Resilient Indonesian Slums Envisioned (RISE): Building an inclusive governance with people and water to make social-ecological interactions more resilient to water-related disasters

Our aim is to develop an inclusive governance roadmap to transform Indonesian cities towards social-ecological resilience that builds capacity to mitigate water-related disasters and enhances people’s well-being. We follow a comparative case study approach to acquire new knowledge and insights on the social-ecological interactions involved in different water-related (qualitative and quantitative) problems (i.e. flooding, access to clean drinking water and sanitation) in slum areas in three different locations in Indonesia: Pontianak, Manado and Bima. They represent most of the social and water challenges Indonesian cities face nowadays. Our project builds upon research conducted between 2018 and 2020 by our collaborating partner Deltares to design for flood resilient cities (Letitre et al., forthcoming in 2020). Our interdisciplinary team will gather more contextual social and water quality data, while paying appropriate attention to their interactions to create a more integrative approach to mitigate the risk of water-related disasters. As such, we build a model incorporating people and water. The results will help develop a generic transformative change strategy to include: an (e-)learning programme, training-of-trainers and workshops, as well as a roadmap to develop an inclusive governance plan integrating both societal and technical solutions. The study will synthesise resilience and well-being in a relational approach to strengthen and broaden knowledge on urban communities resilience to ecological change. In so doing, we will create a better understanding of how complex systems evolve and how individuals and societies are simultaneously embedded within and act as agents of change in those systems. This can provide guidance for more inclusive governance to co-create resilient Indonesian slums. It also envisions the RISE to the water challenge applying across whole urban regions, both old, new and those still in the making, such as the proposed new Indonesian capital.