Fundamento jurídico de la mediación comunitaria

The overarching objective of this thesis is thereby to better understand, and provide new conceptual and policy insights, into the varied pathways through which vulnerability is constructed, and overcome, in one of Indonesia’s many-understudied volcanic landscapes. To address this, and the

research objectives outlined above, I ask a number of sub-questions that stem from, and respond to, the current empirical and theoretical limitations. The first research question asks:

1. What socio-economic and political processes have determined access to hazardous land, and through this, influenced past and present conditions of vulnerability to natural hazards (or the making of the ‘hazardscape’) in Central Java’s highlands?

To answer this research question I describe the historic socio-economic and political processes that have facilitated expansion into the Dieng Plateau, including the way state-led representations of ‘hazardous space’ have contributed to local vulnerabilities. The first component to my response describes the social, economic and political processes that have influenced the past and present development of hazardous land. I apply the access model (Wisner et al., 2004) to describe how the Javanese historically settled the Dieng highlands, including how Dutch colonial and New Order Regime policies intensified land pressures in the lowlands and encouraged the cultivation of largely export driven commodity crops in Java’s highlands (Boomgaard, 1999; Li, 1999a; Hefner, 1990). I then describe how hazardous land is unequally distributed within the Dieng Plateau, with the poorest farmers often tied to farming land parcels situated in closest proximity to active craters or on the upper landslide prone slopes.

However, this research question also seeks to understand how political framings of risk influence access to hazardous land in the Dieng Plateau. To address this, I combine the access model (Wisner et al., 2004) with Mustafa’s (2005) ‘hazardscape’, which argues that vulnerability is also produced through the power or control governments exert over social spaces. In the Dieng example, the making of the hazardscape draws on the concept of internal state territorialisation (Peluso, 2005; Peluso and Vandergeest, 2001; Vandergeest and Peluso, 1995) to describe how the Indonesian state has historically used volcanic eruptions as a catalyst to claim ownership and

governance over areas demarcated as ‘hazardous’ by state bureaucracies. During the 1970s the Indonesian state reinvigorated its transmigration program, with the aim of resettling people from the densely settled islands of Java, Madura and Bali to the outer, less developed archipelago (Eaton, 2005). While this state representation of risk allowed it to enforce relocation and achieve ambitious transmigration targets, the territorial zones that facilitated transmigration were locally contested, leading to the reoccupation of hazardous land with mixed outcomes for overall conditions of vulnerability.

My second research question is concerned with how local processes and capacity have acted against the historic and structural constraints to vulnerability that are addressed in my first research question. This research question asks:

2. How have the livelihood transformations witnessed in the Dieng Plateau over the past decades influenced present conditions of vulnerability and capacity to manage the impact of natural hazards?

To answer this research question I look at the processes that have led to the potato crop boom and how this boom has impacted local conditions of vulnerability and/or capacity. During the mid-1980s a major agrarian shift transformed the Dieng highlands and tobacco and subsistence crops were rapidly replaced with potatoes and other cool climate vegetables. Grown largely for domestic consumption, the potato and other secondary cool climate vegetables such as carrots, cabbages and onions, rapidly transformed living standards. In answering this second research question, I draw on the agrarian transformation literature (Hall, 2011a; Li, 2014; Mahanty and Milne, 2016; Vandergeest, 2008), to describe the conjuncture of social, environmental, economic and political processes that facilitated the potato boom.

As livelihoods and capacity research deals with the sustainability of agriculture in hazardous localities, this question is also concerned with the future sustainability of the potato industry in the Dieng Plateau. I respond to this by discussing the environmental consequences of the potato boom,

demonstrating that potato farming is not always, or only, an unsustainable livelihood activity (see Forsyth and Walker, 2008). Furthermore, I discuss the district government’s response to the environmental impacts of the boom, and how by attempting to constrain livelihood outcomes, these actions can also unintentionally introduce vulnerabilities. The final component to this research question is concerned with the costs and benefits of potato farming and how these produce or counteract local vulnerabilities. I address this by drawing on livelihoods studies in the agrarian literature to describe how potato livelihoods have interacted with vulnerabilities and the many processes (such as livelihood diversification or migration) that rural potato farmers employ to overcome them (Dorward et al., 2009; Rigg and Vandergeest, 2012).

My third and final research question focuses on the construction and practice of disaster knowledge from the perspective of local farmers and the expert organisations acting in the Dieng Plateau. This coupled research question asks:

3. How is local and expert disaster knowledge constructed, interpreted and acted on in the Dieng Plateau? How do these forms of knowledge interact and contribute to volcanic risk reduction strategies that either reduce or increase conditions of vulnerability?

To answer these research questions I describe how both local and expert disaster knowledge is constructed and the actions that this knowledge informs. The first component focuses on how local disaster knowledge is produced and enacted. I respond to this by explaining how volcanic hazard is understood locally as a geophysical process that can be managed on a daily basis through local wisdom and scientific information, while also viewed as untameable phenomena. The second component asks how expert disaster knowledge is constructed, focusing on the institutional biases that shape its formation and the way this knowledge is shared. My response analyses the activities of the District Disaster Management Agency (BPBD) and the Centre for Volcanic and Geological Hazard Mitigation (PVMBG). I describe the

constraints on, and the limitations to, this expert knowledge including the way Indonesia’s district disaster management agencies favour the production of technocratic knowledge and the intrinsic uncertainties associated with scientific risk assessment (Jasanoff, 1987; 1990; 2003; 2007).

These final research questions draw their theoretical underpinnings from the literature on local ecological knowledge (LEK) (Agrawal, 1995; Berkes et al., 2000; Goldman, 2007; Nygren, 1999) and descriptive studies of disaster knowledge (Bachri et al., 2015; Donovan et al., 2012a; Gaillard et al., 2008; Rigg et al., 2005; Schlehe, 2010; Shannon et al., 2011). I demonstrate that local and expert knowledge are not binary opposites that need to be integrated but rather a hybrid space that interacts, is subject to disciplinary biases, and influenced by science, worldview, and economic realities. These findings provide important advice for developing a more contextualised platform for dialogue between local and expert producers and users of disaster knowledge to take place.

As the theoretical and empirical premise underlying the field of political ecology argues that such research should actively inform the policy arena (Forsyth, 2008; Neumann, 2008; Rocheleau, 2008; Walker, 2006; Wisner et al., 2004), the research questions and findings I have outlined above are later drawn on within the conclusion chapter of this thesis to arrive at a discussion of policy implications. These focus on the need for holistic volcanic risk management that recognises how livelihoods can reduce vulnerabilities despite official representations of such livelihoods as ‘unsustainable’. Furthermore, I discuss the role of the district government in community- based DRR activities and how local livelihood priorities can contradict the aims of such programs. I describe the immensity of the task handed to the BPBD and how its current institutional and operating environment make achieving ambitious DRR targets, specifically those tied to vulnerability reduction, unlikely. I then focus on issues of disaster knowledge sharing between expert and local actors, discussing the need for more perspectives that recognise the locally contextualised and hybrid nature of this disaster knowledge.