Description
Vulnerability concept is not static and always contested by climate change adaptation (CCA) stakeholders. Understanding contestation among CCA stakeholders is a crucial aspect in CCA research. The contestation shapes the CCA governance in Indonesia and its impacts on vulnerable groups. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is one of the key actors involved in vulnerability discourse. An epistemic community of adaptation researchers within the IPCC forum has formulated vulnerability and diffused that knowledge through the Assessment Reports. Those documents are utilised by the Parties of the United Nations Framework on Climate Change (UNFCCC) as a basis for negotiation processes and policies formulation. States adopt the idea of vulnerability from the IPCCC and institutionalise it into their national policies.
Indonesia, as an archipelagic country with high population, also adopts vulnerability idea from the IPCCC and institutionalises the idea into a national action plan on climate change adaptation. The Indonesian Government seems to adopt the idea as it is, even “plagiarises” the definition of vulnerability in the national action plan document. This thesis brings in an idea that the concept of vulnerability from the IPCCC is general, and states should modify the idea to fit in with the local challenges and conditions. The inaccuracy of defining what is vulnerability and who are vulnerable might cause the most vulnerable groups being marginalised, hence increasing the gap between the haves and the have nots. The Government of Indonesia tends to use risk-hazard approach by focusing on the exposure level of climate change impacts towards systems and concerns more about internal biophysical factors such as topography and land use. Therefore, Jakarta as a coastal city facing sea-level rise threat and having a high population density is considered as the most vulnerable region, even though the people have high adaptive capacity.
There are ambiguity and contingency of vulnerability in Indonesia. Each Indonesian Ministry might have a different understanding of vulnerability, and non-governmental actors also have their concept of vulnerability. This thesis aims to identify the contestation of the vulnerability concept and the dominant discourse of vulnerability in climate change adaptation governance in Indonesia. This thesis will use a political economy approach to understand climate change vulnerability. People are the focus of this approach by asking who is most vulnerable and why. This thesis will contribute to vulnerability debate by redefining who vulnerable people are and why based on the socioeconomic domain, which remain largely unexplored in CCA research, particularly in Indonesia. This thesis will utilise a qualitative approach and multiple case study designs. Three pilot project locations of national adaptation plans are selected as case studies including West Java, East Java, and West Nusa Tenggara. Engaging with small-scale farmers’ perspective on vulnerability will be one of the original contributions of this thesis. This thesis will reveal the complexity, ambiguity and politically contentious nature of vulnerability through an in-depth interview process involving small-scale farmers in the field.
