Challenges, gaps and needs

2.4 Challenges, gaps and needs

While disaster preparedness has been significantly improved since 2004, challenges remain. The immense area and number of communities in Indonesia exposed to multiple hazards urge for up- scaling CBDRM activities. However, the unique context of each community in Indonesia makes it difficult to know how to best replicate CBDRM to promote a culture of safety nation-wide. Differing cultural settings may cause some CBDRM activities succeed in one region but fail in another. Therefore it is crucial to always understand local settings first and to recognize local risk perspectives even when people experience the same disaster event as elsewhere. Additionally, communities often prioritize economic and livelihood concerns and support for addressing the underlying risk factors over preparedness measures resulting in a mismatch between responses offered and people’s urgent felt needs. So far, CBDRM in Indonesia is dominated by external funding, which puts questions about the sustainability of CBDRM approaches on the long run. In addition to that, partnerships between NGOs, CBOs and local government remain limited for the duration of a project since each actor has it’s own mandate and style. The idea to integrate CBDRM activities into local development processes is still a huge challenge since the timeframe of CBDRM activities do not typically meet the development planning cycle. Further, the integration of CBDRM into the development planning process requires high level support, starting from village, sub-district and district government to get engaged in the process and to support the proposed programme. Another challenge is the limited involvement of the private sector and media in supporting DRM in communities.

Gaps Majority of NGOs have a limited understanding of the potential of CBDRM approaches, of how to conduct a proper risk assessment using the HCVA tools, and face problems around participation, social inclusion and building linkages with local governments. This gap becomes painfully visible when NGOs are about to end their CBDRM programs. Exit strategies are poorly conceptualized and seem to consist of handing over the program to local governments at district and village level.

However, the necessary capacities of BPBDs to sustain CBDRM initiatives are not yet in place. In term of resources, communities are told that they could access resources from line departments or through private sector’ CSR programmes. But these are still dreams because not so many CSR programmes support DRR at community level, and also line departments do not easily provide funds for DRM to communities.

Partnerships between communities and local government through DRR forum are still rare. There are examples where a forum was created through a formal process (under Governor Bill), but no activities happen like in Nusa Tenggara Timur Province. Additionally, many communities lack the capacities to mobilize effective agency and form networks to negotiate with government.

Needs The ultimate goal of CBDRM is to reduce people’s vulnerability and to achieve community resilience, meaning that people are able to optimize and access internal and external resources to reduce disaster risks. Increasing community resilience can be achieved by strengthening people’s existing social and organizational capacities, such as their innate social networks, adat and religious networks, but also by expanding their resources and contacts outside these social networks by seeking connections with power holders as a way to obtain protection. By mobilizing people’s social capital, local communities can attempt to reduce their ‘political vulnerability’; this means that CBDRM efforts could enable people to have a political voice, to gain access to political resources and spaces, positions and to perform their power to achieve safety and security from the local to the national level. There is a trend in Indonesia that CSOs and NGOs increasingly hold government accountable for not adequately addressing disaster risks through various strategies such as inviting government to workshops, creating spaces for dialogues and through media exposure. CBDRM programs should not be limited to village level interventions and disaster preparedness. While some risk problems can

be solved at the local level, underlying risk factors should be tackled beyond the community like land use planning, building codes and environmental concerns. Communities can propose, access and link to local development processes or integrate CBDRM in the village development planning.

The government of Indonesia is currently going through a paradigm shift from reactive to more proactive responses to disasters. BNPB applies a top-down approach with bottom-up ideas. The top-down approach consists of training province-level facilitators who support the districts with risk mapping, among others. At the same time BNPB promotes the ‘Village Resilience Programme’ at the local level. The latter could be linked to CBDRM practices. However, different views and ideas exist among provincial, district and local government levels on what should be done in terms of DRM. The organisational assessment studies of the BNPB and the BPBD reveal many challenges and a clear need for further capacity building. Government, NGOs and CBOs have to find new ways to engage with each other and to transform hierarchical, oppositional relationships and passive mind-sets - due to their histories - into partnerships. The main challenge is to create a conducive environment for dialogue, and for building trust between the government, academia, NGOs, CSO, private sector and its citizens. This requires a dialogue space (platform) in which each actor can share, co-learning to strengthen their capacity, legitimacy and existence in order to pull resources that are available internally (within own district) and externally. There is a need for a paradigm shift within NGOs (local and international), local governments, donors on what goals CBDRM need to achieve. This paradigm shift will require the actors to re-think that CBDRM should address beyond preparedness and start to focus on the underlying risk factors, and to enable the communities to get involved in a dialogue with DRR actors.