revealing many of the processes that have led to vulnerability, the analysis above has not yet sought to address the impact current livelihood processes have on conditions of vulnerability. The largely structural and historical analysis of this chapter resembles what Rigg et al. (2016a) conceptualises as ‘inherited’ forms of vulnerability, as compared to the newer and produced forms that are associated with integration into the modern economy. The present chapter has laid the foundations to understand vulnerability, which will be expanded on in the following livelihoods and knowledge chapters in an attempt to present a more contemporary and holistic view of volcanic risk.