Events

CHAIRPERSON

Assoc Prof Maribeth Erb, Department of Sociology, National University of Singapore

ABSTRACT

Mount Merapi on Indonesia’s most populous and rapidly urbanising island of Java is situated within a set of relationships that extend far beyond its slopes. With its rich repository of grain-sized black sand that is the main ingredient of concrete, Indonesia’s most active stratovolcano sits on the front line of unabated urban development demands and encroaching globalisation. Straddling the provinces of Yogyakarta and Central Java, the Merapi region supports the lives and livelihoods of more than 37 million people in surrounding cities and towns via its networked river systems and fertile agricultural soil. Extended urbanisation in the twenty-first century into ever more remote and rural parts of the volcanic region has been accompanied by unsustainable development practices that have contributed to climate change effects and the incubation of new forms of environmental harm that boomerang back into the heart of dense urban settlements.

In this seminar, Dr Michelle Miller will present a transformative disaster governance framework for governing recurring compound disasters. Drawing on evidence from the volcanic mining industry on Mount Merapi, she will show how the extraction of resources generated by a hazard requires a multi-scalar system of governance that is capable of traversing administrative boundaries and withstanding the political exigencies of electoral cycles. The framework focuses on the interactive dynamics of temporal and spatial scales of environmental disaster governance. The overall aim of this framework is to generate policy insights into the cross-scale trade-offs involved in volcanic sediment extraction in the service of navigating more sustainable development pathways for cement-dependent urbanising societies. In this, city administrations are potentially key intermediaries between markets and disaster-prone communities, both because of their relative power to mobilise policy instruments and in their dual role as perpetrators and victims of wider scales of environmental transformations.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Michelle Miller is a Senior Research Fellow at the Asia Research Institute (ARI), National University of Singapore. Trained in political science, her research focuses on intersections between urban and regional governance in the context of human conflict and environmental change. She leads the Disaster Governance theme of the Asian Urbanisms Cluster at ARI. Her interdisciplinary publications speak to contemporary theoretical debates and key policy issues in environmental disaster governance, decentralisation, urban change, and citizenship and belonging. A reoccurring concern throughout her work is with the policy potential and lived experience of decentralisation in generating more inclusive and effective forms of governance, especially in Indonesia but across Asia more broadly. Before joining ARI, she taught at Deakin University and Charles Darwin University in Australia, and she has held visiting research fellowships in Indonesia at both the Centre for Strategic and International Studies (Jakarta) and Ar-Raniry Institut Agama Islam Negeri (Banda Aceh).

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