BAPPENAS Indonesia – Flood Risk Resilience

We developed a 2-week training program for the Government of the Republic of Indonesia, to be delivered to 25 participants, in Australia and Indonesia to build capacity in all aspects of integrated water resources management, with a primary focus on flood risk management.

Challenges

In Indonesia, proactive measures to mitigate flood risks are necessary. To date, regional development planning has not given much consideration to prioritisation of these measures. A diagnostic assessment of legal, institutional and policy frameworks identified the need for greater awareness of flood risk (and elements of flood risk: hazard, exposure and vulnerability) in government organisations.

In particular, there is need for greater focus on flood management as a core responsibility of the Directorate General of Water Resources (DGWR) (under the Ministry of Public Works), within the disaster management agency Badan Nasional Penanggulangan Bencana (BNPB), and in local government agencies at the river-basin scale.

Institutional and governance reforms are necessary, together with capacity building of the responsible agencies, to initiate and implement effective flood management measures. There is recognition that governments cannot manage flood risk alone. Greater engagement with the community, businesses and civil society and academic groups is needed to better mitigate against flood risks.
the Indonesian Government has identified the need for a training program

Purpose

The Indonesia Government identified a need for a training program that addressed the following high-level outcomes:

  1. Providing central and local-level project managers with lessons relating to integrated water resources management (IWRM), especially flood risk management (FRM), learnt from countries with similar characteristics to Indonesia.
  2. Increasing the understanding and comprehension of integrated flood risk management, where it has been successfully conducted by other countries.
  3. Increasing the capacity of the management of the FMSRB sector project in achieving project goals at central and local levels.
This partnership represents a change in how we do business with our Indonesia partners. Being directly funded by the Indonesia Government, it demonstrates the real investment in a partnership focused on building local capacity to deal with the challenge of flood risk management. It places both partners on a level footing, with a shared interest in seeing tangible outcomes in capacity to understand and manage flood risks.

Solution

We developed a 2-week training program, to be delivered to 25 participants, including staff from central agencies, such as BAPPENAS, National Planning Board, Ministry of Home Affairs, Ministry of Public Works and Housing and Ministry of Agriculture, as well as representatives from local agencies from two provinces, three districts and one city.

The delivery methodology included the following components:

  • in-class presentations
  • focus group discussions
  • field visits
  • simulations of disaster (flood) preparedness.

Specific topics discussed during the training included, but were not limited to:

  • disaster management
  • best practice flood risk management
  • community driven development in flood management
  • land management and flood infrastructure improvements.

Knowledge to practice

Key to enabling effective learning outcomes is the facilitated process that supported participants in using lessons learnt during the training activities, to innovate their work practices and drive positive change within their teams, organisations and the wider water sector. We coached participants in the design and implementation of return-to-work plans, referred to as ‘Change Projects’, where participants selected a priority challenge within their work area and define an action plan to be implemented in the months following the training program. The Change Projects were all directed to respond to real challenges in catchments from Ambon, Eastern Indonesia.

Five group Change Projects where developed to address a series of key issues effecting flood risk communities in Ambon. The projects focused on two integration topics (data management and coordination) and three fluvial transect issues (reducing overland flows in upper catchments, building resilience in mid-stream communities, and changing behaviours associated with drainage and waste management in lower catchment communities).

The Change Projects were later presented in Ambon for validation and consolidation with local stakeholders.

A strengthened catchment-based vision for resilience

The five Change Projects developed by the team are all part of a broader approach to building the resilience needed to deal with the flash flooding in Ambon. The use of the fluvial transect provided a way to depict where the benefits might be felt and where the solutions are to be applied. As a logic checking method, this is vital.

Equally important, as we experienced in the stakeholder engagement workshop in Ambon, the projects represented a unifying and uncomplicated way to engage and discuss with local stakeholders to develop a flood risk reduction plan. Without having complicated flood studies or precise geographic maps, stylised outlines produced in the projects readily engaged local stakeholders, who were able to query and confirm various aspects of the future plan.

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